We are in the thick of the college football season and will have plenty of Wolf Pack football talk in this week’s Monday Mailbag, but with Nevada dropping another heartbreaker last Saturday against San Jose State, we’ll begin this week’s series of questions with college basketball. More specifically, how realignment has impacted Mountain West men’s basketball’s basketball strength and thus Nevada’s odds of making the NCAA Tournament. Thanks, as always, for the questions.
KTVB sports director Jay Tust produced an interesting graphic on the average NET ranking of last year’s Mountain West and Pac-12 schools plus the “New Pac-12” and the “New MW.” Here is how those broke down with Jay’s full graphic below that.
New Pac-12: 72.4
Old Pac-12: 82
Old MW: 104.7
New MW: 140.2
That’s a one-year sample size, but if those numbers hold up, the MW is going to be a one-bid league really quickly, and that’s not a good thing for Nevada. The Wolf Pack would far prefer to finish second or third in the regular season in a good basketball conference than first in a mediocre one and have to win the conference tournament to get an NCAA Tournament berth. The only reason Nevada made the NCAA Tournament as an NCAA Tournament at-large team is because of the strength of the MW. During those two seasons, Nevada played 16 Quad 1 games in MW and five out of conference. It also played six Quad 2 games in MW and two out of conference. The Wolf Pack must be willing and able to upgrade its non-conference schedule once San Diego State, Boise State, Utah State, Colorado State and Fresno State leave the MW after the 2025-26 season.
A MW that features Nevada, UNLV, New Mexico, San Jose State, Wyoming, UTEP and Air Force is not routinely getting two bids to the NCAA Tournament, and I don’t really see which schools the MW can steal to make that a regular occurrence short of adding Saint Mary’s and Grand Canyon from the WCC. Even that probably wouldn’t do it. This will be like going back to the end of Nevada’s WAC era when it won 28 games, went 13-1 in conference and still didn’t get an at-large bid. The Wolf Pack will have to find a way to routinely play top-50 non-conference schedules, and part of that could rest on Nevada scheduling San Diego State, Boise State, Colorado State and Utah State out of conference, if the MW allows it to do so.
From a recruiting standpoint, the Wolf Pack has done a good job building its infrastructure to weather the blow of losing four top-level basketball programs. Nevada should still be able to get good players. But its margin for error in getting NCAA Tournament bids will shrink because it won’t have as many built-in Quad 1 and Quad 2 opportunities if the MW’s average NET team is 140. The MW really needs Nevada, UNLV and New Mexico to remain elite to regularly get two teams into the tournament. The six we saw this season (or four the previous two) are gone after the conference shift. It took the MW almost a decade to recover after losing BYU, Utah and TCU. It’s hard not to envision a repeat after it loses five schools to the Pac-12.
For the 2026-27 season, I’ll go:
Football
1. UNLV
2. Nevada
3. San Jose State
4. Air Force
5.New Mexico
6. Hawaii
7. Wyoming
8.UTEP
Men’s basketball
1. Nevada
2. New Mexico
3. UNLV
4. Hawaii (assuming the Rainbow Warriors join as a full member)
5. UTEP
6. Wyoming
7. San Jose State
8. Air Force
I would guess the final number for full membership is 10, which gives you some wiggle room above the NCAA minimum of eight. And I do think the Mountain West should pursue some non-football schools that excel in basketball and other sports. Tops on my list would be Grand Canyon. I also would look at St. Mary’s, although I’m not on high on the Gaels as others. St. Mary’s is one Randy Bennett retirement away from being a low-impact school. But I’d add either Montana and Montana State plus Grand Canyon. Or Sacramento State plusGrand Canyon. In either scenario, I’d want Hawaii as a full member.
5— SMU (the Mustangs are now in the Top 25, and Nevada had them beat)
5 — San Jose State (this would have given the Wolf Pack a 1-0 start in conference)
5— Georgia Southern (Nevada outgained the Eagles by more than 200 yards and still lost)
1— Minnesota (Nevada was clearly outclassed)
But, yes, the three close losses have all been brutal because of how close Nevada was to winning all of them, and it definitely outplayed SMU and Georgia Southern.
