Santoro: The Wolf Pack will be better than 1-12 … right?

Sports Fodder:

The Nevada Wolf Pack football team, according to one web site, is headed for one of its worst seasons in school history.

College Football News (collegefootballnews.com) predicts the Wolf Pack will win just one game this season, finishing 1-12 overall and 0-7 in the Mountain West. The Wolf Pack, which opens Aug. 24 at Mackay Stadium against SMU under first-year head coach Jeff Choate, will only beat Football Championship Subdivision team Eastern Washington on Sept. 21 of the Big Sky Conference.

The dozen losses would be a single-season record for the Pack and the lone victory would be its fewest in one season since it went 1-9 in 1964. The Pack, according to the site, will go 1-6 at home and 0-6 on the road, losing its first four games and final eight. In other words, according to College Football News, Wolf Pack fans will be left longing for the good old days of coach Ken Wilson's 2-10 teams the last two seasons.

The Wolf Pack, according to the site, will be the only team in the 12-team Mountain West (not counting Pac-12 leftovers Oregon State and Washington State, which will play 15 games combined against Mountain West teams this year) that will win fewer than three games.

Boise State, according to College Football News, will finish atop the conference at 10-2, 6-1, followed by Air Force (8-4, 5-2), Fresno State (8-4, 5-2) and Colorado State (7-5, 5-2). UNLV will finish 6-6, 4-3 and beat the Pack in the regular season finale on Nov. 30 in Las Vegas.

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Choate also didn't receive any love from College Football News. The 53-year-old Choate, who was 28-22 in four seasons (2016-19) as Montana State's head coach, was ranked as the worst coach in the 12-team Mountain West, one notch lower than Wyoming's 53-year-old Jay Sawvel, who has never been a head coach before.

Choate is considered the 122nd best head coach (out of 134 FBS schools) in the nation. College Football News considers Air Force's Troy Calhoun and Fresno State's Jeff Tedford as the best coaches in the Mountain West, followed (in order) by UNLV's Barry Odom, New Mexico's Bronco Mendenhall, Utah State's Blake Anderson, Boise State's Spencer Danielson, Colorado State's Jay Norvell, San Jose State's Ken Niumatalolo, San Diego State's Sean Lewis, Hawaii's Timmy Chang, Sawvel and Choate.

Choate, Sawvel, Lewis, Niumatalolo, Danielson and Mendenhall will be in their first full season as head coach at their schools.

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Nobody expects Choate and the Wolf Pack to set the college football world on fire this year. The Pack, after all, won just four games combined the last two seasons and the roster has been in a constant state of flux and turmoil ever since head coach Jay Norvell left after the 2021 season.

But a 1-12 season is a bit harsh for a program like Nevada that should have earned much more respect than being lumped in as one of the saddest teams in the country. There are ample reasons for at least mild optimism at Nevada, certainly much more than College Football News has mustered in its early predictions for the 2024 season.

The Wolf Pack, after all, will play seven home games this year. Mackay Stadium still has enough magic left in its dated nuts and bolts to squeeze out more than just one victory in seven games, doesn't it?

There should also be at least one victory on the road tucked in somewhere among a basket that includes Troy, Minnesota, San Jose State, Hawaii, Boise State and UNLV. Choate has also reinvigorated the roster with new talent at every position that didn't come to Nevada to lose 12-of-13 games. The same goes for his new coaching staff that didn't come to Nevada to destroy their careers.

A 1-12 season would be disastrous for Choate, the Pack and its dwindling fan base. It would undermine all of his in-your-face optimism and promises he's made the last five months. Ken Wilson basically promised nothing and certainly delivered. Choate has all but said his Wolf Pack will hit the ground running and never look back.

The last Wolf Pack first-year head coach to win fewer than two games in his first season is Jack Glascock, who went 0-5 in 1915. Glascock, who didn't earn anything close to the $1 million-plus a year Choate will take home, saw his Wolf Pack score a grand total of 22 points all season long.

In Glascock's defense, though, the 1915 Wolf Pack was playing its first season of football since 1905 after nine years of rugby. Players cannot pass the ball forward in rugby, sort of like what we witnessed with Wilson's Wolf Pack the past two seasons.

