LAS VEGAS — As college football seems hellbent upon shedding its charms, there’s a populous race underway that might just lasso a heart. It’s bubbling across the land but especially here in this ultimate American city.
“The race is on,” UNLV Coach Barry Odom said in a news conference on Labor Day, and while he meant the UNLV season at hand, his words carried a ring relevant to all Boises, Memphises, Bowlings Green et al.
This playoff berth dangling way up the road has made the road shinier and spiffier for the whole striving lot of them. It brings an upgrade from the previous 10 seasons, when the Group of Five received one New Year’s Six bowl bid per year and went 4-6 against the bigwigs. And it magnifies the one score that shouted from the national list more than any other this past weekend, the one in which UNLV, in Odom’s second season as helmsman, went to Houston, the former Group of Five member with a Power Four address (Big 12). UNLV not only won, 27-7, but also felt miffed about Houston’s “7,” which came along with one minute to play as if to epitomize window dressing. The upset romp got so convincing that, Odom said: “We got into the third quarter, and I asked the offensive staff: ‘Let’s take the air out of the game. I don’t want any more balls in the air.’ I think we attempted three passes in the second half. I felt like we were in complete control of the game, and I wanted to finish it in that context.”
Much of the Group of Five playoff banter before the season had centered around Boise State, that long-recognized financial underling that defeated UNLV, 44-20, in the Mountain West championship game in December while salvaging a season once wayward. UNLV’s presence in that game and a subsequent bowl game, however, had signaled loud things for a program with four winning seasons in the past 30 and with stretches of 9-47 (1995-99), 24-84 (2004-12) and 29-74 (2014-22).
Odom, as football wackos might recall, had, in December 2015, become one of the first tear-jerker intro-video coaches. That’s the construct in which a university films the introduction of a new head coach to the players. (See Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame.) When Missouri opened a door to a roomful and revealed Odom, the familiar defensive coordinator and former Missouri linebacker, as Gary Pinkel’s replacement after Pinkel’s resignation with a lymphoma diagnosis, the players went a beautiful form of berserk, surrounding Odom and hopping up and down in mad mirth.
It ended four seasons later as it so often does, at 25-25 in this case, but Odom went on to Arkansas as defensive coordinator and then to UNLV, demonstrating a fearlessness about topographical change. Listening to him in his weekly news conference, it’s easy to see why players would want to listen to him more.
“You know,” he said after the news conference, “I don’t want this to be — I don’t want it to sound arrogant, but I do want it to sound confident. I believe that UNLV has the space to be on the national scene. It’s in the sports mecca of the world. We’re in a conference that the conference champion every year will be in the discussion for that [playoff] spot, as it should be. For this program, my belief is we should compete and win championships every single year.
“How broad does that go? That depends on us and what we do. I think you look at opportunities that are out there, we know that we don’t get a slip-up [during the season]. If we get one, then that conversation’s over. Internally, because we have a mature team, we are using it as motivation, that we’ve got to be really good every single week. Yes, there’s a prize out there that I want to pursue and chase. It’s also, for me, the progress that we make from week to week overrides any big trophy item out there. If we make the right progress, we’ve got the roster to be in contention at the end of the year.”
He does spot the fine daydreaming as he looks around the country at the oft-hidden fan bases, and he doesn’t shy from bringing up the playoff around his team even in a profession in which looking ahead is often treated as roughly as appealing as smallpox.
“It certainly captures the audience, a narrative for the audience,” he said. “I mean, there’s so many people now, fan bases, that have hope that maybe that wasn’t there before. Because they see, okay, now there’s 12 teams, there’s a lot of things that are possible. You’ve got to have breaks go your way, but also it opens up the door, especially early in the season, for people to have hope on maybe what could take place. I think it’s great for the game.”
Now his team, with its 50 new players in the transfer-era fashion, must cope with whatever self-confidence it might have just amassed. “To be honest,” said quarterback Matt Sluka, who arrived after three seasons at Holy Cross, “I haven’t really thought about the playoffs at all.” The player will have to think as best they can about Utah Tech, inbound from absurdly pretty St. George this weekend, and then a three-game stretch at Kansas and at home against Fresno State and Syracuse. Boise State? That’s Oct. 25 at Allegiant Stadium, the Las Vegas Raiders’ home where a venue-record 63,969 gathered this past Sunday night for the LSU-vs.-Southern California doozy.
“I hope that someday that we’re talking about record attendance for us,” Odom said. “And we need the city of Vegas to continue to embrace what we’re doing. We’re excited about playing at home. We’re thrilled for the opportunity to play in that stadium. We need to create — it does get so loud in there — we could create a nightmare for our opponents. And I know we’ve got to have winning football.”
Toward that, a program often buried in the standings during football seasons and overlooked until basketball seasons has taken on fresh hearings of poll chatter. Speaking of the grand fraternity of coaches who don’t talk polls, Odom said: “I am not one of those. I used to act like I didn’t read them. I read ’em. And I read ’em then [when he acted like he didn’t].” As the room laughed, he said: “Everybody reads ’em. I’m done with coach talk. That’s boring. I think we’re a top 25 team. If you haven’t put your vote in yet, you should vote for the Rebels, and we know the significance of what that means.”
As the Associated Press poll emerged Tuesday, it showed UNLV unranked yet present near the end in the famed others receiving votes section. It had one vote, tied with Colorado. The road is always long and bumpy, but look, there’s that light up there on the distant horizon of December.