I’m not a fan of moral victories. I don’t think Jeff Choate is either. And given the Wolf Pack football players are literally putting their bodies on the line, I doubt they care for moral victories. In the modern era of college football, you can’t count on things year over year. Who’s to say Nevada quarterback Brendon Lewis doesn’t keep up this level of play and transfer for more NIL money; to be clear, I’m not reporting he’s interested in doing that. I’m just pointing out building a winner with the same roster returning if they have eligibility is no longer a guarantee. So, you have to cash in when you can. And Nevada could have cashed in three games it lost and be sitting at 5-1. Now, Wolf Pack fans should be proud of how much the football team has improved. But I don’t think fans of any team should be happy being competitive if you lose even if they’re happy their team’s improvement. Choate and Nevada’s players should be applauded for those gains, but some self-inflicted issues, mostly penalties, are holding the team back from more. Simply put, I doubt the staff and players are sleeping soundly because they’re losing close. It’s actually more painful that way.
Army (5-0) is 59th in ESPN Football Power Index while Navy (5-0) is69th, so while both teams have gotten off to good start, they’ve combined to beat just one FBS team with a winning record (Navy over Memphis). And Army and Navy are 28th and 29th in the AP Top 25 poll, so the humans love those schools a lot more than the computers. Maybe the computers hate America.
Nevada is 4-2 against the spread, so not quite great, but pretty good. The Wolf Pack was 10-14 against the spread in two seasons under Ken Wilson.
There are six such teams in the nation, with ESPN’s Football Power Index ranking them thusly:
34. Auburn
62. Baylor
73. South Alabama
80. Houston
94. Nevada
126. Tulsa
I’d take Auburn, Baylor and Houston to beat Nevada and the Wolf Pack to beat South Alabama and Tulsa. Best 2-4 Group of 5 team in the nation!
The last drive or second-to-last drive? On the second-to-last drive, I think Nevada should have gone for it on fourth down, and so, too, does Jeff Choate now that he’s had time to reflect. I wrote about that here. I’ll write about the last drive later this week. The premise of that article is Nevada has three times this season had the ball with about a minute to go needing a touchdown to win (or in the case of the Georiga Southern game, a field goal to tie). Each time, Nevada failed to score points. Nevada’s offense is not designed to cover 75-plus yards in less than a minute. It doesn’t have the personnel to thrive in that situation, although the Wolf Pack has gotten better in each of those last-minute drives, moving the ball further each time.
I’ll also have a full story on this later in the week, but Jeff Choate said this during his press conference, “Like I told them today, Nevada is done beating Nevada. When we’re at home, you can walk into the locker room and take your stuff off here. I can’t just send you into the locker room on the road and see what’s going to happen. Going into this week, we were averaging nine penalties game. We had eight penalties in this game, two of them unsportsmanlike conduct. My goal was six. I’m not asking to be penalty free. I’m trying to get incrementally better here. Had we not done those two (unsportsmanlike calls), we would have been there. I think one of them cost us points for sure. The other one probably cost us a touchdown.”
Choate said before the Minnesota game that players who got a personal foul would be benched. And he did that when Kristopher Ross got a personal foul. Against San Jose State, two Nevada players got personal fouls in the first half, including DB Keyshawn Cobb and WR Cortez Braham Jr. Choate said he didn’t have a good view of what happened, so they weren’t benched. Also, those are two of Nevada’s better players, with Choate saying the Wolf Pack doesn’t have a wide enough margin for error to be benching key players. So, it’s a tough situation to navigate. If you bench your better players who get a personal foul, you’re hurting the team to make a point. Maybe that’s worth it. I doubt it is.
One thing I can tell you is I am personally sick and tired of football players mimicking shooting guns after big plays. Glorifying murder is idiotic. Full stop. Pull the pin on a fake grenade and throw it if you must blow something up. But this country is friggin obsessed with guns. It’s moronic.
