Columnist Ron Kantowski: Postseason may find Rams ‘gone fishing’

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 1999 | 10:32 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's notes column appears Tuesday and Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

If this keeps up, Colorado State is going to be the equivalent of NCAA basketball's 65th-best team or the 34th-fastest car at the Indianapolis 500.

If the Rams beat UNLV at Sam Boyd Stadium Saturday (as if there were a question about it), Colorado State will be 8-3. The Rams will be the hottest team in the Mountain West Conference, having closed the season with five straight wins.

But for the second consecutive year, Sonny Lubick's bunch could spend the bowl season tying fishing flies or whatever one does to pass the time in Fort Collins.

Thanks to the woeful Pac-10, conferences west of Ole Miss are accorded as much respect as Richard Simmons at a Harley Davidson convention when bowl bids are divvied up.

If television sets were bighorn sheep, perhaps first-year MWC commissioner Craig Thompson would have been more successful in lobbying for a third bowl tie-in for the fledgling league, which would have solved a lot of problems come Saturday.

It's likely the MWC will have four teams tied atop the standings at the end of the regular season. That scenario will enable the Liberty Bowl, which gets the conference champ or first pick of the deadlocked teams in the event of a tie, to choose who it wants. The Las Vegas Bowl will match another MWC bowl-eligible team against Fresno State of the WAC.

(Next year, the LV Bowl is expected to end its relationship with the WAC. Sweeten the pot and get Ohio State one more win, and it's possible we could see the Buckeyes hit the beach -- er, field -- at Sam Boyd Stadium in an off-year like this one.)

The Liberty Bowl probably still will take BYU, even though the Cougars are sputtering like an old Plymouth. And Wyoming has no bowl shot, because Latrell Sprewell has a bigger fan base than the Cowboys.

So the guys wearing the Las Vegas Bowl blazers probably will be left to choose between Utah and Colorado State, which sat out last bowl season despite an 8-4 record. Given that both already will have played in Las Vegas (for that matter, so has BYU), neither is all that attractive to local fans without an allegiance to either program.

Here's the variable: CSU fans, modest in numbers to begin with, would have to make two Las Vegas trips in three weeks. Add in that the Rams already were whacked by Fresno (44-13 on Oct. 9, although virtually everyone agrees the rematch would be much, much closer) and I'd give Utah the inside track.

But it's so close you'd have to measure.

* SPORTS OF ALL SORTS: Las Vegas councilman Larry Brown last weekend was inducted into the Harvard Varsity Club Hall of Fame in the traditional sports of baseball and football (he was a pitcher and a quarterback for the Crimson, class of '79). But many of the specialties of those who were honored along with Brown haven't been feted since ABC's Wide World of Sports went off the air, at least in its prior form.

People in Montana haven't even heard of sports such as crew, fencing, lacrosse, squash and sailing, much less played them.

The oldest Crimson grad honored posthumously was Dwight F. Davis, a tennis star from the class of '00. Davis' biggest claim to fame was buying a silver cup for which standouts from Great Britain and Harvard would play.

The trophy was first called "Dwight's Pot" -- not to be confused with "J.R. Rider's Pot," which isn't a prize, but a controlled substance.

You probably know Dwight's Pot by its now more familiar name -- the Davis Cup.

* DRIVEN TO DISTRACTIONS: It's a road trip to which only the Tacoma Tigers or any of their brethren in the old Pacific Coast League could relate. Georgetown will play three games in Hawaii in the Maui Classic this week before stopping in Las Vegas to meet the Rebels on the way home to the nation's capital.

Think the Hoyas might be ripe for an upset?

In the old PCL, when Hawaii still was in the league, teams would play six games in Honolulu before hooking up with the Las Vegas Stars upon returning to the mainland. The backdrop of luaus and blackjack tables resulted in a lot of 2-10 road trips in those days.

* FIELDSIDE MANNER: The football coach at the small college from which I graduated used to tell his players that if he had to come out on the field to check on an injured one, he was bringing a stretcher and Marcus Welby with him.

In other words, he perceived injuries as a sign of weakness.

One more thing to like about John Robinson is that he seems concerned about the welfare of his players. Whenever one goes down, the UNLV coach usually is right behind the trainers.

That Robinson has been on the field almost as much as his starting offense may explain why the Rebels are 3-7 heading into Saturday's finale against Colorado State.

* AROUND THE HORN: UNLV is showing a little imagination with its new and improved video screen at the Thomas & Mack Center. When one of the Rebels knocks down a 3-pointer, one of the images on the scoreboard montage shows Moe bomping fellow Stooge Curly on the noggin three times. Given Trevor Diggs' long-range marksmanship, that's "soitenly" a sight to which Rebel fans should become accustomed. ... TCU's LaDainian Tomlinson became the first player in NCAA Division I history to rush for 400 yards in a single game when he stepped off 406 against UTEP this past Saturday. But that is 35 short of the all-time NCAA mark of 441, established by Dante Brown of Division III Marietta (Ga.) College in 1996. ... Redwood-like Michael Grant is the only heavyweight who matches up physically with Lennox Lewis. But given Grant needed a spectacular 10th-round knockout to fin ally dispatch Andrew Golota, who was way ahead on the scorecards Saturday night, Lewis could remain champion for a very long time.