• Hi Guest, want to participate in the discussions, keep track of read/unread posts and more? Create your free account and increase the benefits of your WyoNation.com experience today!

Why is unlv such an awful football program?

HighPlainsDrifter said:
Wyovanian said:
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.

I've lived in Las Vegas for 14+ years, and I don't believe your gang statistics at all. There are some really bad schools in CCSD, but there are lots of really good schools once you get out of the inner city into the suburbs. My daughter just graduated from a suburban high school in a solidly middle class area, and I have never heard one thing about gangs at her school. I know many, many people who send their kids to public schools and live in the suburbs - same thing for them. In fact, my daughter's school has a very heavy LDS population (as do many suburban schools) and performs very well on its test scores.

I could go on and on with the problems with CCSD, but in summary the issue revolves around a very large English as a second language population centered in the inner city and some of the city's older areas. There are certainly gangs in some of the schools, but you can pretty easily pinpoint these issues to specific geographic areas in the Valley.
It's easy to live in a bubble anywhere, and in Las Vegas it's almost healthy. Those stats are real, but like I said, the problem's come down some. Also, keep in mind those numbers spanned middle school to UNLV and CSN. I guarantee your daughter knows kids with gang files. I guarantee she has friends with at least one parent who is a convicted felon.

Education, as a value, is very low among even third and fourth generation Las Vegas residents when compared to other cities of comparable population.
 
I found living in Las Vegas...

1. A blast while single & employed
2. A cluster fuck while married
3. A place to move away from fast when you have a family

Strangest damn place (as I expected with the transient nature of the population)...everyone crawls around in their neighborhoods trying hard not to make eye contact with anyone, and closing those garage doors before their cars stop moving, so they don't have to have any personal contact. Lived in one neighborhood for 14 months, and we joked about how many of our neighbors we would wave to and just be ignored. The daily O/U was 11.
 
Back
Top