Columnist Dean Juipe: Let ‘er rip: Rebels simply look terrible

Dean Juipe

Monday, Oct. 27, 2003 | 10:14 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Tickets were $26 and $13 and the best thing UNLV could have done after Saturday's football game at Sam Boyd Stadium would have been to hand out a refund to each and every weary patron as they left the facility.

Sugarcoat this one anyway you want, but a close game is not necessarily a great game -- and this dreadful affair, a 27-20 overtime loss by the Rebels to visiting Brigham Young, was anything but spectacular.

In fact, it was a terrible game by what looked to be two terrible, error-prone teams.

That statement that we were asking the Rebels to make in this space last Friday? Well, they made it and this is it: If you have any yard work that still needs to be done this fall, go ahead and schedule the next few Saturdays to do it.

You won't miss anything by missing the Rebels.

They -- particularly the offense and particularly quarterback Kurt Nantkes -- were awful. Hallelujah, BYU and its own misguided quarterback, Matt Berry, must have thought, we found a team worse than us.

Excitement? Suspense? Well, yeah, I suppose, given that the outcome was not determined until the final play. But, geez, what a pitiful excuse for a major-college football game between a team on the skids with a rich tradition and a team that still has a mathematical chance to be selected for a bowl game.

BYU likely met (or at least tied) some sort of obscure record by actually winning a game in which it had five turnovers. It spotted the Rebels 13 points and tried -- diligently? -- to give away some more, but the generosity was spurned by Nantkes and his offensive teammates.

No, sir, you're not going to give us the game, the UNLV offense sputtered to say, making a critical turnover of its own, blowing an easy field goal and generally lapsing into an ineptness neither easily matched nor easily stomached.

Honestly, the 30,084 who were there deserved better. They not only had to witness a horrible game, they missed the Marlins wrapping up the World Series and/or watching the paint dry back at home.

Nantkes, sorry to say, has to take the lion's share of responsibility for this. He's simply not getting the job done.

He's wild, errant, all over the place with his throws. He's like his predecessor, Jason Thomas, whose inability to hit a receiver in stride became something of a phobia, except, unlike Thomas, Nantkes can't run.

So there's his legacy thus far in his career: He's Jason Thomas without the wheels.

And, often it seems, when he does locate a receiver, that receiver finds a way to bumble the play and the Rebels have blown another down. It seemed to happen all too often against the Cougars, a downtrodden team that bears no physical (or metaphysical) resemblance to those BYU teams that came before it that were big, intimidating and stingy.

These Cougars are 4-5 and, deservedly, have head coach Gary Crowton on the hot seat. His first BYU team, inherited from LaVell Edwards, went 12-2, but last year BYU lost more games than it won for the first time in 28 years and this year's squad is apt to do it again.

Few of us, maybe none of us, have ever seen a BYU team as sorry as this one.

And yet the Cougars beat the Rebels -- on their home field, on national TV, with a bowl bid indirectly at stake.

Three consecutive losses and UNLV is still level at 4-4 and within two wins of becoming bowl eligible, but really now, what bowl in its right mind is going to want this team? Even the usually openhanded Las Vegas Bowl has to rethink its position after seeing the Rebels plop this whopper on the ground.

Now UNLV gets a fired up New Mexico team that's coming off an upset win against Utah, before closing the regular season with San Diego State, Colorado State and Wyoming.

I can't see the Rebels turning this back around. I can't see the season being called a success even if they win a couple more and squeeze the Las Vegas Bowl bigwigs into letting them play again Christmas Eve.

This is at least two very bad games for UNLV this season, but the other one (at Kansas) wasn't here and wasn't on TV. But this one wasn't outta sight and it isn't outta mind.

It looks to be telltale. And for a program that is 199-197-4 in its 36 seasons, I think the time has come to reimburse the fans for their patience if not their suffering.

UNLV should let anyone with a ticket stub from this last game into another one for free. But I'm not too sure there would be any takers.