Mountain West Football Media Event Delivers UNLV Coach Sanchez and Samina The Fortune Teller
By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
There’s no official new Mountain West football TV deal, so the news out of the conference’s football media day in Las Vegas boiled down to one essential question: what goofy character would Hawaii coach Nick Rolovich hire to hang out with him at the chat-with-the-media event.
It was local Las Vegas fortune teller Samina and her tarot cards that turned heads and caused smiles at the media event at Green Valley Ranch in Henderson thanks to Rolovich’s zany streak.
Rolovich, the former Nevada Wolf Pack offensive coordinator, enlisted the psychic in hopes of countering media predictions that Hawaii would finish fourth in a six-team West Division of the Mountain West Conference.
Rolovich has a track record of hiring local Vegas-oriented talent for the annual football media day, which consists of football media asking questions to coaches and players at a Las Vegas area hotel. For example, he hired an Elvis Presley impersonator in 2017 and a Britney Spears entertainer in 2018.
Another football coach, UNLV’s Tony Sanchez, hopes the final season at Sam Boyd Stadium and the opening a $34 million training center in campus will bring new fortunes and help propel the Rebels to a winning season.
The new on-campus football training center will have a soft opening in September and the football team will move in during October. Fund-raising efforts are ongoing. LVSportsBiz.com interviewed Sanchez after he met the Las Vegas media:
Sanchez said the new training center plus the football team’s new home field at Raiders stadium starting in 2020 “did sway” a few players to attend UNLV. But he noted, “It doesn’t win the recruiting battle.”
Hawaii’s Rolovich discusses UNLV’s new football training center and the stadium:
The Mountain West TV deal brings in about $13 million a year thanks to partnerships with ESPN, CBS, AT&T and Stadium — a fraction of the giant TV deals in the Power 5 conferences. UNLV receives slightly more than $1 million a year under the current Mountain West TV deal.
UNLV Athletics also issued a release saying UNLV and Nike will continue their decades-long relationship through the signing of a new, three-year agreement through May 2022, UNLV AD Desiree Reed-Francois said Tuesday. Worth $3 million per year in retail product, Nike will provide UNLV $2 million in annual product allotment, with UNLV purchasing approximately $1 million in additional product per year. In the previous agreement which expired May 31, 2019, UNLV received $1 million in annual product allotment from Nike and purchased $800,000 in product per year.
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