They were lining up the NASCAR trucks for Saturday’s race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when a guy wearing a Route 66 shirt in the media center noticed one of the TVs had been switched. Instead of the race broadcast, it was showing the Arizona State-UCLA football game.
UNLV played its annual game against a Football Championship Subdivision opponent at Sam Boyd Stadium on Saturday night. The official stat sheet said only 16,717 were on hand to watch the Rebels tally a school-record 80 points — Idaho State had 8 — and do chest bumps on the sideline.
Marquel Martin went from playing college football, to becoming a reality TV star (for five weeks) on ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” to baking cookies for the media and freeloaders from the hospitality suites during halftime of Saturday night’s UCLA-UNLV game at Sam Boyd Stadium.
If there’s anything most Las Vegas sports fans can agree upon, it’s that Sam Boyd Stadium and Cashman Field stink, and that hopefully there will be places to park at the new hockey arena.
When you’ve been down for as long as UNLV has in football, you’re going to have to take an occasional risk on the recruiting trail — you might have to accept an Alabama reject or two, or maybe go for a quick fix via the junior colleges. Longtime observers of the local football scene are aware of this.
Every five years when UNLV fires its football coach there is a great whoop-de-doo and la-di-da about football. It usually lasts until the UNLV basketball team plays a quality nonconference opponent. Is there a program out there UNLV ought to be imitating?
By now you probably are familiar with Notre Dame having hired a wildly successful high school coach named Gerry Faust to wake up the echoes. But there’s an even bolder experiment that better correlates to UNLV that was conducted in North Texas.
A couple of hours after Bobby Hauck resigned as UNLV football coach on Friday, Gonzaga beat St. John’s in one of those sort-of-attractive early season college basketball matchups on TV.
Because it’s still college football season — and because UNLV has regressed to its losing ways faster than anybody could have possibly imagined — the subject changes often whenever sports fans gather ’round here this time of year.
Houston routed UNLV, 69-0, in the season opener of 1989. The Cougars’ wide-open offense, led by quarterback Andre Ware, revolutionized college football.
