UNLV's Tony Sanchez reaches a higher level and degree of difficulty

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY Sports

LAS VEGAS — When he coached at the high school across town, Tony Sanchez had the best of everything: A fully customized weight room that would put many college facilities to shame, a plush locker room with all the modern bells and whistles, a hydrotherapy pool and a roster full of players that would go on to top-level programs across the country.

On his first day as a college coach at UNLV, he arrived to offices that needed carpet and paint just for starters, never mind a decked-out football operations building as nice as the one he had at Bishop Gorman, a private school backed by big-money donors and celebrity families.

"He came in he said, 'This place is a mess,' " UNLV athletics director Tina Kunzer-Murphy said. "I said, 'Get rid of everything, clean everything out.' That was on a Friday. He calls me on Monday and he said, 'OK, everything's gone so now what do I do?' I said, 'I don't know. we don't have any money so go figure out a way.' "

But as the nation's most interesting new coach embarks on his first season at any level of college football since he was a New Mexico State graduate assistant in 1996, the 41-year old Sanchez wants to make one thing very clear.

Though he may have been hired largely because he could make UNLV football relevant with the right people in Las Vegas, because he had name recognition with some of the best high school players in the country and because, frankly, the school had already tried everything else, Sanchez' connections are only a fraction of what it will take for this program to become something more than a perennial pushover in the Mountain West Conference.

"I've challenged a lot of people," Sanchez said this week from his office, where views of the shimmering Las Vegas Strip casinos stand in sharp contrast to the drab reality of UNLV's outdated facilities. "(Fans) are kind of relying on, 'Are you going to bring this group or that group?' No, this community has to get off their butt if they want to get going. The people that have been UNLV fans for a long time, they need to step up."

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For all the riches of Las Vegas, which have been manifest in beautiful athletic facilities popping up all over town and a new arena that could soon be home to an NHL team, UNLV runs a shoestring operation even relative to some of its peers in the Mountain West.

Hammered by state budget cuts and hamstrung by a bureaucratic process that makes it difficult for athletics to have autonomy over its future, it's pretty much impossible for UNLV to snap its fingers and make the kinds of big investments in football that are long overdue.

Make no mistake, even though the history of high school coaches jumping straight into college jobs is not pretty, Sanchez was gotten because he was

gettable; a bargain at $500,000 per year. After all, what does UNLV have to lose?

The Rebels tried a former legend (John Robinson), a hot coordinator (Mike Sanford) and a championship-winning FCS coach (Bobby Hauck) and got eight two-win seasons in the last 16 years — while squeaking into a pair of bowl games over that span — to show for it.

"There are a lot of great coaches out there, but we had to do something different," Kunzer-Murphy said. "This is not for the weak of heart. You have to have somebody who knows what they want and knows how to fix it and Tony, from the time we started talking, I knew he was a little bit special. I think he's kind of a raw, real kind of fellow and tells you exactly what he thinks. He's very thoughtful, very humble but he knows what he wants and knows how difficult the situation is."

Which is why Sanchez, even before he's coached a game, feels empowered to make people uncomfortable. Why he's up front about the school's forever lack of commitment to football. Why he's putting the onus on the school to get serious at a time when UNLV's competitors are pouring money into their programs, chasing invitations to power conferences that may never materialize.

Sanchez even questioned how much of the $300,000 in bonus money UNLV will earn this season from the Mountain West for appearing on ESPN will be reinvested into football or spread out to cover department-wide losses.

Those are the kinds of things that might make his bosses and his fan base wince, but as he sees it, there's never been a better time for searing honesty and urgency from the football coach at UNLV.

"Some people are going to look at me and say, 'You shouldn't say that,' " Sanchez said. "Damn right I am because it's the truth. UNLV needs to start pointing the finger at themselves a little bit and go, OK, what investments have we made to create change over the past 20 years and the answer is probably not much."

"You want to talk about creating a medical school, creating interest in the university, getting people to hear the name on a national basis, increase enrollment, well, guess what? Do what a lot of other schools have done and invest in football."

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The reality, though, is that for all of Sanchez's connections to big money in Las Vegas — the Fertitta Athletic Training Center at Bishop Gorman bears the family name of Station Casino and Ultimate Fighting Championship's co-founding brothers — much of what UNLV needs is a ways off.

Sanchez has been able to raise money for things here and there and make some cosmetic improvements, but a football building adjacent to the school's practice fields will take an institutional commitment UNLV hasn't had before.

"You can't be the one-man band," Sanchez said.

In the meantime, he's selling what UNLV has. In some ways, the poor reputation for its facilities is helpful when prospects see things aren't as bad as they envisioned.

Despite having less than a month to recruit, UNLV landed the Mountain West's eighth-ranked class according to 247Sports and already has a solid base of early commitments for 2015. Sanchez has also added talent to the roster via the transfer market, including former four-star running back recruit Altee Tenpenny, who got caught up in a numbers game at Alabama.

And unlike some of his predecessors, who tried to recruit against Las Vegas and everything that happens a mile away on the Strip, Sanchez is talking about the opportunities available after football and his own experience raising a family here. He even takes recruits on the LINQ hotel's High Roller ferris wheel 550 feet above the Strip. As Kunzer-Murphy said, "Instead of pretending we're something else, he sells Las Vegas, he sells who we are."

So far, it's working.

"We're going nose-to-nose and competing against schools that we probably have no business competing against and we're (having success)," Sanchez said. "Part of it is because we're new and fresh and part of it is I've been around a bunch of really successful kids, I've had a lot of success. I'm a known quantity with teenagers and when people walk in this office and sit down I think they know how excited this place is and they spend a day with our coaches and see what's going on here, I think we can compete with anyone."

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Of course, reality is going to come when UNLV opens Sept. 5 at Northern Illinois, then turns around to play UCLA and Michigan in successive weeks.

But Sanchez didn't build a high school dynasty at Gorman, going 85-5 the past six years at a program that didn't have a long history of success, because he lacks confidence.

"The biggest change we've seen so far is the level of excitement, the energy," quarterback Blake Decker said. "You walk into the hallways here, guys are pumped up. Since Day 1 they walked in it's been enthusiasm, excitement, it's been flare, a revitalization we haven't had in a long time. I think we were ready to buy into something new and we needed to buy into something new."

Will it work? Who knows. Gus Malzahn, Art Briles and Todd Graham have made it trendy to hire former high school coaches, but all of them had a transition period as college assistants. The path Sanchez is trying to walk is littered with failure from Gerry Faust to Todd Dodge.

There's no doubt he has the charisma — he sold copy machines, after all, before taking a pay cut to get into coaching — and the connections to get things done. But you still have to have the goods on Saturday.

Sanchez knows that stigma may stick around, and he acknowledged there's a learning curve for running a college program. That's why he surrounded himself with experienced assistants, avoiding a mistake the other straight-from-high-school coaches made.

"If you think you're just going to be the X and O guy here and just (coach) football, you're crazy," he said. "It hasn't worked. You have to be a little more than that. We still have some work to do. I like where we're at, I like the way we're recruiting. We have a great staff. A lot of energy. Kids are doing a great job responding to it. It’s good, but let’s not make any (illusions), this is a big mountain to climb here. I was outside the box when I got here. Winning is going to be different. I think sometimes in this game you get too concerned about keeping your job. S—-, I ain't afraid to get fired."

For both sides, there's risk. Sanchez could have taken the same path as Briles or Malzahn, joined a college staff and waited patiently for his opportunity. UNLV could have made a so-called safer hire. But as gambles in this town go, this one could pay off big for both sides.

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