Aching Rebels told to ‘knuckle’ up for UNR
UNLV must quickly forget loss to Hawaii
There was little good for UNLV that came out of Saturday night in Honolulu, but if anything was going to make the Rebels forget about the 35-28 loss to Hawaii, it would be the upcoming game against their fiercest rival.
The Rebels (3-8, 1-6 Mountain West) have to quickly get ready for Saturday’s 6:30 p.m. game against UNR (7-4, 5-2) at Sam Boyd Stadium.
“That’s a game we let get away,” UNLV coach Tony Sanchez said of the Hawaii loss. “This has been a tough season. Our guys are playing hard.
“But I did tell (the players), ‘This is Reno week. We’ve got to knuckle up. We’ve got to go back to work. We can feel as crappy as we want about it on the plane ride home, and (Sunday) we can even feel crappy about it.’ But on Monday when the players come in, they’ve got to be completely locked down and get ready to play a good Reno team.”
Hawaii freshman quarterback Chevan Cordeiro came off the bench to throw three fourth-quarter touchdown passes, including a 68-yarder to John Ursua with 1:25 left for the victory.
This after UNLV led by as much as 21-3 late in the second period.
UNLV can look back at these crucial situations and decisions that impacted the outcome:
* The decisions on two fourthand-1 situations to hand off to running back Lexington Thomas rather than keep the ball in the hands of quarterback Armani Rogers . Thomas was stopped on both plays.
“That’s the power play we run,” Sanchez said. “We’ve been successful with it multiple times this year. Earlier in the game, we ran it successfully. You know what, they flat-out out-toughed us on it. At the end of the day, you’ve got to do a better job with pad level and creating some movement.”
* With the game tied late, the Rebels called for passes on four of five plays. The results were an incompletion, a 15-yard completion, another incompletion, a 2-yard loss and a 3-yard sack. But as Sanchez pointed out, UNLV rushed for 63 yards on 23 carries in the second half compared to 158 yards on 30 first-half carries.
“They did a really good job of taking that away,” Sanchez said of the Rainbow Warriors. “Quite frankly, we had a guy open down the sideline on that stutter route, and (Rogers) just overthrew him to the right. Armani threw the ball (well), but that one he missed on.”
Sanchez said he would have to sit down with the coaching staff and evaluate how to use Rogers and Max Gilliam against UNR in the season finale. Gilliam started the past seven games while Rogers missed six of them with a toe injury.
“We need to sit down and look at it, but the one thing I’ll say is I was really pleased with the way (Rogers) played,” Sanchez said. “We didn’t really have a lot of quarterback run involved in this game because he’s not really in game shape right now. We wanted to see how his foot would hold up in the situations, and it looked good to me. He looked like he had a burst, made some nice runs.
“He will obviously continue to play, and I perceive he will get the start going into next week.”
Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @markanderson65 on Twitter.