Lately, Rebels can relate to Mondale in this rivalry

Given this is an election year and Nevada is a battleground state, it might be interesting to compare the Silver State's most intense sports rivalry - discounting, of course, any racquetball competition of consequence between Carrot Top and Wayne Newton - in political terms.

UNR vs. UNLV.

Democrats vs. Republicans.

Ault vs. Hauck.

Obama vs. Romney.

Pistol offense vs. well, whatever UNLV can come up with this year to try to stop it.

Voting requirements vs. eminent domain (or whatever esoteric proposals they will add to the ballot this year to slow the voting process to a crawl.)

Wolf Pack vs. Rebels.

Blue State vs. Red State.

In what can be described only as a coincidence of Halley's Comet proportions, or of somebody loading up a slot machine at McCarran International Airport and actually lining up the 7s, 37 presidential elections have been held since Nevada achieved statehood during 1864; during - you guessed it - the Civil War. And 37 football games also have been played between UNLV and UNR.

In Nevada politics, the Red Team has won 20 times; the Blue Team 16.

In Nevada football, the Blue Team has won 22 times; the Red Team 15.

In politics, the Yellow Team has won once. It happened in 1892.

In 1892, former President Grover Cleveland represented the Blue Team and, in a result that mirrors the past seven football games played between the Red Team and the Blue Team, thoroughly trounced the Red Team and its presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, who was from Indiana.

With the exception of 1968, when the Hoosiers somehow went to the Rose Bowl, where they lost to O.J. Simpson and Southern California, Indiana never wins in football. And so it was that Harrison carried only 16 states while Cleveland carried 23. In electoral votes, it was 277-145, which sort of mirrors the scores of the UNLV-UNR games when Mike Sanford was Rebels coach.

But a lot of people forget there was a Yellow Team in 1892. Unfortunately, it wasn't called the Whigs, which still is the coolest name ever for a political party, even if two of its presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, died in office. And even if a third - the last Whig president, in fact - was called Millard Fillmore, whose name conjures up visions of Ivy League quarterbacks, or of accountants.

A lot of people forget (or simply don't care) that James B. Weaver, a former representative from Iowa, and his vice presidential running mate, Senator James H. Kyle of South Dakota, carried Nevada in 1892.

Weaver and Kyle headed the People's Party, also known as the Populists - also known as the Yellow Team, at least according to a website called 270towin.com, which identifies the Populists with a yellow swatch on its official Nevada Electoral College bar graph. As it does the Whigs on the bar graphs of states that were around when the Whigs were around, though most Whigs became Republicans.

(On the subject of the Electoral College, why couldn't UNLV have scheduled those guys instead of Northern Arizona when Southern Utah fell off the schedule?)

In 1864, when Abe Lincoln whipped George B. McClellan 21-3 (in states carried), Nevada was supposed to have three electoral votes. It wound up with two. The third electoral voter got trapped in a snowstorm. Could he have been a McClellan man? Hard to say. There was no Watergate Hotel in those days. But who needs Chicago's political machine when Mother Nature suppresses voter turnout?

In a note that is semi-related but only in a third cousin sort of way, a hanging chad never has decided a UNLV-UNR football game. The teams never have tied. Most of the games haven't even been close. The closest was the first, a 30-28 Wolf Pack victory in 1969.

In recent years, the series more closely has resembled the presidential election of 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale, like, 84-0 (525-13 in electoral votes). Only that year, the Red Team won. In the football series, the Red Team hasn't so much as carried Minnesota and the District of Columbia over the past seven years.

Since John Robinson quit/was impeached as Red Team coach, Chris Ault and the Blue Team have stuffed the ballot box as well as the stat sheet. The Blue Team has won the past seven meetings by mostly landslide scores of 37-0, 44-26, 63-28, 49-27, 27-20, 31-3 and 22-14. The Red Team's lack of foreign policy has been appalling. So has its lack of defense.

But this still is an entertaining rivalry, if for no other reason that it has a cannon, the Fremont Cannon, the heaviest and most expensive trophy in college football that goes to UNR - I mean, the winner - every year.

It also has beer at the concession stands, which might not have made Reagan vs. Mondale more compelling but tends to lead to high jinks and shenanigans and fisticuffs and helmets and water bottles being thrown when the Red Team and the Blue Team line up in the trenches, or even for the national anthem.

Then, just as in politics, the result is a series of checks and balances, such as an increased police presence and public address announcements about drinking responsibly.

Which, I believe, was one of the platforms on which the Whig Party was founded and might explain why Millard Fillmore's reign pales in comparison to that of Chris Ault.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0353. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.