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The last time the Wolf Pack met SMU on a football field was Christmas Eve 2009 in the Hawaii Bowl. SMU, under coach June Jones, blasted the Pack and head coach Chris Ault, 45-10. This year's meeting on Aug. 24 (less than 90 days away) will be the 15th anniversary of that horrendous Christmas Eve in Honolulu.

The Pack has a score to settle.

That 2009 loss just might have been the impetus and motivation for the Wolf Pack's program-changing 13-1 season in 2010.

A crowd of 32,650 showed up in Honolulu on Christmas Eve 2009 to see the matchup of Jones' run-and-shoot offense and Ault's Pistol. It was a one-sided affair right from the start as SMU raced out to a 31-point halftime lead. The only Pack touchdown of the game came on a 10-yard parting-gift score from quarterback Colin Kaepernick to Brandon Wimberly with 64 seconds to play.

The SMU defensive coordinator that day was former Wolf Pack linebacker (1976-77) and assistant coach (1998-99) Tom Mason. Mason's Mustangs stuffed Ault's Pistol (Mason's former Pack coach) in Hawaii, holding Kapernick and friends to just 314 total yards and 17 first downs.

SMU's offense, though, was the key to the Christmas Eve catastrophe. SMU came to Honolulu loaded with weapons, including three future NFL wide receivers who would torch the Pack secondary.

Emmanuel Sanders caught seven passes for 124 yards and a touchdown, Cole Beasley caught three for 88 yards and a score and Aldrick Robinson had nine catches for 176 yards but didn't get into the end zone. The three combined to play 30 years in the NFL. The Pack never had a chance back in 2009. SMU quarterback Kyle Padron had the day of his life in that bowl game, completing 32-of-41 passes for 460 yards and two scores.

The Wolf Pack did have its own future NFL pass catcher in that bowl game in 2009. Tight end Virgil Green, who caught one 10-yard pass from Kaepernick against SMU, would play on the Super Bowl-winning 2015 Denver Broncos with Sanders. Green will be at Mackay Stadium for the long-awaited rematch on Aug. 24 against SMU as the Pack's tight ends coach.

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It appears Steve Alford has completely reloaded his Wolf Pack men's basketball team with the recent additions of former Oklahoma State power forward Justin McBride and former Evansville guard Chuck Bailey. McBride and Bailey will join transfer portal gifts Xavier DuSell (Fresno State), Brandon Love (Texas State) and Kobe Sanders (Cal Poly) as the Pack has more than made up for the loss of Hunter McIntosh, Tyler Powell, Tylan Pope, Jarod Lucas, Kenan Blackshear and Jazz Gardner, at least on paper.

The 6-foot-8 Sanders and McBride and the 6-9 Love will add size, scoring, rebounding and physicality to the Pack while the 6-5 Bailey and 6-4 DuSell will supply a little bit of everything. Alford has already called DuSell, who also spent three years in the Mountan West with Wyoming before his lone year at Fresno State, as "one of the best shooters in college basketball."

McBride and Bailey each have three years of eligibility remaining while DuSell, Love and Sanders have one year to go.

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One player who never seems to run out of eligibility is 6-10 center K.J. Hymes who, according to the Wolf Pack, will return in 2024-25 for his seventh year in the program, likely setting a record for a Pack athlete. Hymes, who will turn 25 on Aug. 10, was recruited to Nevada by former head coach Eric Musselman for the 2018-19 season. Musselman is now on his second job (USC) since leaving Nevada after the 2018-19 season after five years at Arkansas.

Hymes, who sat out the 2018-19 season as a freshman redshirt and received an extra year of eligibility because of the 2020-21 COVID-19 season, has played parts of five seasons on the court for the Pack. He got into 32 games last season (31 starts) and averaged 5.7 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.7 fouls a game (one foul every six minutes).

Hymes has played in 115 games so far in his career and has a very real chance of setting the school record for games played in a career, currently owned by Dario Hunt (2009-12) and D.J. Fenner (2014-17), who each played in 135 games. Hymes has played 1,672 minutes in his career, far below the school record of 4,393 by Deonte Burton (2011-14).

The last Wolf Pack head coach to last as long as seven seasons on the bench is Sonny Allen (1980-81 through 1986-87). Before that it was Jake Lawlor, who coached 15 years off and on from 1942-43 through 1958-59. Odds are Hymes won't spend that long on the Pack bench.