VisorHair said:
Wyovanian said:
pokefanchaz7 said:
Location: check
Cali recruiting: check
City for local recruits: check
I can't figure out why its a place that's so hard to coach.
Recruiting's just a part of it. Most football recruits' parents really don't want their kids to attend a school in Las Vegas (too many temptations) and the fact that UNLV isn't a tier 1 school doesn't help.
The locals are all coming out of a completely gang-infested school district (even the private schools have serious issues) and the single worst public school program in the country. Most of them can't wait to get away from that. UNLV is a very difficult place to recruit serious talent, tougher than we have it.
Couple that with a complete lack of tradition, at any level, and throw in the general apathy for UNLV among Las Vegas residents (the basketball team isn't really viewed as a university entity, more like a basketball program with a college sponsor) and you have have a really hot, sticky tar baby mess in which everyone who takes a swing at finds themselves quickly mired. Add in among the worst football facilities in the FBS, including a stadium located over five miles from campus next to the site of an old sewage treatment facility with nothing to do nearby, a financially hamstrung athletic department (Bohl makes over twice what Hauck was paid) and you can see why recruits who really think about things would choose about a hundred programs before they'd choose UNLV.
What? Other schools don't recruit from "completely gang-infested school districts"? Come on. There just isn't a culture there. They can recruit AZ, SoCal, Washington, Hawaii, Utah, etc. They just haven't had a coach worth a shit. And that town does not care about football. It's 110% a basketball town. The fanbase there treats UNLV as their professional team, so if you aren't winning.. they don't show. And UNLV is broke like you mentioned. Hence why the $30M's is so huge and tempting from the Fertittas.
LV's gang problem is different from other cities on a few levels- it cuts across all demographics and class strata. There are gangs of privileged white kids as well as your usual minority gangs. My friend, who just retired from Metro, used to tell me about the number of kids in LV schools with gang files. It was jaw-dropping. It's come down a bit, but in the mid-to-late 90's it hovered around 65% of middle school students and up (including UNLV and CSN students) had or were suspected of gang affiliation at some point.
The public school system there is unbelievably bad. Combine that with the social issues and you have a bunch of athletes (and/ or their parents) who want to get the hell out of LV.
The problem for UNLV Football being a "cultural" one encompasses a lot of things that work together to hold a program down. Because of the myriad, generational issues conspiring against UNLV Football, I personally believe if there's a school in the MW in danger of losing its football program, UNLV is in as much danger as Hawaii of being that school.
