NCAA Football Unlv Football

The video below is a 10-minute, profane (NSFW) interview with *former* UNLV quarterback Rocky Hinds. Hinds started at UNLV for a few games before a serious knee injury forced him to miss a season's worth of football. When he came back, it appears he was no longer invited to be part of the team. This news was delayed enough to make him ineligible to transfer to another school and be eligible to play right away.

This stuff actually happens a fair amount, particularly at places flying under the radar like UNLV. His coach will obviously tell a different and perhaps accurate story in this he said/she said affair, so by no means is this video the official and final word on the Rocky Hinds/Mike Sanford/UNLV breakup.

(Via: WildWest)

After being rather thoroughly outplayed for the better part of the football game, the Wisconsin Badgers finally did in the final ten minutes what they should have been doing all night. They imposed their will on heavy underdog UNLV, escaping Las Vegas with a 20-13 non-conference win.

Senior quarterback Tyler Donovan's 29-yard scamper down the left sideline with 1:53 left capped a ten-play, 61-yard drive to give Wisconsin the lead for good. Donovan threw a pass to Luke Swan for the two-point conversion.

Wisconsin's defense then shut down UNLV in five plays, sacking Travis Dixon twice, and Donovan closed the night with two kneel-downs. Wisconsin is 2-0, and thanks to earlier college football craziness, the Badgers now own the nation's longest winning streak at 11.

While the end of the game was good for Wisconsin, the rest of it was uneven at best, and completely ugly at its worst. The Badgers struggled to make any big plays offensively, and they couldn't sustain many drives. The defense played a bend-but-don't-break style against UNLV's spread offense, which would have been nice had it not cost UW valuable field position most of the night. The Rebels put together a 14-play, 80-yard touchdown drive in the first quarter to take a 7-0 lead, then strung together two more long drives to set up field goals. While the running game struggled to find holes, Dixon picked the Badgers' vaunted secondary apart most of the night, throwing for 258 yards.

With the Big Ten fledgling network still involved in a public spat with Comcast, comparisons to the Mountain West's less than spectacular first year with "The mtn." sports channel are inevitable. In the first year of operation, the mtn. has made it to a whopping 1.2 million homes.

It appears to be a flop. Utah and BYU took the lead and got the rest of the Mountain West members to help foot the bill in hiring an attorney to explore options with their TV deal.

In its annual meeting Tuesday, the MWC Board of Directors voted unanimously to retain Kelly Crabb, the lawyer originally hired and retained last week by BYU and Utah, in efforts to clarify the nature of the TV contract and delineate distribution strategies of The mtn. network.

Crabb will work with Commissioner Craig Thompson and an ad hoc committee made up of three Board members - BYU President Cecil Samuelson, Texas Christian University Chancellor Victor Boschini and Colorado State University President Larry Edward Penley. The conference presidents spearheaded the TV deal that the MWC settled on a year ago with the network co-owned by Comcast Cable and CBS' College Sports Television.

However, there is widespread displeasure because of the troubles in getting The mtn., distributed.

This has fueled speculation that the Mountain West may try to find a way to get out of its deal, and pull the plug on the mtn. The mtn. has not been picked up by either satellite provider, and very few sizable cable operators in the markets (PDF) where the schools operate (Comcast in Utah and Cox in Las Vegas and San Diego are the largest carriers that have it).

A new tradition among college football programs is the practice of allowing home games to be played at "neutral sites".

Some schools do it so they can boost their attendance figures to meet NCAA Division I-A standards. Some do it to boost their regional profile. Some do it to make money and nothing else.

Others, like UNLV, aren't prepared to sell their soul for the chance to play a "home" game at one of pro football's legendary sites.

The Las Vegas Sun reported that UNLV athletic director Mike Hamrick turned down an offer to play a September 2007 home game against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Sun report stated that Hamrick received multiple offers from "University of Wisconsin representatives", asking him to sell next season's home game against the Badgers for amounts of $1 million and then $1.3 million. The paper says Hamrick turned both offers down, saying that he didn't feel it was the right thing to do.

(In a Capital Times article today, UW denies that they were the ones who made the offers, saying that an unidentified third party made the proposals.)

If the report is true, and Hamrick really did turn down upwards of $1.3 million to play a home game more than 1,800 miles away from home, then I give him credit. I don't care who made the offer. The money might have helped UNLV's program in the short-term, but the loyal fans and supporters of the program in the Las Vegas area would have had every right to be upset about losing the chance to see a marquee opponent playing UNLV in Las Vegas, an event that doesn't come around every season.

John David Booty was not the only former backup to Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart to shine on Saturday night. For his part, Rocky Hinds, who transferred to the University of Nevada Las Vegas, turned in one of the top five performances for a quarterback as the Running Rebels defeated Division I-AA Idaho State 54-10.

Hinds thre for 322 yards (fourth best in the Country) and a touchdown, and added 42 yards on the ground. Ryan Wolfe, a favorite go-to guy for Hinds, set a UNLV freshman record en route to 160 yards receiving.