Nevada head coach Steve Alford, left, and his staff came up short last Saturday against Boise State, the Wolf Pack’s eighth loss against the top tier of the Mountain West.
Photo by Steve Ranson.
Sports Fodder:
The Nevada Wolf Pack men's basketball team hasn't proved anything meaningful this season yet.
Yes, the Wolf Pack has a respectable 16-12 overall record and is 8-9 in the Mountain West. That's all well and good, fine and acceptable on an everybody-gets-a-juice-box-and-a-trophy-after-the-season sort of way. Four games over .500, to be sure, is certainly no reason to start firing anyone.
But we all expected more. We know the Wolf Pack expected more, or so they said. This team, after all, is better than just fine and worthy of simply a juice box and a plastic trophy, whether they know it or not. So, yes, something needs to change. If you are Nevada, you don't have to pay a head coach a million dollars a year and keep pestering your fragile fan base non-stop for NIL dollars to give pampered players if all you are doing this for is a juice box and a plastic trophy.
The cold, hard truth is that the Wolf Pack right now is just a team that takes candy away from babies. It bullies the weak, the young, the unfortunate. It's an aging lion that only eats three-legged, wounded antelopes and baby giraffes. And that's fine. That's what you are supposed to do in the college basketball jungle. The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack, right?
Well, when the Pack has met up with a bully in the Mountain West this year, it has quickly walked to the other side of the street, turned its head away and has not dared to make eye contact.
Don't believe it? Well, the Pack's 8-9 Mountain West record tells a very distinct story. The Wolf Pack is 0-8 against the top five teams in the conference (New Mexico, Utah State, Colorado State, San Diego State, Boise State) and 8-1 against the bottom five (UNLV, San Jose State, Wyoming, Fresno State, Air Force).
It's time the Wolf Pack starts standing up to the Mountain West bullies. It's time the Pack toughens up, stops merely talking about the law of the jungle and goes out in the wild and puts it into practice. After stealing another baby's candy on Friday at UNLV one more time, the Pack will wrap up the regular season in a pair of eat-or-be-eaten statement games against two bullies. New Mexico comes to Lawlor Events Center March 4 and the Pack goes to San Diego State March 8 for its final tune-up before the Mountain West tournament in Las Vegas, March 12-15.
Will the Wolf Pack tiptoe into the tournament trying not to make eye contact with the bullies? Or will it strut into Las Vegas with some Mountain West bully blood dripping from its teeth?
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Make no mistake, the Pack has some bully blood running through its veins, whether it knows it or not.
The Pack has one of the best one-two punches on the court in the Mountain West in Nick Davidson and Kobe Sanders and also on its bench in coaches Steve Alford and Craig Neal. Does that sound like a sixth- or seventh-place team in the Mountain West?
Of course not.
Alford was one of the toughest, cold-blooded killers in college basketball history as a player. He was the jump-shooting Michael Jordan, afraid of absolutely nobody (including Jordan) and absolutely nothing. His task over the final three games of the regular season and through the conference tournament is to turn his team into a bunch of fearless, cold-blooded killers.
The material is there.
The Pack, though, has been a team that, when it gets punched in the face, its knees tend to wobble at the free-throw line, it is too timid to attack the glass as ferociously as it should or throw caution to the wind and dive on the floor and demand those 50-50 loose balls in crunch time that seemingly always found opponents' hands this year (see Nelly Joseph in New Mexico in early January and Boise's Alvaro Cardenas at Lawlor last Saturday).
Bad luck? That's what losers call it. Winners (see cold-blooded killers) call it toughness and maturity.
That's all this Pack is lacking — a physical and mental toughness mindset, confidence and maturity. It's those things that will determine whether this season is going to end with a complimentary juice box and plastic trophy or pieces of a net around their neck and a real trophy. Luck determines nothing.
The Pack, whether it truly believes it or not, has it in them to turn this season into something special.
The community believes in this team. Northern Nevada doesn't just show up in crowds of 7,000-plus like it has this year for all 16 home games for a team that is weak, afraid and not worthy of its time and money. Northern Nevada believes in this team and that should not be ignored.
It's time this team believes in this team.
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The Fresno State men's basketball program right now is a dumpster fire burning out of control.
The once-proud Bulldogs are 5-23 overall, 1-16 in league play and riding a 10-game losing streak. They are 2-21 since Nov. 26. How this team forced the Wolf Pack to go to overtime on Jan. 11 in Fresno in order to win (77-66) is one of the great mysteries of this Nevada season.
It's one thing, though, to lose 23-of-28 games on the court. It happens. Hey, the kids are still playing hard, the coaches will tell you. Well, it turns out that maybe not all of the Fresno State kids were playing as hard as they should have been.
