Santoro: Hey, coach, stop worrying about everyone’s budget

Sports Fodder:

Nevada Wolf Pack football coach Jeff Choate believes it is his responsibility as King of All Football Things Silver and Blue to lecture the media on how to ask questions.

Choate was asked three innocent questions this past Saturday afternoon after a glorious 49-16 win over Eastern Washington that barely referenced the Pack's 27-0 loss at Minnesota the previous week. Choate, clearly puffing out his chest after beating the FCS Eagles of the Big Sky Conference, got a bit defensive and irritated over the audacity of someone even mentioning the Minnesota loss.

Keep in mind that the only time the word "Minnesota" was mentioned, it was done so that Choate could then talk about how his team responded so well the following week to blow out Eastern Washington.

The first time Minnesota was referenced, Choate responded like a normal, respectful human being and actually answered the question. The second and third time, well, he began to recognize a trend, so he resorted to bullying the questioners on how to ask a question to such a person who is the, after all, King of All Football Things Silver and Blue.

"I don't mean to cut you off," said Choate (via youtube.com and nevadawolfpack.com) as he was doing exactly what he said he didn't mean to do, "but I think you need to keep this Minnesota thing in perspective. Watch where they (Minnesota) rank in total defense at the end of the year. That's what I would pay attention to rather than continue to pile on (Nevada quarterback) Brendon Lewis in a situation that wasn't a competitive balance situation. We got his back."

First of all, nobody was piling on Lewis for his three-interception performance at Minnesota. Second of all, why did Nevada, as Choate said, knowingly put its low-budget quarterback in a situation that wasn't a competitive balance situation? And, third, shame on the media for actually buying into the fantasy that teams like Nevada schedule non-conference games against opponents that their low-budget athletes can have even a slight chance of competing against.

The third time the Minnesota game was mentioned, Choate gave the questioner a lecture on college finances.

"Again, I'm going to correct you on that," said Choate the Throat, correcting a question that didn't need correcting. "Let's keep last week in perspective, all right? Do you want to compare budgets between Minnesota and Nevada? I'm happy to do that. We can talk about who should win that game. Our guys played hard on defense. We were overmatched on the offensive line. Let's forget about that and move on."

And then he read off the schedule.

"We're playing San Jose State in two weeks," he reminded all of those who insisted on bringing up the past. "(This week) we got a bye."

It is now clear that the Wolf Pack needs to list each school's athletic budget next to the rushing, passing, offensive and defensive statistics in its weekly press releases so that the uninformed media knows who should win and doesn't irritate the King of All Football Things Silver and Blue with any more silly questions at aggravating press conferences.

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To Choate's credit, his message that teams with bigger budgets than their opponents clearly should win the game, remained on point throughout his press conference lecture. He didn't, after all, blow the ridiculously easy 49-16 victory over Eastern Washington out of proportion or even perspective.

"This game will be irrelevant when we play San Jose State," he said. "We were playing down a level (against Eastern Washington) and they were playing up a level. I get it."

In other words, don't blame a coach for losing to a school with a bigger football budget and don't throw a parade for a coach who beats a team with a smaller budget. Those type of games are just to pay the bills and, of course, the all-important coaching salaries. Everything in college sports these days, don't forget, is about the dollars, all right? Keep it in perspective, buddy.

Next question.

It's a wonder why the games are even played out on the field anymore. OK, we know why, it's so the television stations have programming. And if the TV stations have programming, they can pay the low-budget schools and keep them afloat so those low-budget schools can then pay their football and men's basketball coaches seven figures a year.

The games themselves, Choate reminded us on Saturday, are meaningless. All we really need to do, according to Professor Choate, is compare athletic budgets to determine the winner. No more sitting through monotonous three and four-hour snooze fests like the win over Eastern Washington, right?

You can now, if what Choate says is gospel, play out an entire football schedule between drinking your coffee and eating your toast at breakfast. All we need to do is simply come up with a football budget, just numbers on paper or a computer screen, compare those numbers to your opponent's budget numbers and, prest-o change-o, abracadabra, you get the team's record. The entire season can be played out in, say, 20 seconds depending on the strength of your internet signal.

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Choate says the Wolf Pack, at 2-3 heading into its first of two bye weeks this year, is right where he expected it to be after five non-league games. He didn't say it, but he obviously looked at the respective budgets of the first five opponents and it spit a record of 2-3 back at him.

"At the end of the day I probably would have flipped the Troy win and the Georgia Southern loss," he said. "The oddsmakers would have had us there (2-3), right?"

Oddsmakers? We thought the good folks who put the budgets together determine everything, right? Aren't oddsmakers and media people simply uninformed, fake pseudo experts who have the nerve to judge million-dollar coaches? They don't keep things in perspective, right?

"Maybe they (the dreaded oddsmakers) had us losing four of those, I don't know," Choate continued. "Best-case scenario, I thought maybe we could pull a rabbit out of our hats and find a way to win three of those."

