Columnist Dean Juipe: Rebels take game Eagles didn't want

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

This is no time to burst their bubble.

In dire need of a victory and the feelings of ecstasy that can accompany one, UNLV got what it wanted in its football season opener Thursday night in the dull old Texas town of Denton.

Entitled to a little revelry if for no other reason than they hadn't won a game in 16 previous tries, the Rebels looked neither good nor bad in taking a 26-3 victory over a North Texas team that had to be embarrassed by its performance.

In comparison to the Eagles, the Rebels deserved to win and, unlike a couple of occasions during that 16-game drought, this time they actually did.

This time it was the opposition making more mistakes than UNLV, and for that the Rebels and coach John Robinson have to be happy. There were times they made those ol' Texas boys look as if they were trudging through sorghum.

Badly needed as it was, the win allows the Rebels to at least harbor grander conquests to come and unshackles the yoke of a losing streak that was closing in on mythic proportions. As a byproduct of the win, the Rebels also snapped a 26-game losing streak on the road that had long since passed into the inexplicable stage.

That notch in the win column also allows UNLV to think more positively in terms of achieving Robinson's goal of six victories and a winning season, as a season-opening loss to a lame North Texas squad would have put a quick end to that ambitious scheme.

But the Rebels, as Robinson will be first to say, will have to play much, much better than this to threaten the plus side of the .500 mark.

Special teams are usually a good measure of how competent a team is overall, and UNLV's special teams need to improve substantially. If North Texas' special teams hadn't looked pathetic (aside from returning kicks), UNLV's would have appeared downright abysmal.

Conversely, the Rebels defended the pass well and played with energy throughout the entire four quarters in a game that undoubtedly had more television viewers in Las Vegas than actual fans in the stands in Denton.

That apathy carried over to the field for North Texas, which botched several significant plays and didn't seem to get much in the way of snap or assistance from head coach Darrell Dickey. Here he was with no score in the game sending out a terrible kicker to try one from beyond 50 yards when he could have gone for it on fourth and three; that failed, as did a fake punt a little later on fourth down that led to the Rebels' first TD.

Dickey's poor clock management also led to the Eagles having to accept a field goal to close the first half even though they had a timeout to spare, while in the second half they used all three of their timeouts in the first 15 minutes of play.

In the days leading up to the game Dickey also had his players studying tapes not of the Rebels, but of Robinson's old USC teams. In other words, he didn't do his team any favors.

But those are North Texas' problems.

At UNLV, it's a joyous time and the Rebels can bask in this glow at least for a few days. With his team graciously taking a gift that was there for the taking, the John Robinson era is off to as good a start as anyone could have reasonably expected.

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