Don’t cry for Mike Sanford

The last time I wrote about former UNLV football coach Mike Sanford was in a blog last year. He was on the Banks of the Wabash, at Indiana State, trying hard not to fall in.

Indiana State was one of the worst teams in college football during Sanford’s first season as head coach.

The Sycamores would finish 1-11, with the only victory coming over Quincy College. How bad was Indiana State? Sanford’s bunch had the same record as Northern Colorado.

The photo that ran with the blog was from the Western Illinois game; it showed a white pickup truck parked behind the ISU bench, and people watching from lawn chairs. The inference: Indiana State is pretty small-time when it comes to college football.

The winningest coach in Sycamores history, a fellow named Dennis Raetz, won 94 games in 18 seasons. He lost 105. Indiana State has not been to the Division I-AA playoffs — Football Championship Subdivision, if you insist — since 1984.

The Sycamores play their home games in Memorial Stadium, which opened in 1924 as a minor league baseball park. The Terre Haute Tots played the Peoria Tractors. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis threw out the first pitch.

This only seems significant because when Mike Sanford was fired by UNLV, he sort of blamed his lack of success on the lousy locker rooms at Sam Boyd Stadium. You can’t expect to hang with Colorado State when the locker rooms are this bad, he said.

But Sanford almost won here, at least in his last two seasons. He went 5-7 in back-to-back years, and the Rebels even knocked off 15th-ranked Arizona State under his watch. If that happened today, they’d probably name a street for him, or at least give him a multiyear contract extension.

Instead, the higher-ups at UNLV gave him a pink slip.

Nobody really complained too much, and when Sanford landed the offensive coordinator’s job at Louisville and got run off there, too, most people around here and in Louisville thought it was the right choice to send him packing.

But now he’s 5-3 at Indiana State, and one of the losses was to Indiana of the Big Ten, 28-10 in Bloomington. The other two losses were against ranked I-AA opponents. And three of ISU’s five wins came against ranked teams.

The Sycamores also beat in-state rival Ball State of the Mid-American Conference 27-20 in Muncie to regain possession of the Victory Bell. It was the first time in seven seasons ISU rang the bell. I’ve heard this was the real reason David Letterman decided to retire.

It’s all so relative in Division I-AA, isn’t it?

It’s not about facilities so much, not about recruiting so much, not about a TV deal. The playing field is mostly level in the small-college ranks. It’s sort of like that in the Ivy League, too, with the difference being that if you try to drive a pickup truck behind one of the benches at the Harvard-Yale game, they’ll probably have you arrested.

So it’s mostly about the coaching in Division I-AA, which is why the great Eddie Robinson won 408 games at Grambling. The football field was a patch of dirt when Robinson started at Grambling, so it can be assumed the locker rooms were pretty lousy then, too.

It would be easy in retrospect to say that UNLV was hasty in running Sanford off, especially after the Rebels lost to a fourth-string quarterback at Utah State while rushing the ball 27 times for 15 yards, an average of 0.6 yards per rush.

But that was a different time, a different place, and as stated before, nobody really said that then, not even with Texas Christian and Brigham Young still in the conference.

So give Sanford some credit, even if it’s past due. His team beat No. 19 Southern Illinois 41-26 on the road Saturday, and there were 10,255 people at Saluki Stadium in Carbondale and nary a pickup truck behind the benches.

Afterward, Sanford talked to reporters — make that a reporter, singular — in the bowels of the stadium. There were circuit breakers and thermostats on the cinder block wall conspicuously close to his head, which is something Nick Saban does not have to deal with when he knocks off a ranked opponent on the road.

ISU had just set a Saluki Stadium record with 563 yards of offense, and Sanford said his quarterback, a kid named Mike Perish who has thrown only one interception in 265 passing attempts this season, was not only the best quarterback in the Missouri Valley, but the best quarterback in college football. So Sanford still is prone to hyperbole, it would appear.

Then he turned and nearly conked his head on one of those circuit breakers.

But Mike Sanford did not complain about the lousy locker rooms, or the lack of proper interview space in the Missouri Valley.

He just looked pleased as punch to be 5-3 heading into November.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski