Columnist Dean Juipe: Sorry, Charlie, you only went 1 for 2

Dean Juipe

Friday, Feb. 20, 2004 | 10:48 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.

When Charlie Spoonhour was hired at UNLV almost three years ago, there wasn't any doubt his secondary role was almost as important as his primary one.

He was brought to Las Vegas not only to coach the Rebels, but to keep the men's basketball program from running afoul of the eagle-eyed NCAA.

He was, in the appropriate parlance, a "caretaker."

He was 61 years old at the time and he wasn't looking to make a name for himself or build a reputation as a hot-shot coach.

He was hired by UNLV to stabilize a program that had just gone through another rocky stretch (and two head coaches in the 2000-01 season), and to reassure the NCAA that the school was doing everything in its power to clean up its sullied reputation.

Spoonhour succeeded in that aspect of his career, which came to a somewhat hurried close this week when he resigned, ostensibly, for health reasons. He kept the Rebels from a return bath in the hot waters of an NCAA inquiry, and he eliminated the unfavorable stories that occasionally surfaced during his predecessors' reigns that portrayed UNLV as the home of an outlaw, renegade program that consistently drew the NCAA's ire.

Of course he also had his own agenda in play.

If things went well for Spoonhour at UNLV, he could coach for a few years, drift into retirement and turn the team over to his son, Jay, whom he brought with him as an assistant coach. The transition had the potential to go smoothly and without interruption, and given Jay's experience as a head coach at the junior college level any appointment he might receive at UNLV couldn't be classified solely as nepotism.

That was the perfect scenario: Charlie does well and Jay comes in behind him, the Rebels becoming all but synonymous with the Spoonhours.

And for two seasons, reality matched expectations. The Rebels went 21-11 both years, and while failing to reach the NCAA tournament either season was mildly disappointing it wasn't the end of the world.

But this season ... this season was the end of the world, at least in the context of the Spoonhour household's ultimate game plan. This season the grand design came apart at the seams, the Rebels disintegrating as a team into a hodgepodge of destructive individualism.

The bickering among the players reached the stage where it rivaled the team's losses for space in the newspaper. The innuendo -- that Spoonhour was impervious to the turmoil and that his players had careened out of control -- had bobbled to the surface.

The rumors were surfacing again that Spoonhour, as he had considered a year earlier, would retire at the close of the season.

The fact that he chose not to break the tape at the finish line but to leave prematurely was the only element pertaining to his resignation that caught his bosses and observers by surprise.

The last straw wasn't a doctor's report but an incredibly one-sided loss to Missouri on Sunday. As became apparent for all to see -- and for me to write -- Spoonhour had to go.

A day later he was gone, relying on the timeliness of a doctor's appointment (concerning his skin cancer) as a palpable excuse to bow out early.

Some cut him immeasurable slack, referring to his resignation as the "honorable" thing to do.

Naturally, I saw it a little differently: I saw it not only as Spoonhour quitting at an inappropriate juncture of the season -- he could have just as easily announced that he would retire following the completion of the season -- but as a last chance to hand over the keys of the kingdom to his son, or at least get him some Division I head coaching experience.

Jay Spoonhour, who was appointed the Rebels' interim head coach after his father's departure, is 1-0 heading into Saturday's game with Colorado State. If -- but only if -- the 13-9 Rebels all but win the remainder of their games and drive deep into the NCAA tourney, he will be asked to return as head coach.

But that's not going to happen. The Rebels won't be winning the bulk or maybe even the majority of their remaining games and it has nothing to do with who's coaching.

It's because they're just not that good.

And therein lies Charlie Spoonhour's downfall at UNLV. Yes, he polished the hardware and kept his players off the police blotter, but he failed to deliver an acceptable level of talent or produce a sufficient number of victories.

The caretaker was just dutiful enough to achieve half of his and the school's goals, as the Rebels have no known lingering or arising problems with the NCAA.

But the next UNLV basketball coach will not be a caretaker. The next coach will be asked and required to fulfill an entirely different mission: He's going to have to win and do it impressively.

The next coach is going to have to recruit and coach, and not just keep his players out of legal and scholastic trouble.

Spoonhour, 1 for 2 when it came to meeting the demands that were put upon him at UNLV, did at least half of what he set out to do.

But someone else, someone perhaps a little more skilled and attuned to college basketball today, will be called on to get this program back to where it was a dozen years ago, when You Know Who was coaching and the Thomas & Mack was stretched to its capacity anytime the Rebels played.