Oh, so that's why a 54-year-old lifetime assistant coach gets a million dollars a year at Nevada? To pull rabbits out of his hat? You can probably find a prospective magician outside Circus Circus on any night of the week who will pull a rabbit out of his hat for a couple hundred bucks. Why pay a guy seven figures to go into games knowing he should lose because the budget says so?

Choate, though, is right about the Pack being 2-3 right now. It is where we thought the Pack should be after five games, give or take a rabbit or two popping unexpectedly out of a hat.

But if you actually watched the games instead of simply comparing budgets, you saw that the Pack could have easily been 4-1 right now. Choate, it turns out, didn't even have to pull a rabbit or two out of his hat to win four games. He just had to find a way to push or pull his team over the finish line, you know, like a good coach should. Isn't that why he gets a million dollars a year Rabbits and hats don't cost that much, do they?

The Pack, after all, should have beaten both SMU and Georgia Southern, given the way they played and because both games were at home. The Pack led SMU 24-13 in the fourth quarter and dominated Georgia Southern everywhere but on the scoreboard. Even an out-of-work magician hanging out on the sidewalk outside of Circus Circus could tell you that.

The million-dollar coach should have figured out a way to beat both SMU and Georgia Southern and should be sitting at 4-1 right now. And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't have been so defensive after a 33-point win at home against an overmatched team from the Big Sky Conference.

•••

Choate clearly obsesses about athletic budgets. But he's no different than any other you-have-no-right-to-ask-me-that-question, defensive, jittery head coach making a million dollars or so a year for a program that is stuck in a dying conference. All coaches now obsess about budgets because, well, it's their go-to excuse whenever they lose.

But most coaches don't tell the media to compare the budgets of teams after games to see who should have won. Athletic directors and university presidents don't like their coaches talking about their tiny budget. It's in bad taste.

But forgive Choate. He's still in the honeymoon phase of his Nevada career when his bosses still kiss his Texas and Boise State rings whenever they see him walk by their offices. Choate can still say whatever he wants to say at press conference lectures. He hasn't even coached in a conference game at Nevada.

But the fact that Choate still has the respective budgets of the schools he's playing against in his mind does not bode well for him staying at Nevada for a very long time. True, Nevada's budget might increase after Boise State, Colorado State, Utah State, San Diego State, Fresno State (and maybe UNLV) pay out the exorbitant exit fees to the Mountain West after they jump to the Pac-12. But there will always be schools with bigger football budgets than Nevada. A lot more. And Nevada will have to play those schools with bigger budgets just so they can afford their own tiny budget. See Ohio State in 2029, USC in 2027, Penn State in 2025 for games Choate already knows his team will lose.

Choate has already coached at some of those schools with bigger budgets than Nevada, like Boise State, Texas, Florida, and Washington State. The only schools on Choate's resume that Nevada doesn't have a budget edge is probably Montana Western, Challis (Idaho) High School and Post Falls (Idaho) High School. But we're not sure about Post Falls and Challis.

Coaches leave Nevada because of Nevada's budget. We've seen it in football (Jay Norvell) and we've certainly seen it in men's basketball (Trent Johnson, Mark Fox and Eric Musselman). Heck, we've even seen it in baseball (Jay Johnson). Yes, most coaches still leave Nevada eventually because they are fake head coaches, but money (or retirement) steals the rest of them.

We're hoping Choate leaves because of money or retirement and not because he's a fake head coach. So far so good. From everything we've seen on the field so far, he looks like a legitimate head coach.

He just needs to stop bringing up such nasty things in mixed company like budgets.

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Speaking of the ugly business of college sports, we learned this week that the UNLV Rebels just lost their starting quarterback because (he says) the Rebels aren't going to pay him the NIL dollars they promised him when they bought him from Holy Cross last winter.

Matthew Sluka, a former FCS wizard who sought big NIL dollars this past offseason, has left the Rebels and will redshirt this year because NIL promises UNLV made to him are not being met. And you still think college sports is about the pageantry of the sport, the love of the game and the school? It's about the dirty business of overpaid coaches and players always wanting more money.

How heartwarming is that?

Sluka has barely done anything in FBS. Yes, he's played well in his three games (all victories) for UNLV, completing 21-of-48 passes for 318 yards and six touchdowns and running the ball 39 times for 253 yards and a touchdown. But a guy with just one remaining season of eligibility left, walking away from his school and teammates after just three games because of NIL money? Talk about heartwarming.

Sluka, who hasn't even completed half his passes, clearly realizes this is his one and only chance at making seven figures for doing nothing but playing a game. He's not a legitimate NFL prospect at quarterback. He's just a tough young man, fearless and, obviously, confident. That's all it takes in the FCS and Mountain West.

