Columnist Steve Guiremand: Aloha means hello to a new era for UNLV

Steve Guiremand

Friday, Dec. 1, 2000 | 11:03 a.m.

Steve Guiremand covers college football for the Sun. His Around Campus column appears on Friday during the football season.

HONOLULU -- Make no mistake, Saturday night's game against Hawaii here at Aloha Stadium is a critical one in the John Robinson blueprint for success.

When he took over for Jeff Horton two years ago, Robinson used Kansas State as a model for rebuilding the Rebels. If building a perennial Top 20 program can be done in the stark and chilly plains of Manhattan, Kan., he reasoned, why not in a booming tourist town like Las Vegas?

Well, now just two years later, Robinson has taken a UNLV team that was coming off an 0-11 season and had a 16-game losing streak to within one victory of the school's first bowl berth since 1994.

And what transpires on Saturday night and in the next couple of months of recruiting could go a long way in determining whether UNLV actually becomes one of those Kansas State success stories.

Think how much easier it will be for Robinson to go into a top-notch JC or high school recruit's home if UNLV can defeat the Warriors and garner a Las Vegas Bowl berth.

He'll be able to tell him that in just two years the Rebels have gone from 50-point blowout losses to the BYUs and Colorado States to just a missed PAT or field goal from beating them and winning the Mountain West Conference title.

He'll be able to point out that he'll have the best NFL quarterback prospect on the West Coast, Jason Thomas, back to run the show for two more years.

He'll be able to say the ABCs and ESPNs of the world, who rarely gave Las Vegas a look other than for the ESPYs or big-time boxing matches, now are broadcasting their games.

And he'll be able to able to point to practice and stadium facilities that are at least the equal, if not better, than the school he coached to a national title, USC.

Even if the Rebels lose on Saturday night and finish 6-6, that's still a huge step up from where the program was two years ago.

But if they win and get into a bowl game, which will bring even more credibility to Robinson's mission, it can only help his recruiting efforts.

And this arguably will be the most important recruiting class of Robinson's tenure at UNLV.

He must find solid replacements for talented tailbacks Jeremi Rudolph and Kevin Brown as well as hard-nosed wide receiver Nate Turner. He also needs to bring in a top-notch JC lineman or two on each side of the ball.

If he can do that, a Top 25 rating and a legitimate shot at the Mountain West Conference title in 2001 is a very real possibility for UNLV.

With USC's program in disarray and UCLA also struggling, there is no reason the Rebels can't sneak a few blue chip recruits out of Southern California who might not have given them the time of day a few years ago.

Robinson, Florida State's Bobby Bowden and South Carolina's Lou Holtz are regarded as the best "closers" in college football recruiting. So it's up to UNLV recruiting coordinator Joe Hubbard, who did a solid job at USC in that role, to locate and convince those blue chippers to make UNLV one of their five recruiting stops this winter.

And that job will be made a whole lot easier if those recruits can turn on ESPN2 on Dec. 21 to watch the Rebels play in a bowl game.

Notes, quotes & anecdotes

The BCS was formed to have No. 1 play No. 2, not to match all the top-ranked teams against each other. The sad fact is a Notre Dame-Miami game in the Fiesta Bowl would draw much more interest nationally and be more profitable for the Fiesta folks than Oregon State-Miami. Heck, how about 10-1 Virginia Tech with a finally healthy Michael Vick, arguably the most exciting player in college football, against Miami?

Bellotti has done the best coaching job in the Pac-10 the last five years with talent that USC and UCLA didn't think was good enough to recruit.