Yes, and Jeff Choate would tell you he’s done a bad job curtailing unsportsmanlike conduct penalties. It’s perhaps the biggest failing of his tenure to date. You have to love the passion Nevada is playing with, and that’s carried the team a long way. But it definitely cost Nevada the San Jose State game and the Georgia Southern game.
If Nevada had zerounsportsmanlike conduct penalties, it would be 4-2 rather than 2-4. It’s that simple.
Here were Nevada’s three 15-yard penalties against San Jose State.
1. DB Keyshawn Cobb called for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty to give SJSU a first down when it would have been third-and-8 from the Nevada 29 (SJSU scores a touchdown four plays later)
2. WR Cortez Braham Jr.called for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after a Nevada touchdown, leading to SJSU getting its ensuing possession at its 45-yard line (SJSU scores a touchdown five plays later)
3. LB Drue Watts called for a late hit out of bounds to giveSJSU a first down when it would have been third-and-20 from the SJSU 18 (SJSU scores a touchdown 10 plays later)
It’s not a stretch to say those penalties cost Nevada 18 points.
Penalties and final-drive execution. The penalties throughout the game are thinning an already lacking margin for error. And then Nevada has been outplayed in the last 10 minutes of games. Even in its 28-26 win over Troy, the Wolf Pack was outscored, 14-0, in the final 7 minutes with a 2-point conversion stop being the difference between a win and another potential late loss. It’s encouraging Nevada is playing close games; now it must learn how to win in those situations, and that includes cutting out mental and physical mistakes.
I’d be more pleased Nevada football is this competitive than worried this team doesn’t know how to win close games. Nevada football played at a 1 out of 10 level for most of the last two seasons. It’s probably a 5 out of 10 now. That’s a pretty big jump. When asked to sum up his team’s mentality right now, Jeff Choate said, “It’s frustration, but I really do think that guys understand we’re not totally incompetent here. It’s one thing if we’re just bad, right? We’ll play the string out and go recruiting and see if we can get better a year from now. I don’t think anybody in the organization feels that way at all. I think they recognize that we’ve got the ability to win games, and they’ve also got to take ownership, including me, over the things that are keeping us from winning games. I don’t think we’re in a bad place. I think there’s frustration, but I don’t think there’s, ‘Hey, we’re screwed up,’ or ‘These coaches don’t know what they’re doing.’ That locker room lawyer stuff that happens from time to time. And I’m definitely paying close attention to that for sure. But I think that we’re still in a really good place, and I think that will continue to compete really hard.”
I was surprised by the decision, and Jeff Choate said it was a mistake. “I lost a lot of sleep over that,” Choate said. “I really wanted to go for it. The issue that we had a little bit there was if it fourth-and-3, it would have been a no-brainer. If it was fourth-and-7, I think I actually would have gone. It wouldn’t have even been a discussion. I think if I’d have flipped over on the other side and not gotten involved with kind of the offensive staff a little bit (I would have gone for it). I could tell there was a lot of concern about this particular down and distance.” To be fair, Nevada’s defense was rested, had stopped San Jose State on two of the last three possessions and the Spartans had changed their quarterback due to ineffectiveness, so I can see the rationale for punting. But I would go for anything inside fourth-and-5 in opponent territory as a general rule of thumb. I was surprised Choate, who is an aggressive coach, took the conversation route. You can rest assured that won’t happen again.
I expect Nevada to play a lot more close games, and it’s anybody’s guess how those play out. Most games decided by seven points or less are a coin flip. Nevada is on the wrong side of that coin flip at 1-3 in single-score games. That could even out. But outside of the road contests at Boise State (Nov. 9) and UNLV (Nov. 30), the Wolf Pack is basically playing five more coin-flip games with contests at home against Oregon State, Fresno State, Colorado State and Air Force and a road game at Hawaii. The big thing is Nevada’s spirit can’t be broken by these close losses because then things would spiral. If the Wolf Pack continues to believe, some of the close games should go their way if they cut out the obvious mistakes.
