UNLV bets on Sanchez to revitalize program
Coach with Vegas ties faces long odds with tough rebuilding job
When he coached at the high school across town, Tony Sanchez had the best of everything: a fully customized weight room that would put many college facilities to shame, a plush locker room with all the modern bells and whistles, a hydrotherapy pool and a roster full of players who would go on to top-level programs across the country.
On his first day as a college coach at UNLV, he arrived to offices that needed carpet and paint just for starters, never mind a decked-out football operations building as nice as the one he had at Bishop Gorman, a private school backed by big-money donors and celebrity families.
“He came in, he said, ‘This place is a mess,’ ” UNLV athletics director Tina Kunzer-Murphy said. “I said, ‘Get rid of everything, clean everything out.’ That was on a Friday. He calls me on Monday, and he said, ‘OK, everything ’s gone, so now what do I do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t have any money, so go figure out a way.’ ”
But as the nation’s most interesting new coach embarks on his first season at any level of college football since he was a New Mexico State graduate assistant in 1996, Sanchez, 41, wants to make one thing very clear.
Though he might have been hired largely because he could make UNLV football relevant with the right people in Las Vegas, because he had name recog- nition with some of the best high school players in the country and because, frankly, the school had already tried everything else, Sanchez’s connections are only a fraction of what it will take for this program to become something more than a perennial pushover in the Mountain West Conference.
“I’ve challenged a lot of people,” Sanchez said this week from his office, where views of the shimmering Las Vegas Strip casinos stand in sharp contrast to UNLV’s drab, outdated facilities. “(Fans) are kind of relying on, ‘Are you going to bring this group or that group?’ No, this community has to get off their butt if they want to get going. The people that have been UNLV fans for a long time, they need to step up.”
NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP
For all of Las Vegas’ riches, which have been manifest in beautiful athletics facilities popping up all over town and a new arena that could soon be home to an NHL team, UNLV runs a shoestring operation even relative to some of its peers in the Mountain West.
Hammered by state budget cuts and hamstrung by a bureaucratic process that makes it difficult for athletics to have autonomy over its future, UNLV finds it pretty much impossible to snap its fingers and make the kinds of big investments in football that are long overdue.
Make no mistake, even though the history of high school coaches jumping straight into college jobs is not pretty, Sanchez was gotten because he was gettable — a bargain at $500,000 a year. After all, what does UNLV have to lose?
“There are a lot of great coaches out there, but we had to do something different,” Kunzer-Murphy said. “This is not for the weak of heart. You have to have somebody who knows what they want and knows how to fix it, and Tony, from the time we started talking, I knew he was a little bit special. I think he’s kind of a raw, real kind of fellow and tells you exactly what he thinks. He’s very thoughtful, very humble, but he knows what he wants and knows how difficult the situation is.”
That’s why Sanchez, even before he has coached a game at UNLV, feels empowered to make people uncomfortable. Why he’s up front about the school’s forever lack of commitment to football. Why he’s putting the onus on the school to get serious at a time when UNLV’s competitors are pouring money into their programs, chasing invitations to power conferences that might never materialize.
Sanchez even questioned how much of the $300,000 in bonus money UNLV will earn this sea- son from the Mountain West for appearing on ESPN will be reinvested into football or spread out to cover departmentwide losses.
Those are the kinds of things that might make his bosses and fan base wince, but he thinks there has never been a better time for searing honesty and urgency from the coach at UNLV.
“Some people are going to look at me and say, ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ ” Sanchez said. “Damn right I am, because it’s the truth. UNLV needs to start pointing the finger at themselves a little bit and go, ‘OK, what investments have we made to create change over the past 20 years.’ And the answer is probably not much.
“You want to talk about creating a medical school, creating interest in the university, getting people to hear the name on a national basis, increase enrollment, well, guess what? Do what a lot of other schools have done and invest in football.” ‘HE SELLS LAS VEGAS’ The reality, though, is that for all of Sanchez’s connections to big money in Las Vegas — the Fertitta Athletic Training Center at Bishop Gorman bears the family name of Station Casino and Ultimate Fighting Championship’s co-founding brothers — much of what UNLV needs is a ways off.
Sanchez has raised money for things here and there and made cosmetic improvements, but a football building adjacent to the school’s practice fields will take the type of institutional commitment UNLV hasn’t made before.
“You can’t be the one-man band,” Sanchez said.
In the meantime, he’s selling what UNLV has. In some ways, a reputation for having poor facilities is helpful when prospects see things aren’t as bad as they had envisioned.
And unlike some of his predecessors, who tried to recruit against Las Vegas and everything that happens a mile away on the Strip, Sanchez is talking about the opportunities available after football and his experience raising a family here. He even takes recruits on the LINQ hotel’s High Roller ferris wheel 550 feet above the Strip. As Kunzer-Murphy said, “Instead of pretending we’re something else, he sells Las Vegas, he sells who we are.” So far, it’s working. “We’re going nose-to-nose and competing against schools that we probably have no business competing against (in recruiting), and we’re (having success),” Sanchez said. “Part of it is because we’re new and fresh, and part of it is I’ve been around a bunch of really successful kids, I’ve had a lot of success. I’m a known quantity with teenagers, and when people walk in this office and sit down, they know how excited this place is and they spend a day with our coaches and see what’s going on here, (and) I think we can compete with anyone.” EXCITEMENT IS BUILDING Of course, reality is going to come when UNLV opens Sept. 5 at Northern Illinois, then turns around to play UCLA and Michi- gan in successive weeks.
But Sanchez didn’t build a high school dynasty at Gorman, going 85-5 the last six years at a program that didn’t have a long history of success, because he lacks confidence.
“The biggest change we’ve seen so far is the level of excitement, the energy,” quarterback Blake Decker said. “You walk into the hallways here, guys are pumped up. Since Day 1 they walked in, it’s been enthusiasm, excitement; it’s been flare, a revitalization we haven’t had in a long time. I think we were ready to buy into something new, and we needed to buy into something new.”
Will it work? Who knows? Gus Malzahn, Art Briles and Todd Graham have made it trendy to hire former high school coaches, but all of them had a transition period as college assistants. The path Sanchez is trying to walk is littered with failure from Gerry Faust to Todd Dodge.
There’s no doubt he has the charisma — he sold copy machines, after all, before taking a pay cut to get into coaching — and the connections to get things done. But you still have to have the goods on Saturday.
Sanchez knows that stigma might stick around, and he acknowledged there’s a learning curve for running a college program. That’s why he surrounded himself with experienced assistants, avoiding a mistake other straight-from-high-school coaches have made.
“If you think you’re just going to be the X and O guy here and just (coach) football, you’re crazy,” Sanchez said. “It hasn’t worked. You have to be a little more than that. We still have some work to do. I like where we’re at. I like the way we’re recruiting. We have a great staff. A lot of energy. Kids are doing a great job responding to it. It’s good, but let’s not make any (illusions), this is a big mountain to climb here. I was outside the box when I got here. Winning is going to be different. I think sometimes in this game you get too concerned about keeping your job. I ain’t afraid to get fired.”
For both sides, there’s risk. Sanchez could have taken the same path as Briles or Malzahn, joined a college staff and waited patiently for his opportunity. UNLV could have made a socalled safer hire. But as gambles in this town go, this one could pay off big for both sides.