Columnist Dean Juipe: From NCAA perspective, UNLV is 0-6

Some of the guys are taking classes in criminal justice.

Some are into sociology.

Others keep it simple and focus on their core requirements.

But there's one class every member of the UNLV basketball team is taking and passing with flying colors.

It's right there in the syllabus: Painting 101. And the Rebels have mastered it, painting themselves into a corner even before the onset of their league season.

As predicaments go, this is an unusual one for a team that made it to the NCAA Tournament last year and was expected to do it again this year. Yet here's the reality of the situation: UNLV must repeat as the Western Athletic Conference tournament champion, or at least make the title game, or go virtually undefeated during the WAC's regular season and hope a slip-up in the WAC tourney is overlooked by the NCAA.

It's a precarious position for a team that entered the season with lofty goals and with fans anticipating a return to the Associated Press Top 25. But the failure to win any of their six significant nonconference games has trapped the Rebels in a proverbial corner.

They're 7-6 headed into the opening of WAC play and a Saturday game with Air Force at the Thomas & Mack Center, yet in the NCAA's eyes UNLV is 7-0 against cream puffs and 0-6 in the real world.

As a result, this is a team that either needs to go 14-0 in the WAC's regular season or duplicate its almost miraculous 1998 run through the WAC tourney.

Either way, it's a daunting task and the odds don't favor it happening.

Strange, isn't it? Without having played a WAC game, the Rebels are being asked to win them all.

Of course there are other teams around the country in a similar boat, but what differentiates UNLV is the level of excitement that greeted the opening of the season in mid-November. Hot off 1998's 20-13 record and NCAA Tournament appearance, and with a roster that looks even stronger than a year ago, the Rebels were highly touted both nationally and here at home.

Las Vegans were thinking big, as in a mercurial rise through the top 25, and, perhaps, a return to the type of prominence the program once enjoyed.

But after losses to every respectable team they've played, the Rebels are losing sight of that NCAA Tournament plum. As it is, they're listed as outcasts today.

The real downfall in Bill Bayno's scheduling was the failure to arrange games with at least a handful of established Division I teams that might even be easy to beat. If UNLV could have traded in a few of its useless wins -- like the ones over Sacred Heart, Troy State and Columbia -- for victories over teams like Texas, Georgetown and Oregon State, the NCAA would be taking a kinder view.

But Bayno didn't do it that way and now he and his team are paying the price. If there is a silver lining, it's that the Rebels know right where they stand with the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee.

It's simple, right? Just win the next 14 games or hope you peak like you did a year ago in the conference tournament.

It's a tough, some would say hopeless, assignment. And it's no consolation to the players that Bayno is as guilty as they are, caught on his knees with a dripping brush in his hand.

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