UNLV road win must come this week

UNLV's football team hasn't won a Mountain West Conference road game in four years under Mike Sanford. None. Zilch. Zero.

Oh-and-16.

Oh-for-everyone.

They have lost to great teams (Utah of 2008). They have lost to forgettable teams (San Diego State of 2008). They have lost to all sorts of teams in between. They have just lost.

The Rebels open league play against Wyoming on Saturday in the bland and bleak environment that is Laramie, where you might swear the world comes to an end at nearly 7,500 feet.

But then you remember the Cavalryman Supper Club just outside town has a salad bar stocked with iceberg lettuce, and that all is right with the universe.

It snowed some the past few days in Laramie. The winds are picking up. It can go from mild to miserable in the time it takes you to count the local hotels whose names don't include the word Inn.

Laramie does frost like Miami does humidity.

But none of it should matter to a UNLV team that is a near-touchdown favorite, because there is no better opportunity than now to prove times are different, whether the skies are clear or gloomy.

Because if oh-and-16 isn't one-and-16 when the sun begins to set over the palatial Days Inn, it will be as inexcusable a result as the Rebels have owned under Sanford.

Perhaps more than any, and yet I'm still trying to understand the embarrassment that was San Diego State 42, UNLV 21.

Sanford on Monday spoke about how perception has often defined his team and those it played the past four seasons, that it's time to move on from worrying about how good or bad someone else is and merely existing in the moment.

Good. Fine. Makes sense.

Here is this week's moment: Wyoming stinks.

That isn't perception. It's fact. It's a truth the Rebels can believe or ignore, but what they can't do is lose Saturday and expect anyone to accept they are on better conference footing than in past seasons.

You can't lose to Wyoming this year and be taken seriously. You can't lose to Wyoming and even whisper a thought about contending in league without being laughed out of the nearest locker room.

Coaches hate such decrees. They cringe at the hint of any game being viewed as a definite victory. Too bad. It's a fifth season of the same system that is being led by experienced players. The days of losing games such as the one approaching Saturday not only should be over, they must be over.

"We have to play at a high level all the time," Sanford said. "This is the next game, regardless of all the other factors of what anybody says about perception or what we are supposed to do. It's the next game. It's the only game, and we need to win.

"Our feeling is to focus on the next game. Forget the past. Forget the future. Just the next game."

There will never exist such a thing as a bad win, not when you only receive 12 chances per season to get it right. UNLV might have spent the first 30 minutes against Hawaii on Saturday acting as if defending the pass would result in contracting swine flu, but realized at halftime the best way to contest a high-scoring offense is to keep its collective butts on the sideline.

The more you control the ball, the less someone else can move it, a theory that seems to work for everyone not playing against Peyton Manning.

UNLV deserves its 2-1 start. It deserved to beat Hawaii, 34-33. It will deserve to beat a Wyoming team that is 1-2, struggled to beat a Football Championship Subdivision team in Weber State at home and was just shut out by a Colorado side that previously yielded 54 points in a loss to mighty Toledo.

It will deserve to beat a Wyoming team that will start a true freshman (Austin Carta-Samuels) at quarterback under a first-year coach running a spread offense none of the Cowboys seem to have figured out.

It will deserve it because there is no acceptable alternative. Not in a fifth season against this bad an opponent. Not if things really are different.

Forget about the past? Then the Rebels must dismiss the thought of oh-and-16 and begin to write a new chapter on the road.

"I expect to be contending (in the conference)," Sanford said. "Now, there is a lot of water to go under the bridge between now and (season's end). To me, this is where we have to prove it, against a conference opponent on the road.

"Our goal and expectation is to (win the league). That's our goal. I can't get up every morning if I don't expect to win each game. That's why I go to work. And this week, it's Wyoming."

The man is a farmer. He gets up early every day.

And this week, his team doesn't need to win.

It has to.

Otherwise, what's really different?

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He also can be heard weeknights from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on "The Sports Scribes" on KDWN-AM (720) and www.kdwn.com.