Columnist Dean Juipe: Rebels’ blowout loss tarnishes earlier win

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2003 | 9:33 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.

Rarely does a team play so poorly in one game that it clouds, if not negates, the positives that came out of another.

But that seems to be the case for the UNLV football team, which had an awful game at Kansas last Saturday and -- in retrospect -- maybe shouldn't have been so pleased with its season-opening win against Toledo a week earlier.

The luster is off the Rebels, largely because of persistent penalty problems and the 546 yards they surrendered in Lawrence.

And the fear, in light of their 46-24 loss to the Jayhawks and the fairly decent showings of their Mountain West Conference mates thus far, is that they may be in for a long, perhaps even tedious season.

The situation isn't apt to improve this week either, as UNLV plays at nationally ranked Wisconsin. The Badgers are 20-point favorites and, unappealing as this may seem, it's one of those games where a "moral victory" of some sort may be the target the Rebels should aim to hit.

No one is going to hold it against them if they get manhandled in Madison. It's almost expected.

But losing -- and looking bad in doing it -- as an 11-point favorite at Kansas is another matter. Whether it was an aberration or a telltale sign of what's to come is all that remains to be seen.

If it was no aberration, the Rebels will be lucky to win two more games this season, let alone the six or seven or eight they once envisioned.

"We can't soft-pedal our poor play," head coach John Robinson confessed at a Monday luncheon in which he chose to be forthright with a forgiving audience. Those people may not have seen UNLV's game at Kansas -- it's the only one this season that's not on TV -- but they knew from the news reports or the radio broadcast that it had to have been ugly.

"We stunk," Robinson said. "We played lousy. Our defense played horrible."

He said the showing was especially mystifying in that the Rebels had a strong practice two days before the game and seemed to be building on their earlier 28-18 win against Toledo.

But those who looked with a discerning eye at that Toledo game noticed some weak links in the UNLV armament that may have been slighted in the aftermath.

Those who didn't see them then are now thinking they may have missed something.

Beating Toledo seemed good at the time but the Rockets may not have their usual respectable team. And their 49-3 victory against little ol' Liberty last Saturday doesn't shed any light on their overall stature or abilities either way.

Yet they likely noticed in Toledo that UNLV was destroyed by Kansas. "Are we that bad?" Rockets fans may have said as they saw where the dominos lay.

UNLV fans are asking themselves the same thing today.

"Kansas was a better team than we expected," Robinson said, looking to reassure the faithful. "We're not as bad as we played in that game."

Kansas plays at Wyoming this week, so the outcome of that game will lend additional perspective.

But the Jayhawks are underdogs to a Wyoming team that has won only eight of its previous 48 games, which can only mean one thing: Bettors still don't like Kansas and they have come to believe UNLV is a very bad team.