Columnist Ron Kantowski: A red feather in Hamrick’s cap

Monday, Dec. 6, 2004 | 9:02 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

When it appeared last week that athletic director Mike Hamrick was going to have to reach deep into his playbook, back where the hook-and-ladder and fumble-rooskie gather dust, for UNLV's new football coach, I thought this was going to be my chance to act like a Jets fan at the Waldorf Astoria on draft day. You know, when the J-E-T-S Jets usually pass on somebody like Dan Marino to select somebody like Ken O'Brien.

It was going to be 25 column inches (at least) of second-guessing.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Catcall City. Hamrick stayed with his strategy from the start, which enabled him to keep those Big Ten assistants none of us has ever heard of back there with the double reverses and halfback option passes. He somehow convinced Utah offensive coordinator Mike Sanford that Las Vegas is the ideal place to start a head coaching career.

Sanford is one of the caretakers of Utah's prolific spread offense which, along with the substandard talent in the Mountain West Conference this year, was responsible for making Utes head coach Urban Meyer the most sought-after man in Utah since Gary Gilmore knocked off the attendant at the Orem Sinclair station in 1976.

Only Sanford and Meyer truly know whether the former was the guy working the controls behind the curtain or just a guy who positioned himself on Meyer's coattail. But at this point, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that Utah went 11-0 to crash the BCS party like the Hilton sisters. And that Meyer and, to a lesser extent, Sanford are now considered the pioneers of a new brand of football that is so easy to watch and so hard to defense that it even got Ty Willingham fired at Notre Dame.

Sanford apparently had been Hamrick's guy since Sept. 27. That was the day after John Robinson announced he would be stepping down as Rebels coach having completed half the job he set out to do -- the half about improving the facilities and creating interest in the football program, etc. Sanford's name was one of the first that surfaced in conjunction with the other half -- the one about winning football games.

A couple of weeks later, Hamrick was seen interviewing Sanford under the stands at Rice-Eccles Stadium after the Utes destroyed the Rebels seven-to-the-third power to 14. He told an eyewitness to that meeting that he was just congratulating Sanford on a job well done -- and then immediately tried to sell the onlooker 25 acres in the Everglades.

Of course, you can't offer an assistant coach at another school a head coaching job in the middle of the season, at least not without first checking with the Black Coaches Association, or Hamrick might have done so on the spot. But then Utah did its Willie Mosconi thing, complicating Hamrick's pursuit of Sanford.

Utah's perfect season presented the career-driven Meyer with an opportunity to jump to one of the college football factories after serving only a brief apprenticeship in Salt Lake City. Not even he could have foreseen going from the mail room to the board room so quickly.

He was still choosing between Florida and Notre Dame last week when the Salt Lake columnists began calling for Utah athletic director Chris Hill to act quickly in promoting Sanford to head coach. Why that didn't happen, we'll probably never know. Probably not even when Sanford is asked that question upon being introduced as Rebels head coach today.

During his 17-year tenure at Utah, Hill had never promoted an assistant to the head job. So maybe that had something to do with Sanford's decision to take the sure thing. Or maybe it was that BYU had yet to offer its vacant head job to Kyle Whittingham, the Utes' defensive coordinator, who is even more popular than Sanford at Utah, and that he could wind up being Meyer's successor. Or that in following the Urban legend, the bar at Utah has been set so high that Dick Fosbury couldn't flop over it with use of a trampoline.

At UNLV, Sanford won't be expected to go 11-0 and produce a BCS bid. Heck, this town will settle for 6-5 and a bid to the Emerald Bowl. Next year, that is.

That Sanford chose UNLV rather than wait on Hill to make a bunch of telephone calls to see who else might be available to coach the Utes is another feather in UNLV's bonnet. With the advent of one-person search committees, the truth behind these delicate decisions most often winds up in the neutral zone where fact lines up against fiction. But even if Sanford wasn't Hill's guy, there's been enough written to suggest he was a viable candidate to continue Urban's renewal in Salt Lake. And so you could hypothesize that Sanford turned down Utah for UNLV.

As they say at Wimbledon, advantage Mr. Hamrick.

So give him another Buckeye leaf, or helmet decal of your choice. Maybe Hamrick was lucky that Lon Kruger just happened to be available when UNLV basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour got sick and tired (of what, we may never know) last year and maybe he was fortunate that ... well, whatever caused Sanford to choose UNLV.

It has been said that luck is the place where opportunity meets preparation. It has also been said that being lucky is better than being good. I don't know which one applies to Hamrick. Although next time I drive out to Primm for a California lottery ticket, I may ask if he wants to ride along.

Naturally, only time will tell if the choices that Hamrick prepared for or lucked into making were the right ones. But at this point in the football program's tedious progression from also-ran to ... well, also-ran a little faster, it's hard to see where he could have done much better than a guy with a West Coast background whose fingerprints are all over an offense that is averaging 46 points per game.

If Mike Sanford were any more qualified for the Rebels' job, he'd have to send in the plays to Utah quarterback Alex Smith wearing a UNLV sweatshirt.

That's what I wrote on Oct. 25, fully oblivious that by the first week of December Sanford would be pulling a Rebels XXL over his sport jacket during a news conference at the Si Redd room.

Now, as then, it seems like a good fit.

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