Nevada defensive end Sam Hammond, left, and defensive end Kameron Toomer sack UNLV quarterback Max Gilliam during the Fremont Cannon game on Oct. 31, 2020, in Las Vegas.
John Locher | AP
Sports Fodder:
Jeff Choate knows what fans want.
Choate has all the qualities that fans of struggling college football programs crave. He's full of enthusiasm and no-nonsense toughness. He makes bold promises, loves his players and the community. He's old school, respects tradition and guarantees an honest effort by his team, assistant coaches and himself.
And, oh yeah, one other thing. He knows which team his fans want to beat the most.
Of all the things Choate did in his first tour of duty as a head coach, one stood out. He beat his rival. Choate's Montana State Bobcats went 4-0 in four seasons (2016-19) against the hated Montana Grizzlies. Choate's Bobcats, who went a respectable but not great 28-22 in his four seasons, beat the Griz every year he was there, 24-17 (2016), 31-23 (2017), 29-25 (2018) and 48-14 (2019). The 2018 victory required a historic comeback after being down 22-0. Those four consecutive victories came after the Bobcats lost three games in a row (2013-15) to the Griz just before Choate came to town.
That's how you win a fan base over.
It wasn't by accident. Choate lives, breathes, eats and devours football. He knows football fans love to beat their rival. Athletic directors and school presidents might not care about rivalries anymore as they chase TV dollars. But old school coaches like Choate and fans care.
When Choate left Montana State in January 2021 (after COVID-19 cancelled the Bobcats’ 2020 season) to become the linebackers coach at Texas, he didn't hesitate to remind Montana State fans what he did for them.
"No matter where I go, what I do, I will always be able to say I never lost to Montana," Choate said.
Wolf Pack fans now hope Choate can say the same thing about UNLV when he eventually leaves Northern Nevada.
•••
Chris Ault based his entire Wolf Pack head coaching career on beating UNLV. Ault, who had just as many detractors as backers during his three-decade career as Pack head coach, made sure he dominated UNLV.
He was 15-7 against UNLV, winning 13 of his last 15 Fremont Cannon games. Ault was a very average coach in Division I-AA playoff games and I-AA bowl games (10-15 combined record) but he gave the Pack boosters what they wanted.
A blue Fremont Cannon.
The more Ault beat UNLV, the more he reminded Pack fans how important it was to beat them. He hated the color red (or so he said), he lived to beat UNLV (or so he said) and he convinced his players to do the same. He’d even berate media members who had the nerve to show up at practice or on game days for wearing the color red, you know, as if they were on his payroll. And that was before media members wore Wolf Pack sweatshirts and hats on the air and openly rooted for Nevada victories.
Yes, of course, deep down Ault didn't actually hate UNLV. In fact, he was likely jealous of them. They, after all, had more money, support and better facilities. The Rebels gave him his first college coaching job. The first time Ault stepped down from coaching after the 1992 season, he spent the bulk of his time interviewing to become the Rebels’ head coach.
Ault knew Pack boosters were also deep-down jealous of UNLV and the way southern Nevada took over the state. The boosters, Ault knew, wanted to beat the Rebels in the worst way so Ault told them what they wanted to hear. And he backed it up on the field.
Choate, it seems, will try to do the same.
Beating UNLV and making it a priority is a concept Chris Tormey, Brian Polian, Jay Norvell and Ken Wilson never totally embraced. Each time they lost to UNLV (10 times in 15 games) they never felt as much remorse, shame or guilt as Pack fans wanted them to feel. Oh, sure, they said all the right things the week leading up to the Rebel game. But they never said the right things after losing to the Rebels and treated it as just another game on the schedule. That's why Pack fans weren't all that upset when Tormey, Polian, Norvell and Wilson eventually left town.
You don't have to remind Pack boosters that the Pack has gone a painful 5-10 against UNLV without Ault on the sideline this century. The Fremont Cannon has had to endure the indignity of so many coats of red paint since 2000 it is starting to look like a boiled lobster or a Russian hockey player’s jersey.
Choate, if he doesn't do anything else as Pack head coach, has to beat UNLV consistently. He's smart enough to know that those boosters, who only could get a coach hired and fired in Ault's day, now have to buy players. You have to keep boosters happy now more than ever. And there's only been one surefire way to do that in Northern Nevada.