A couple of things about that:
1) Nevada football’s budget is$13,222,437; Nevada men’s basketball’s budget is$5,241,656. Adding $1 million to the basketball team’s budget could have a lot more return on investment than adding $1 million to the Nevada football team’s budget.
2) Nevada basketball has routinely turned a profit of $1 million-plus over the last decade, so it’s easier to reinvest that profit into that program; Nevada football has routinely lost $2 million-plus over the last decade, so it’s hard to invest into a program that is already bleeding cash.
3)If a donor like Eric and Linda Lannes wants to give you $4 million for a basketball facility, you don’t say, “No, we need money for football.” Donors engage more with winning teams, and Nevada basketball has won more often than Nevada football over the last 20 years.
4) Nevada’s men’s basketball coaches have had— how do we put this?— “stronger” personalities than those in football in recent years, so they’ve more successfully argued for perks and improvements. Now, that is going to change with Jeff Choate, who is going to stump for his program and push for what it needs. But that’s not necessarily been the case pre-Choate.
Financially, football is the most important sport on any campus. Even a school like Kansas or Kentucky. It just is. And Nevada needs to get that point across to its fans. But the Wolf Pack can’t really invest in football until that program starts making money, or at least breaking even, and that only happens through season-ticket sales, which have been on a downward trend since 2013. Yes, getting an indoor football facility would excite fans, but would it increase revenue in the program via ticket sales immediately? I don’t think so. Even a $15 million renovation of Mackay Stadium meant to entice fans didn’t do that. Attendance and season-ticket sales dropped significantly after that renovation.
It’d be interesting to go from NIL checks to social security checks, although K.J. Hymes is only 25, so he has a few years before gettingsocial security. Hymes’ birthday, Aug. 10, is one day after mine; I will get thatsocial security, if it exists, well before him.
As for the top scorer, Nevada has four guys who I believe can score 15 points per game, those being Nick Davidson (12.2 ppg last season), Kobe Sanders (19.6 ppg last season at Cal Poly), Xavier DuSell (11.5 ppg last season at Fresno State) andTré Coleman (8.5 ppg last season). I’d be more concerned about Nevada’s defense than its offense, which should be OK despite losing the team’s top-two scorers from last season with the departures of Jarod Lucas and Kenan Blackshear. It will be interesting to see who emerges as the top scorer— I’d guess Sanders slightly ahead of Davidson— but Boise State has been plenty fine in recent seasons despite spreading out the scoring. The Broncos haven’t had somebody score 17 points per game in the last three years, all NCAA Tournament teams, with its top scorer below 15 ppg in two of the last three seasons.
I was in bed putting my son to sleep when I got word the Mountain West was sticking together, so I tweeted that Mountain West chart-up emoji at 7:57 p.m.with the first national reporter tweeting the news of the conference staying together at 8:28 p.m., so I would have been a solid 31 minutes earlier than Brett McMurphy’s report, but I was spending time with my son and didn’t really care to interrupt that beyond a quick tweet. McMurphy deserves credit for his “scoop,” but I honestly don’t care who breaks news. That’s not interesting to me. I’m more interested in providing analysis and commentary. I do break news sometimes, but it doesn’t drive me. And, honestly, those who do break news are oftentimes compromised by the sources they get information from. I’ve felt that before. I don’t want to feel that again, so I don’t really try to break stuff. But those who do break news get paid a lot in modern journalism (even though the information would still come out just a few minutes later).
The new College Football Playoff payout structure gives SEC schools $23 million annually, Big Ten schools $21 million, ACC schools $13 million and Big 12 members $12 million. Notre Dame will get $12.5 million plus $6.5 million for making the playoff. Group of 5 schools will get about $1.8 million each. Under the previous four-team model, Power 5 schools got $6 million each with Group of 5 schools getting $1.2 million to $1.5 million annually. There is reportedly noparticipation bonus except for independents likeNotre Dame, per Yahoo! Sports. This new deal was not favorable to the Group of 5, which at one point was expected to get $3.3 million per school annually before that was shaved by about $1.5 million each.
