Columnist Ron Kantowski: Quick fix is in for Rebels’ program

Thursday, Oct. 5, 2000 | 10:07 a.m.

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

So much for needing five years to build a college football program.

Now that the Rebels have played Brigham Young to an ultra-competitive 10-7 loss and grounded Air Force 34-13 in the past two weeks, it's safe to say that the UNLV football program has been successfully turned around and is headed in the right direction.

It took football handyman John Robinson a grand total of 13 months -- one transitional season and September of this one -- to complete the first stage of the project.

Heck, it takes Bob Vila longer than that to put up a new deck on one of those home improvement shows.

Of course, when you've got an apprentice such as Jason Thomas under center, a lot of the usual building materials become superfluous. The strapping left-handed quarterback provides the Rebels with a dimension that not even Rod Serling, the late TV frightmaster, could have imagined.

But what do Thomas and many of the other UNLV impact players have in common?

They are transfers, guys who were thought to be too small, too slow, too old or too injured to help their previous schools (or in the case of the junior college guys, prospective new ones). Guys who most Division I coaches, for reasons known only to God and Bear Bryant (not the same person, unless you reside in Tuscaloosa), wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.

This past year, seven of the 23 new players Robinson brought in were transfers. That doesn't include guys such as Thomas, who transferred from Southern Cal at mid-semester.

Robinson's predecessor, Jeff Horton, was given five years to build a program and elected to do it from the ground up (read: recruit freshman). Trouble is, by the fifth year all those prep phenoms Horton recruited were either gone or not very phenomenal to begin with. And the Rebels, the record will show, got progressively worse.

In the "milestone" fifth year of Horton's rebuilding scheme, they were a dreadful 0-11.

And so the Rebels went from the outhouse to ... well, an even bigger outhouse.

There's a reason why Kansas State has evolved from Big 12 patsy to national championship contenders virtually overnight, why San Jose State whips up on Stanford every season and scares the dickens out of every other Pac-10 school that is brave enough to schedule it.

Each has been rebuilt with transfers.

Coaches talk about the continuity that results in recruiting freshmen but that's more overrated than time of possession. Kids can only play for four years, and it's only 50-50 whether many of them will develop into impact players over that time. You get most JC kids for just two years, but it's 80-20 they're gonna help right now.

The bigger risk with transfers is whether they can get their paperwork in order. Sometimes, that's more difficult than that guy in "Midnight Express" trying to get through Turkish customs.

Other JC kids, the theory goes, develop bad habits, because there aren't a lot of Knute Rocknes wearing head coaching whistles at the JC level.

But those who do pan out, as Kansas State's Bill Snyder and John Robinson will be the first to testify, can make you look like a better coach than you already are.

At K-State and UNLV, the quick fix is most definitely in.