Beat UNLV.
•••
Choate, who has based his entire career on saying the right things, will tell you what you want to hear. He'll hate UNLV, despise the color red and remind everyone that beating UNLV is the same as loving your family, the country and the flag.
But the team he will really want to beat, more than any other on the schedule, is Boise State.
Boise State is personal for Choate. You can bet that the one game he already has circled on the calendar (do people still have actual calendars hanging on their wall these days?) is Nov. 9 at Boise State. It's the game that will get his blood pumping, his heart racing and add a little extra bounce to his step more than any other this year.
Boise State is where Choate grew up and matured as a college football coach. The six years (2006-11) Choate spent as one of Chris Petersen's assistants were filled with winning and good times. The Broncos were a phenomenal 73-6, including 5-1 against Nevada and two memorable Fiesta Bowl wins. Choate was basically a lowly special teams coach during those years (he also helped out with the running backs and linebackers), but the shine, glitz and glamour and endless possibilities that was Boise State football during that era clearly rubbed off on Choate. Those Boise years are at the root of why he's the Pack head coach now.
If Choate was totally honest, he'd tell you that, if he had his way, he'd rather be Boise State's head coach this Nov. 9 than the Pack head coach. Boise blue and orange runs through his veins. Choate, after all, clearly wanted to be Boise State's head coach after the 2020 season. He was a finalist for the job but the Broncos chose former Boise State linebacker Andy Avalos instead of their former special teams coach who used to play linebacker for Montana Western.
Boise State also didn't seriously consider Choate (or anyone else, for that matter) for their head coaching opening this past offseason when interim head coach Spencer Danielson nailed down the job by winning the Mountain West championship last December.
Choate, you can be sure, will want to show Boise State this November they made the wrong choice twice.
Come to think of it, he might have already done that no matter what happens on Nov 9. It was Avalos, after all, who Boise State fired during last season. Choate is now a head coach in the Mountain West while Avalos is back to being a coordinator (at TCU, where he hired Ken Wilson, another Mountain West head coach who failed last year, as his linebacker coach).
•••
At least nine of this year's 13 Wolf Pack football games will be on national television.
That, of course, would mean more and be more impressive if this was 1994 and not 2024. If you can't get your games on so-called national television now, well, you and your conference are not really trying.
Television money, of course, is why college football even exists now. It's the only reason, after all, why almost the entire Pac-12 jumped to conferences in the Midwest, Southwest and East coast.
But having all of your games on television is not without its price for mid-major programs like Nevada. Nevada obviously needs the money and couldn't survive without it. But putting all of your games on TV (nationally and locally) clearly affects the number of fans in the stands, especially when your mid-major program like Nevada struggles to win games. And when fans stop going to games it slowly but surely erodes the connection between the community and the program. Why go to Mackay Stadium, for example, to watch your two-win heroes get destroyed when you can stay home and watch it on your couch? And why choose to watch the Pack get destroyed on TV when you flip to another channel just as easily to watch a more entertaining game?
All you had to do was take a look at the tiny crowds at Mackay Stadium the past two seasons to know that is the price you pay for selling your soul to television. But don't be like athletic directors, university presidents, coaches and players and blame the fans for staying away. It's not the fans who chased the TV money and made it easy to stay away from the stadium.
•••
Will Choate have enough sense to do what Norvell and Wilson failed to do this fall? Will he allow his quarterback with the big-time Power 5 resume to actually step right in during his first season at Nevada as the unquestioned starter?
Norvell didn't do it with David Cornwell (Alabama) in 2017 and Wilson didn't do it with Shane Illingworth (Oklahoma State) in 2022. Will Choate do it with Chubba Purdy (Florida State, Nebraska) this fall?
Cornwell quit the team after about a month into his first season and Illingworth gutted it out for two seasons before jumping into the transfer portal in April. Purdy, whose brother Brock is the San Francisco 49ers’ starting quarterback, might leave at halftime of the season opener Aug. 24 if he's on the bench.
