Ron Kantowski vents his frustration with circumstances that keep Saturday’s UNLV-UNR match in Reno off TV

Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

A couple of years ago, there was a movement in the Nevada Legislature to permanently switch the UNLV-UNR football game to the last weekend of October, when it would serve as the highlight of a Nevada Day celebration.

A better movement would be passing a law to get the game on TV.

Fans of the schools who come out of the woodwork once a year to throw the finger at one another will have you believe the Battle for the Fremont Cannon ranks right up there with the Red River Shootout (Texas-Oklahoma), the Iron Bowl (Auburn-Alabama), the Army-Navy game and Michigan vs. Appalachian State in the pantheon of college football rivalries.

At least those games are on TV. So, for that matter, is the big one pitting Mars Hill College against Catawba, which will be rebroadcast on College Sports TV on Saturday.

We can't even get the UNLV-UNR game broadcast once.

Saturday's Silver State rivalry renewal will not be televised in Southern Nevada, which is probably a bigger upset than Appalachian State beating Michigan in the Big House.

It all goes back to - here's another upset - television rights. It goes back, at least indirectly, to the Mountain West selling its soul for a big bag of cash and telling ESPN it could keep its smaller bag of cash, because it didn't want to play on Thursday night anymore.

Actually, it goes back further than that. It goes back to whoever decided UNLV and UNR should play in different conferences.

But it doesn't go back to Channel 8, which has been jumping through hoops to get permission to broadcast the game.

"We've been asking since July," said Bob Stoldal, the vice president of operations for KLAS Channel 8. "We've been asking, begging, all the way up the line. We would do it at the drop of a hat."

But there won't be any hats dropping Saturday afternoon in Reno.

ESPN owns the Western Athletic Conference's broadcast rights. UNR is a WAC member.

The Mountain West's rights used to be owned by ESPN but now are controlled by the mtn. UNLV is a MWC member.

(The mtn. still isn't available on satellite here and, as a national TV audience learned, at Kirk Herbstreit's house. When ESPN's college football guru was asked about Air Force he said he didn't know, because he didn't get the channel they play on. But that's another story, or at least a version of the same old one.)

ESPN and the mtn., and the WAC and the MWC, have a contentious relationship. Think Hatfields and McCoys. Or Britney Spears and the tabloids. This is what happens when presidents call a meeting to form a new conference without telling anybody from the old one, which is what the MWC chiefs did to the old WAC.

I talked to about a dozen people for this column who gave at least that many reasons why Saturday's game would not be televised. One of the more popular ones was that when UNR wanted to broadcast last year's football game at UNLV, the mtn., which had jurisdiction, said no. And that turnabout is fair play when all sort of rights - these would include exclusive broadcast and state bragging ones - are at stake.

But one Mountain West official told me that if the truth be known, the mtn. didn't really want the game shown here either, at least not at the scheduled time, because it would be going against Utah vs. Utah State in the same time slot. And in case you have been living in a cave with Cat Stevens and don't get cable, ESPN also shows football games on Saturday afternoon.

The real shame is that for the first time since John Robinson's second year on the job, the Rebel football team is doing a good job blocking and tackling. There's renewed interest in the program. People would actually watch this game.

But will they listen?

Man, it has been so long since I had to listen to college football on AM radio, I don't even know if my house is wired for it.