Well, you said you became a fan because your dad was a fan. So, it would make sense to target parents who would turn their kids into Wolf Pack fans like you. That said, Nevada has put some effort into converting young fans, specifically the student population with things such as the “Running of the Wolves” and “NevadaFIT,” which aims to get first-year students into Wolf Pack football. Nevada athletics has put additional resources into social media, which is a young-person thing. It could do more on TikTok. Young people are the most valuable group to capture due to their influence and spending capital. It’s also probably the hardest group to capture. Northern Nevada in general has grown so much with out-of-state transplants, it’s hard for the Wolf Pack to convert them into loving the local university if they didn’t attend it. The Wolf Pack also hasn’t really had a magnetic personality in a high-profile position since Eric Musselman left campus in 2019. I think Jeff Choate can be that, which is why his hiring could be huge for Nevada athletics overall.
Yes. The next time Penn State wins a big game under James Franklin will be the first time. Franklin is in his 11th season at Penn State and is 5-25 against AP top-15 opponents with one win over a top-10 team since 2017, that coming against No. 8 Utah in 2022. Penn State might be LinebackerU but it’s not BeatGoodTeamsU.
I understand mistakes that are made by officials on the field at the college level. There are only so many good refs to go around, and the NFL gets those. But I will never understand messing up replay reviews. You should bat 100 percent on those, and clearly there were huge mistakes over the weekend. The missed targeting in the Miami-Cal game was the worst of the bunch. That cost Cal the game and marks the second straight week the refs have gifted a game to Miami (Virginia Tech also got jobbed). Look at this video below. How is this not targeting?
I like hockey quite a bit. Big Kings fan here. I think Wayne Gretzky andLuc Robitaille will lead the Kings to the Stanley Cup Final. As for the Red Wings,Sergei Fedorov andChris Osgood are nice building blocks for Detroit this season. They’re still in their prime, right?
Call me a rotten banana if you must, but if the Savannah Bananas are the wave of the future in professional and college sports, count me out. I’m here for the talent and the game. Not for whatever the Savannah Bananas represent. Not that I’m against that. If it gets people into baseball, my favorite sport, I’m all for it. I’m just not personally watching it.
Padres in 4.
The Dodgers aren’t winning anything with this starting rotation. Even the team’s two good starting pitchers allowed nine runs in 8.1 innings. The Dodgers’ IL starting pitchers are far superior to the healthy rotation. And Mookie Betts turn into Dookie Betts in the playoffs.
And I just watch sports at my house. I’ve never really gone to a sports bar to watch anything except for first-round NCAA Tournament action a few times. This way, I can sulk after the Dodgers’ NLDS loss in solitude.
Truckee could compete in the 5A-II, and if the NIAA applied its competitiveness rubric, it should move Truckee up because even its non-football sports have been good. Nevada high school sports are in the final year of a two-year cycle of the latest realignment, so Truckee could be bumped up a level in 2025-26. I’ve not spoken with Wolverines officials to see if they would be open to moving up a level. It’s nice to dominate where you are.
Ohio’s E.W. Scripps Schools of Journalism has 23 former students and graduates who have won aPulitzer Prize. Nevada’s Reynolds School of Journalism has six Pulitzer Prize recipients among its alumni (I have not contributed to that total despite being a two-time Reynolds School graduate). Edge, Ohio! But only because I haven’t pulled my weight by winning 17Pulitzer Prizes to even up those two schools.
I’d put Ryan Radtke in that Thursday Night Football booth, with me as his color analyst. That’s one world-class broadcaster, and also me.
See y’all next week!
Sports columnist Chris Murray provides insight on Northern Nevada sports. He writes a weekly Monday Mailbag despite it giving him a headache and it taking several hours to write. But people seem to like it, so he does it anyway. Contact him at crmurray@sbgtv.com or follow him on Twitter @ByChrisMurray.
