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March 28, 2024

UNLV football’s defense won’t let Hughes rest

2017 MW Football Media Day

L.E. Baskow

UNLV’s Michael Hughes Jr. answers another interview question during the Mountain West Football Media Day at the Cosmopolitan on Tuesday, July 25 2017.

2017 UNLV football

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5 wins — 25.6%
Reach a bowl game and lose — 17.3%
3-4 wins — 16.3%
Less than 3 wins — 7.9%

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The Rebel Room

Setting the expectations for UNLV football

Ray Brewer, Mike Grimala and Case Keefer start thinking about football season with the Mountain West Conference coming to town for media days this week. Where does UNLV fit within the conference? Will Armani Rogers prove the Rebels' savior? Is it bowl game or bust in coach Tony Sanchez's third season?

It was almost enough to make Mike Hughes physically ill.

UNLV went 4-8 last year and lost four games in which they scored more than 21 points. In the four games they did manage to win, the Rebels’ offense had to average 54.5 points, and even then a couple of the contests were in doubt until the final horn.

There wasn’t much wiggle room when it came time to play the blame game — the defense was responsible for most of the losing, and that was unacceptable for Hughes.

The defensive tackle took every defeat to heart and struggled to reconcile his role in his unit’s poor play.

“Honestly, the night of [the game], it’s hard,” Hughes said. “It’s not easy. It gets you. You’re upset, you’re mad, you’re trying to figure out, ‘What can we do?’ And honestly all you can do is go in the next day, watch the film and see what you did wrong, and work on it in practice and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s really all you can do, put your head down and keep going, because if you sit up there and you think about it too much, you’re not focusing on the next game.”

Hughes doesn’t want that burden to fall on his shoulders again this season. The Rebels will go into 2017 with much of the offense intact, with an upgrade at quarterback thanks to freshman phenom Armani Rogers. So once again, it looks like UNLV’s bowl aspirations will rest on the defense.

2017 MW Football Media Day

UNLV's Devonte Boyd laughs at an interview question during the Mountain West Football Media Day at the Cosmopolitan on Tuesday, July 25 2017. Launch slideshow »

At Tuesday’s Mountain West media day, Hughes was quick to accept responsibility for the entire defense, and the senior pledged a better performance this season despite prognostications to the contrary.

“I feel like my role is the captain of the defense,” Hughes said. “Coming back [this season] it’s just two starters, it’s me and Tim Hough. Everyone thinks we’re going to sink. We lose nine starters, and we already didn’t have a good season defensively [in 2016]. So we understand people are going to come in thinking, ‘We’re going to put 40 on these dudes.’ We can’t let that happen. We can’t put the offense out there in a situation where they have to score 40 a game for us to win. You’ll see that fire in our eyes and in our play. We know the odds are against us.”

A defensive turnaround won’t be easy. Hughes pointed to three key areas where the Rebels will need to make major improvements from last year if they want to be competitive: Pass rush, tackling and deep coverage.

Hughes, as a 6-foot-2, 315-pound defensive tackle, can have the most impact on the pass rush. He registered two quarterback takedowns last year as UNLV finished 97th in the nation in sack percentage, and that wasn’t good enough — for Hughes, or for the Rebels. With opposing QBs feeling extra comfortable in the pocket, UNLV was torched for 7.9 yards per pass attempt, which ranked 96th nationally.

“Two sacks isn’t where I want to be,” Hughes said. “I feel like I can improve that number. I’ve been working on it year by year and I’ve gotten a lot better. Sacks, yeah, that’s what you want to see, but I got a lot of quarterback hits last year, I got a lot of pressure, so I feel like I’m improving. It can be a lot better.”

If Hughes and the almost-entirely new defense can make even modest gains this season, the UNLV offense should be able to take care of the rest. Rogers is assuming the helm of a unit that scored 28.7 points per game last season, and that was with most of the receivers group on injured reserve by the end of the year. Senior wideout Devonte Boyd should be back at full health — he hasn’t participated in live contact drills yet but has been working out in 7-on-7 situations and expects to be cleared for training camp — and he should be able to take some pressure off Rogers while adding big-play potential to the Rebels’ powerful run offense.

“When it’s at its best, I think this will be an offense where we can run you over if we want to and we can throw the ball deep if we want to,” Boyd said. “It can be an offense that’s versatile and can do a lot of things.”

As for Rogers, head coach Tony Sanchez plans to let the 6-foot-5, 225-pound specimen develop at his own pace, but acknowledged that he can’t be babied. Though he’s a freshman, Rogers will have to make plays, move the offense consistently and put the Rebels in position to win on that side of the ball.

“We’re going to have to score some points,” Sanchez said, seeming to concede that the defense will be a work in progress. “I don’t think this is the kind of year where we’re going to win a lot of 17-14 games.”

That’s the kind of thought that will keep Hughes up at night until the defense proves otherwise.

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.

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