But the NFL isn't exactly drooling over the prospect of drafting a four-year Holy Cross quarterback whose priorities lean to the selfish side and whose FBS team only trusts him to throw 15 or so passes a game.

This negative UNLV news is, of course, all good for the Wolf Pack and its fans. Sluka had his team at 3-0 and riding high. UNLV now, it seems, has to hand the quarterback job over to sixth-year senior Hajj-Malik Williams, who spent five years at Campbell, or fourth-year senior Cameron Friel, who, it seems, has already been beaten out for the Rebels starting job a half-dozen times already.

The bad news for the Pack is that both have talent and can certainly play and win games at the Mountain West level. UNLV won't go away entirely with Williams or Friel running the offense.

But what, exactly, is UNLV doing? If Sluka is right and the Rebels are making promises they don't intend to keep, then why would any important recruit worth his weight in NIL dollars trust them in the future?

So maybe this is great news for the Pack after all.

•••

Don't believe anything anybody tells you about what is supposedly going on in the Mountain West and Pac-12 right now. Nobody knows how any of this will play out in the end even if they think they know.

The Mountain West's squabble with the Pac-12 will ultimately be decided by slimy lawyers, threats, bully tactics, greasy TV money and whoever has the deeper pockets. Fake promises will also play a role. Just ask Matthew Sluka.

How the Mountain West has allowed Oregon State and Washington State to seemingly bully it into submission is something that boggles the mind. But it is the Mountain West, isn't it?

The Mountain West kept Oregon State and Washington State alive and well this year by having all of its teams play them and now those two devious schools have grown stronger, bolder and more devious. While the Mountain West was busy fitting Oregon State and Washington State onto its football schedules, those two were busy making calls and promises to the gullible, desperate and frightened Mountain West schools and stealing them in the dark of night.

Has everyone (the five Mountain West schools who have already pledged their allegiance to the new Pac-12) forgotten that Oregon State and Washington State just a year ago were two old dogs thrown out of the car on the highway who just happened to stumble upon an exit ramp?

Again, this is not over. Not by a long shot. Nobody knows how it will all shake out. The lawyers will decide all of that. Until that happens, all you will hear is meaningless noise coming from greedy, lying, selfish schools and conferences and, of course, uninformed media people.

•••

Would the state of Nevada actually allow UNLV to jump to the Pac-12 and leave the Wolf Pack in a dying Mountain West? Don't forget it's happened before, when UNLV left the Pack and the Big West to go to the Western Athletic Conference in 1996. But the two schools were only in the Big West together for four years at that time, so nobody cried all that much when UNLV left the Pack. Pack football, after all, was guaranteed a blowout victory over UNLV every year, anyway, and that game was always more important than a meaningless Big West title.

Everyone in Northern Nevada (and, of course, in southern Nevada) knows the Rebels think they are better than the Wolf Pack in every way. They, after all, have a bigger budget and, as Choate tells us, that's really all that matters at the end of the day (or the fourth quarter).

The Pac-12 must also believe that because, it seems, they have extended an open-armed hug to UNLV and not Nevada. Or maybe it's because Nevada can't possibly afford the exit fee. Who knows? We'll find out more when the lawyers get done squeezing the life out of everyone in the next six months or so.

All we know right now is that the Nevada Wolf Pack should officially be in crisis, survivor mode. The Mountain West is in jeopardy of becoming an official joke. If the threats are true, the Mountain West in two years will consist of Nevada, San Jose State, Hawaii, Wyoming and New Mexico. That's not a legitimate FBS conference. That's a bad Greyhound trip with a flight on Hawaiian Airlines thrown in to make you even more agitated. Even Air Force is supposedly considering a move to join Army and Navy in the American Athletic Conference right now.

If the Mountain West roof indeed caves in (it's now leaking badly), the Wolf Pack football program should consider a move back to the Big Sky. Think of all the 49-16 wins you'd witness at Mackay. Choate, who would no doubt run screaming into the night to the first power conference school that offers him a job coaching linebackers, wouldn't even have to qualify the Big Sky wins by telling you the Pack was playing down a level.

The Pack, we assume, wouldn't likely make a move back to the FCS and the Big Sky. They'd have to give all their NIL dollars back to the boosters they lied to. There's also teams in the FCS who actually don't pay attention to things like budgets all that closely and have the nerve to go into games against teams with bigger budgets thinking they can and should win.

Imagine that.

A more likely scenario if the Mountain West collapses would be that Pack football would become an independent (all those ex-Mountain West schools, after all, would need Western non-league opponents) and the rest of the Nevada men's and women's sports could join the West Coast Conference. WCC basketball, after all, is up for grabs now that Gonzaga hoops has agreed to join the Pac-12.

What an exciting time we live in, isn't it? College sports in general and the Wolf Pack athletic program and its tiny Choate budget is about to slip into chaos. Sends a chill down your silver and blue spine, doesn't it?