Expect him back next year

By Ron Kantowski

Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008 | 2 a.m.

A lot of UNLV fans think this is going to be the year for UNLV football.

As in this is the year the Rebels go 2-10 again, and rid themselves of head coach Mike Sanford.

Not so fast.

For starters, this might be the year UNLV doesn’t go 2-10, because the drop-off from the top three in the Mountain West (BYU, Utah and TCU) to the bottom six is steeper than the learning curve for a Lohan sister. Then there’s the “every dog has its day” theory. Except Baylor, which hardly ever has a day.

So maybe this will be the year the Rebels win four or five games, although I can’t believe I just typed those words.

But even if the Rebels do go 2-10, you probably should hold off on the welcoming party for the next offensive or defensive coordinator you’ve never heard of.

Because who’s going to put up the $291,000 it’s gonna take to buy Sanford out?

UNLV runs its athletic program the way Michigan and LSU run theirs, so Sanford was given a five-year contract when he began the difficult task of rebuilding the football program, which is sort of like rebuilding the Edmund Fitzgerald without a blow torch. So after this year, he still has another year remaining on his deal.

I don’t know if Gov. Jim Gibbons is on Sanford’s Christmas card list, but he should be. With handouts from Carson City having gone the way of the leather helmet, UNLV can’t afford to buy Sanford out, even if it wanted to. Wisconsin’s off the schedule and Tom Wiesner, the guy who arranged that game, died in 2002, so where’s the money to buy out the final year of Sanford’s contract going to come from?

Unless Casey Flair trips in the end zone while trying to catch an overthrown pass and discovers oil, I just don’t see it happening.

Oh, I suppose Athletic Director Mike Hamrick could ask Lon Kruger, his men’s basketball coach, for a loan after agreeing to pay him a bonus for marketing his own team.

Otherwise, I’m afraid Sanford is the Band-Aid of the UNLV coaching staff. We’re stuck on him. Or at least with him.

But Chancellor Jim Rogers is right: This mess of a football program isn’t all Sanford’s fault. In fact, most of it isn’t his fault. UNLV was bad for a long time before he got here.

Sanford’s big mistake was making big promises about changing that when he got here. Fans’ big mistake was believing him.

Most coaches talk big at the news conference. That’s what coaches do. It gets people excited.

It would be better for coaches who inherit losing programs to say, “We’re gonna do the best we can,” and leave it at that, because sportswriters wouldn’t write that down, and then they wouldn’t use it against the coach later. Which is what sportswriters do.

Besides, it’s hard to tell when a team is not doing the best it can, because I know there were times when I was giving only 95 percent and managed to fake out my coaches. And my mom still thinks I’m giving 110 percent, when that’s impossible, because 100 percent is as high as you can go.

While we’re at it, you cannot play defense with your hair on fire, although that certainly would make the second half more interesting. It also might explain why Brian Urlacher doesn’t have any.

Sanford’s record is 6-29, and that’s awful. But if the Rebels win four games this year, it will be twice as many as they won last year. And then Hamrick will say that UNLV football is vastly improved and that it’s just a matter of time until the Rebels become Kansas or Kansas State or Wake Forest.

And if Sanford does win four games, he should get to stay. Because as Joe Schmidt, the old coach of the Detroit Lions, once famously said, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken ... feathers.