UNLV lacks one major component to make serious bid for Big 12

I recently asked a high-ranking college administrator from a Power 5 conference this: Which has a better chance — a Mountain West team such as UNLV being invited into the Big 12 or me beating Katie Ledecky in an 800-meter swim?

The reply: “You would lap her before the other happens.”

Ouch. Honesty in its cruelest form.

The Big 12 is running its own version of Shark Tank, where those schools interested in winning the sweepstakes should the league decide to expand reportedly will be given a chance to make their case and hope a deal can be struck.

The room is getting crowded. Arkansas State out of the Sun Belt wants in. Any day now, I expect College of Southern Nevada will submit a letter of interest.

UNLV is among a reported 20 schools to do so, not surprising given the pot of gold those in Power 5 leagues annually distribute to members. This is about the haves and have-nots of college athletics, and which side everyone wants to be on before the landscape changes forever and those not included are shoved aside for good.

CBS Sports reported this week Big 12 expansion could be so late in the process, it’s “in the hands of the lawyers,” and that the conference probably will add only two schools and not four. It might add none. The majority feeling is two.

The popular feeling is that Houston and Cincinnati are looking real good right now.

Presidents decide such things. Well, presidents and TV executives, and many believe the league’s TV partners aren’t all that giddy about the prospect of expansion and could offer to pay the Big 12 to keep membership at 10.

That’s how little some think of those 20 wannabes.

None of this, on its face, is good news for UNLV or other Mountain West schools interested in playing in the same sand box as Texas and Oklahoma.

Teams from the MW are viewed as serious long shots, some more than others, to advance past the stage of writing a letter before the Big 12 equivalent of Kevin O’Leary tells them, in a not-so-wonderful way, they’re out of expansion consideration.

The frustrating part about UNLV: Of those MW schools hoping to make the leap into Power 5 riches, the Rebels have arguably the strongest argument in several areas but are questionable in a major one.

UNLV has the population growth, the demographics, a clear path to Tier 1 academic status, the market size, the opening of a medical school set for 2017, the athletic facilities now and perhaps more so in the future with a 65,000-seat domed stadium, the opportunity to be involved with the impending realization of NCAA championship play finally being allowed in Las Vegas.

The Rebels should be obvious leaders of MW hopefuls in this Big 12 scenario.

Which brings us to the questionable area: leadership.

To say that part at UNLV is looked on with a skeptical eye nationally is to say Ledecky might win a race or two for the Stanford swim team.

Len Jessup is president at UNLV with an athletic director in Tina Kunzer-Murphy whose contract expires this year, and what Jessup ultimately decides to do in terms of the position will shape Rebels athletics for years, perhaps decades.

What those at UNLV don’t like to admit: The school’s credibility took a massive hit across the country as a forgettable basketball coaching search played out publicly over a period of months earlier this year — “People were watching, and those things tend to have shelf lives the school in question doesn’t want,” said the Power 5 administrator — and the effects of it rightly called into question the leadership structure.

UNLV was also late to the Big 12 expansion party. Others proactively approached the conference months ago with volumes of reading material and videos and various pamphlets in making cases for potential inclusion. The process didn’t just begin last week, and to suggest you need to get better at football or wait until the stadium issue is finalized before making a strong push for a Power 5 league is to be uneducated on procedure.

You put your best foot forward long ago and promote your strengths while explaining your weaknesses. Jessup is the central figure. He holds the future of UNLV athletics in his hands and needs to decide sooner than later whom he wants running the department and how that decision will affect, well, everything.

Who has Jessup talked with regarding the Big 12? Jim Livengood is a former UNLV athletic director with 35 years of intercollegiate experience. As a consultant, he knows and works with all the major players in the expansion game, many of them his close friends. He is as dialed into the Big 12 discussions as anyone else.

I would assume Jessup is smart enough to have reached out to Livengood, whom he has a close relationship with dating to their days at Arizona, for advice and direction.

Right?

Right?

UNLV has so many positives when it comes to envisioning a bright future in athletics. Its potential is limitless.

But it better get the leadership equation in line and start thinking in terms of $100 bills instead of pennies and nickels, because even when your checkbook isn’t as fat as others, you need to give the impression it is.

Start acting big time or get left behind for good.

It’s not that difficult a concept.

Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. On Twitter: @edgraney