Columnist Dean Juipe: Coach’s tale isn’t too convincing

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004 | 9:44 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.

As if computers hadn't already done enough to ruin college football, now they're having a negative effect on college basketball as well.

They're the reason the UNLV men's basketball team is playing a useless game with Occidental on Wednesday night at the Thomas & Mack Center, according to no less an authority than Rebels head coach Charlie Spoonhour.

UNLV vs. Occidental ... now there's a sorry excuse for a game. The Rebels have Mountain West Conference title and NCAA tournament aspirations while the Tigers ... well, the Tigers hope to have a nice season in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which is an amalgamation of Division III schools that barely give a care about organized sports.

Here's the most interesting thing about Occidental, an old school in Los Angeles: Its enrollment is the same as the capacity of its gym, which in both cases is 1,800.

I guess if you go to school there, they make you go to the games.

Luckily, UNLV students are under no such edict, because Occidental vs. UNLV would not be worth seeing unless your GPA or diploma depended on it.

Yet if you bought season tickets to see the Rebels, you're stuck with this one. While you might want to see the team against a competent or "name" opponent and to see the guys tested against players of their own abilities, you will, instead, see a gross mismatch that Spoonhour somehow justifies as the correct and proper thing to do.

Trying desperately to legitimize the game, which is the first between UNLV and Occidental since 1963, Spoonhour says the computers that tabulate the Ratings Percentage Index that influence the selection process in the NCAA tournament have a built-in bias that encourages D-I teams to play D-III opponents. He says it's to the Rebels' advantage to play a team such as Occidental as opposed to playing a D-I team with a low RPI.

He says he talked with a member of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee and was told that a game with Occidental was "the smart thing to do" if the only other option was playing a mediocre or lesser D-I team.

Of course neither Spoonhour nor the unnamed NCAA person he talked to is being asked -- or forced -- to buy a ticket to the UNLV vs. Occidental game.

I think Spoonhour is feeding the public a line that it isn't apt to bite. I think most everyone knows the real reason the Rebels are playing a deadbeat team such as Occidental is to pad their record.

The fact that five of the other seven Mountain West teams have a game or two scheduled against non-Division I opponents also fails to take into account that UNLV is, in theory, in a more attractive position to schedule home games against the better teams in the country if Spoonhour would only do it. With Las Vegas a major tourist destination, almost any team would schedule a game here if UNLV showed an interest.

Occidental, Montana, Bradley, Northern Arizona ... this is what the fans are getting, yet I assure you it's not what they want to see. So let's tell it for what it is: a blatant attempt on Spoonhour's part to get the Rebels 20 wins.

Blaming a computer -- the same computer that messed up the Bowl Championship Series? -- may be convenient for Spoonhour but, in truth, it comes across as nothing more than a defenseless alibi.