Thursday, Sept. 9, 1999 | 11:11 a.m.
Steve Carp is a Las Vegas sports writer. Reach him at 259-4087 or [email protected]
It's not often the opportunity presents the UNLV athletic department a chance to seize a positive moment when it comes to its beleaguered football program.
So what happens when John Robinson's debut a week ago was a smashing success and the last four years of negativity were erased, albeit temporarily, and the 26-3 win over North Texas draws between a 9 and 10 rating on local television?
Fuuumble!
Sure enough, the athletic department dropped the ball. Instead of being able to see what Robinson's Rebels can do against a real opponent in Baylor Saturday, you'll have to settle for the radio account of the game.
After UNLV beat North Texas, a lot of you probably tuned in to last Saturday's Baylor-Boston College game on ESPN out of curiosity, thinking here's a chance to scout out the Rebels' next opponent.
While Baylor didn't look that bad losing to BC, the Bears were certainly a step up in class from North Texas. Yet, given what you saw Thursday and Saturday, you didn't come away with the feeling this was going to be like playing Tennessee. In other words, UNLV has a fighting chance in Waco.
And with the home opener a week away, what better way to keep the momentum going and sell the town on the Rebels by having the game on TV?
However, you won't see it. Without getting too convoluted in trying to explain the process, there apparently were too many hoops to jump through and not enough time to do it.
When UNLV joined the Mountain West Conference, the league cut a TV deal with ABC and ESPN for $47 million over seven years. Athletic director Charlie Cavagnaro said that to gain a piece of the pie, you have to give up something. In UNLV's case, it was control over all its athletic inventory.
Later on, an entity called "SportsWest" offered to handle the programming for each school that ESPN had opted not to use. Each participating school receives between $250,000-$300,000 a year for the next five years. For that, they gave up control to SportsWest.
Once ESPN relinquished its rights to a team's games, such as UNLV-Baylor, SportsWest got dibs. And once SportsWest passed, the TV rights became UNLV's property again.
However, Cavagnaro didn't learn until Wednesday morning from neophyte SportsWest that the process had run its course. It takes two weeks to buy satellite time, find a station to air the game, hire a crew and rent equipment, not to mention sell the advertising inventory. There's no way UNLV could do all that in 72 hours.
But had the school been more diligent in pursuing the matter and pressed ESPN and SportsWest for an answer earlier, this could have been arranged prior to the North Texas game, regardless of the outcome last week.
Granted, had UNLV been on the losing end of that 26-3 score, this would probably be moot. But Robinson has done an awful lot of good and has won over a lot of people in his short stay in Las Vegas. He seemed to have faith in the program. Apparently, his employers didn't share the faith.
So the Rebels are denied an opportunity to show Las Vegas they are the real deal. It's an opportunity they have earned and, unfortunately, one the athletic department let slip through its collective grasp.
At UNLV, they say it's a new game. On the field, that may be true. But behind the scenes, it has a familiar look of the bumblin', stumblin' Rebels.
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