But Purdy might have an even tougher road to the starting lineup than either Cornwell or Illingworth. He certainly has more competition. The Pack already has a Power 5 quarterback on the roster in Brendon Lewis (Colorado) who proved to be the type of gritty, highly competitive dual threat that Choate seems to love at the position. Or at least he did at Montana State with Chris Murray, Troy Anderson and Tucker Rovig from 2016-19. The last thing Choate would seem to want is a prima donna Power Five quarterback who is afraid to get his uniform dirty or thinks he's owed an opportunity because of his resume.
Lewis, who passed for 1,313 yards and two touchdowns and rushed for 495 yards and four scores last year in a dozen games, has proven he can lead a team, even one without many weapons or a reliable, proven play-caller. He certainly proved he's not afraid of taking a beating or getting his uniform dirty. A.J. Bianco, who backed up Lewis last year, is also still around and also proved he is worthy of playing time.
But Purdy, like Illingworth and Cornwell, obviously didn't leave a Power 5 school to come to Nevada and stand on the sideline like a Wolf Pack alumni. It would be a little shocking to see him on the bench when the Pack opens the season on Aug. 24 against SMU.
But Choate, you can be sure, will make him earn it. A coach like Choate, who has had to earn everything he's gotten in the sport of football, will make sure his starting quarterback is not a prima donna who will be afraid to get his uniform dirty.
•••
Is Jay Norvell at a crossroads this year as far as his head coaching career is concerned? Norvell, who abandoned the Pack after the 2021 season, has gone just 8-16 in two seasons at Colorado State. He's now 61 years old and likely won't get another head coaching job if that 8-16 trend continues this year.
Norvell has been a head coach now for seven seasons and has a mediocre 41-42 career record. Maybe all of the programs who passed him over for head coaching jobs were right. He's gone just 29-27 in Mountain West games and has never finished higher than second in league play. Norvell's done nothing to disprove the notion that the pass-happy Air Raid offense is long on statistics but short on meaningful victories.
So, yes, it's time Norvell starts to earn his five-year, $9 million contract for Colorado State.
The good news for Norvell is that he shouldn't have any problem turning in his first winning season since he went 8-4 at Nevada in 2021. His Rams play a ton of teams that struggled in 2023, like Northern Colorado, UTEP, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah State. They play three other teams that will have first-year head coaches (Oregon State, Wyoming, San Jose State). And they don't have to play either of the two teams in last year's Mountain West title game (Boise State, UNLV) or San Diego State.
Norvell and the Colorado State fan base should not accept anything less than 8-4 this year.
•••
When is the Mountain West going to start to take the sport of baseball seriously?
Well, likely never.
The conference just completed yet another year with just seven baseball teams. Just one of those seven teams finished with a record of better than two games over .500. The Fresno State Bulldogs (33-29) represented the Mountain West in the NCAA regionals and lost both games. The Wolf Pack, in case you were wondering, finished 25-26 and didn't even qualify for the conference tournament.
When just seven of your 12 league schools play a sport, you simply do not care about that sport. Do you think the Mountain West would even consider having just seven football or basketball teams? Of course not. That's because football and men's basketball can earn easy television money.
Baseball could and should be one of the Mountain West's signature sports. There's plenty of baseball talent in and around the conference to build winning programs. But the Mountain West, a conference formed in the middle of the night after the 1998-99 season with former Western Athletic Conference schools, has never truly cared about baseball. It was just concerned with collecting leftover football and men's basketball programs that other conferences didn't want.
The Mountain West has never had more than eight baseball teams. And that eight-team league lasted just one season (2020) when Boise State finally decided to spend some of its football money (with the goal of joining a more prestigious conference) and create a baseball team. The Broncos dumped the program the very next season. The rest of the 25 Mountain West seasons were spent with just six or seven baseball schools.
The Pack, to be sure, didn't jump to the Mountain West in 2012-13 with baseball in mind. The Pack baseball program was doing very well in the Western Athletic Conference since 2001 and, before that, in the Big West (1993-2000). The Mountain West never does anything with the health of baseball in mind.
There is, however, some hope on the horizon for Mountain West baseball. Pac-12 leftovers Oregon State and Washington State, which will both play a full Mountain West football schedule this fall without being eligible for a conference title, could make Mountain West baseball legit on a national scale if they come to their senses and join the conference soon.