Columnist Ron Kantowski: Sanford pays due disrespect to UNR

Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005 | 10:10 a.m.

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

I spent part of Monday afternoon in the office of the football coach from the school in the south.

And he assured me his life insurance premium is paid in full.

If you don't get the reference to UNLV first-year football coach Mike Sanford, that's because you weren't watching his coaching show on Channel 8 Sunday night when he made repeated references to "the school from the north," i.e., Nevada-Reno, for those wincing at home.

At first I thought Sanford, being new to the annual blood-letting known as the Battle for the Cannon, was unclear on whether to call the Wolf Pack "Nevada," which it insists on, or "Nevada-Reno," which is how we representing the media in the south stubbornly refer to the Pack. So maybe, I thought, Sanford was just splitting the difference, especially when he apologized on-air for calling UNR "Reno" earlier in the show.

I thought wrong.

"The whole thing is respect," Sanford told Channel 8's Dave McCann. "They are our rival and we're not going to give them the respect of calling them by their name."

I don't know if them's fightin' words. But let's hope they aren't bottle-throwin' words, which is what happened the last time UNLV ventured to Mackay Stadium in 2003.

Former coach John Robinson, who, it should be noted, wasn't exactly the Human Torch when it came to inflammatory remarks about the opposition, was hit in the head as he walked off the field at halftime by a projectile thrown by a fan who was later prosecuted.

That the fan reportedly resided in the world's largest trailer park was probably just a coincidence.

By contract, the visiting team in the Silver State rivalry is now provided with a security force made up of 8-10 officers. But once Sanford's remarks get out, he may require a SWAT team and a Secret Service detail by the time he gets off the UNLV bus. Or at least a fake nose and glasses to throw off all the hooligans wearing flannel shirts and drinking Budweiser. (Not that we don't have our share of those at Sam Boyd Stadium, only ours wear tank tops.)

On Monday, Sanford didn't exactly back off from dissing the Wolf Pack on (very) local TV. Given its 11:30 p.m. Sunday night time slot, "Game Time With UNLV Football" doesn't exactly pull in "Desperate Housewives" ratings. So just in case Eva Longoria and the Wolf Pack nation were dozing off (sort of like they did during Friday's 55-21 home loss to Washington State) Sanford repeated himself during his weekly luncheon with local writers.

He said even if UNR were to rise from the doldrums and turn the series around to where it was during Chris Ault's first, second or third stint as head coach (UNR won 10 of the 11 games played from 1989-99), he would refuse to call it by any other name.

"No, this is forever," Sanford said.

Does that mean, I asked, that even if UNR got its act together that respect from the UNLV coaching staff would not be forthcoming?

"That would be correct," Sanford said with a smile.

Let the mind games begin.

Maybe this is just Sanford's way to spark a rivalry that could use one, at least between the lines. Under Robinson's watch, UNLV has taken permanent possession of John C. Fremont's howitzer, which Sanford passes every day in the hallway at the Lied Athletic Complex on the way to his office.

Robinson's first UNLV team lost 26-12 at Reno in 1999. But his next five won the semi-big one. Three of the five were blowouts, including last year when the Rebels romped 48-13.

UNLV on Saturday will thus have an opportunity to, like the Starship Enterprise, go where no Silver State football program has gone before. Since the series began in 1969, neither school has managed to win six in a row.

Interest in the game, at least around here, has waned to where it was in the late 1970s, when the UNR-UNLV game went on hiatus for four years, only to return on an every-other-year basis from 1983 to 1989. The not-so-friendly rivals have squared off in every season since 1989 and there's now a state law mandating they play every year, even should UNR try to schedule Florida State, Nebraska, Notre Dame and the New England Patriots all in the same season.

Maybe Sanford sensed the rivalry needed some new blood (his?) so he borrowed a page from his old boss Urban Meyer's fat playbook. When the two were at Utah, Meyer would only refer to Brigham Young as "the school from the south."

If Sanford winds up ducking foreign objects Saturday night, he might wish he had kept all negative references to the school from the north to himself. But I doubt it. Two games into his head coaching career, he has displayed a knack for telling it like he thinks it is, whether it's chastising his quarterback for his poor start against New Mexico or blasting Idaho for all those "stupid penalties" (his words, not mine, although I couldn't have said it better myself) it committed against the Rebels on Saturday night.

In this day and age and especially in my business, it's refreshing for a coach to say what's on his mind when the cameras and tape recorders are rolling. But if this keeps up, we might have to get Sanford a visor like that "Ol' Ball Coach" down in South Carolina.

If nothing else, it would fit nicely under the riot gear he will be wearing up in Reno on Saturday night.