Three Fresno State players (Jalen Weaver, Jaon Collins and Mykell Robinson) are currently being investigated on suspicions of gambling on Fresno State and professional basketball games, according to various Fresno-area media outlets (namely the Fresno Bee and ABC-30 television).
Weaver is a former Wolf Pack player who emerged this season as a dependable starter at Fresno State, averaging 12.5 points and nearly four rebounds a game. He scored 23 points in two losses against the Pack this year. The 6-4 guard spent just one year (2021-22) on the Pack bench, getting into just 11 games and playing 56 minutes and scoring a mere 11 points. He immediately left for Salt Lake Community College and has been at Fresno State the last two seasons.
Collins is a Las Vegas high school (Bishop Gorman) product while Robinson played at North Texas in 2020-21 and at Fresno State this season and in between was at Dodge City Community College before getting kicked off the team in January.
Sports gambling, which is no longer confined to just Nevada anymore, is becoming a serious concern for the NCAA now more than ever before. Fresno State isn't even the only school under current investigation. New Orleans is also being looked at and a nationwide betting ring currently is under investigation that has also been suspected of placing bets on games this year involving Mississippi Valley State, Eastern Michigan and North Carolina A&T. It's probably only the tip of a dangerous iceberg that could sink the careers of numerous players and entire programs.
This, of course, is nothing new in college basketball. The sport has been tarnished by numerous betting scandals through the years. But now, as everyone knows, betting is easier and more tempting than ever before, especially for athletes whose careers will likely end after their eligibility runs out.
The NCAA, thanks to NIL deals, already clearly lost control of its athletes. Every athlete now is basically a free agent after each season out there selling their services and looking for the best deal. Gambling is just a natural progression of that money-grab mindset.
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The Wolf Pack men's basketball team heads to UNLV on Friday night with a three-game winning streak against the Rebels that includes a 71-65 victory Feb. 1 at Lawlor Events Center. The Pack has won eight of its last 12 games against UNLV in Las Vegas and has won 17 of the last 25 games overall (13 of the last 18) in the rivalry.
So, yes, the Pack owns the Rebels and has owned them for quite some time. Tark the What? The Rebels haven't even been to the NCAA Tournament since 2013. The Pack has gone five times since 2017. Pack coach Steve Alford is 7-4 against UNLV since he came to Nevada for the 2019-20 season. Eric Musselman, the Pack coach before Alford, was 7-2 against UNLV.
Yes, we are well aware that UNLV once won 38 of 42 games against the Pack from 1966 to 1994. But, you know, it helps when you are the only team on the floor paying your players. NIL (and bad UNLV coaching and athletic director hires) clearly put an end to the Rebel dominance in the rivalry.
There is a misconception, though, that the UNLV-Nevada rivalry isn't as strong in men's basketball as it has been in football. Football, of course, has a huge cannon as a grand prize and Nevada once had an athletic director who wasn't shy about brainwashing everyone in Northern Nevada that football was the only important sport on campus.
But the basketball rivalry, while one-sided for the first handful of decades, has always been exciting and memorable. It has always been important and meaningful, certainly as much as football, which, for the most part, has rarely provided a competitive game to go along with its over-the-top trophy.
Alford, who cut his basketball teeth in the basketball-crazy state of Indiana, certainly knows what a rivalry means to its fan base. Most of the athletes hardly know which school they play for anymore and clearly do not care given how frequently they switch uniforms. That's why these rivalry games, now more than ever, are truly for the fans. The players and coaches owe it to us to at least act and compete like they care in exchange for their paychecks.
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Eric Musselman, in case you lost track of him, has now finally seemed to make one coaching move too many.
Musselman, who left Arkansas after last season and jumped to USC, might be headed to his worst season as a college head coach this year. The Trojans are just 14-14 overall and 6-11 in the Big Ten (that will never sound right) after an 87-82 loss to Ohio State in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Musselman's Trojans have lost four in a row and six of their last seven. This is a guy, after all, who would throw a tantrum if his Wolf Pack would play a bad six-minute stretch. Musselman's worst season in nine seasons as a head coach before this year was 16-17 last year at Arkansas. He wasn't fired (according to reports) because, well, Musselman is not a guy who will ever wait around to be fired. But he's gone just 30-31 overall and 12-23 in conference play since going to the Sweet 16 in 2023 so you know he's not getting much sleep lately.
Musselman was 110-34 in four years at Nevada (without NIL money), going to the NCAA Tournament three times, with one Sweet 16. The Pack was fortunate he stayed four years. He then went 111-59 in five years at Arkansas, going to the NCAA Tournament three times with two Elite Eights and one Sweet 16.
Whether he can win big or not in Los Angeles remains to be seen. Constantly traveling to the Midwest for league games can't be easy, even with NIL dollars. One thing you can be sure of is the moment he realizes he can't win big in Los Angeles, he will leave faster than you can say Muss Bus.