Can Tony Sanchez Save UNLV?

Since 1973, five people have tried making the jump from high school to the head coaching position of a top-tier college football team. The first, Jim Bradley at New Mexico State, coached five years and lost 31 games before he was dismissed. Then there was Iowa's Bob Commings (final record: 18-37). Gerry Faust was hired by Notre Dame in 1981 and left the Irish, as Sports Illustrated put it, "in shambles." More recently, North Texas's Todd Dodge finished ignominiously, with the lowest winning percentage in school history.

The fifth is Tony Sanchez, now with University of Nevada Las Vegas, who knows this cautionary list, knows the names, but spent about three seconds fretting about it before agreeing to become UNLV's fourth head coach since 1999. Eight months later, on a bright, broiling morning in early August, Sanchez was standing near his team on the palm-ringed practice fields outside UNLV's athletic complex, where the only sanctuary of shadows had already shriveled along the eastern fence. It was nearly 10 AM, and the temperature was ticking up toward 100. Mercifully, practice had just finished. The new coach gathered his players into a kneeling half-moon in the middle of the turf. "I thought I was out of high school!" Sanchez screamed. "Holy shit, I'm right back in it!"

The mistake that had attracted Sanchez's indignation would seem to fall on the "what's the big deal?" side of the spectrum of college football incidents today: two players had arrived to practice that morning in the bed of a pickup truck. The joyride lasted about 800 yards, from the Hyatt Place hotel (where the team is staying during training camp) to the fields. But that's not a look that Sanchez wants his new team to be projecting. That's not the look of a polished football program in a town known for its looks and polish. That's not going to make donors want to donate, or fans want to set down their strawberry daiquiris and hang a sharp left out of Harrah's toward Route 95 to watch a historically putrid program under the stewardship of a historically inexperienced new coach.

Make no mistake — of all the hires in college football this off-season, Sanchez's was easily the most intriguing. He has not been affiliated with the college game since 1996, when he was a graduate assistant at New Mexico State after his playing career ended. The gig lasted one season. He expected other college opportunities to come. When they didn't, Sanchez retreated to the high-school level. He remained there for 17 years.

The last six years, however, were at a nearby place called Bishop Gorman, which is to other high schools a bit like what the Biltmore is to other houses: another stratum of grandeur. Between 2009 and 2014, Sanchez propelled the private Roman Catholic preparatory school into a national football powerhouse. But it was more than just his offensive ingenuity that stood out. Sanchez also starred in a five-part ESPN miniseries about one of his players, Cordell Broadus, whose father is Snoop Dogg; established unique relationships with Nike and Gatorade; expanded the schedule nationally; hosted a weekly radio show; and implemented a professional-caliber conditioning regimen in the 40,000-square-foot training center he helped design. All the while, the Gorman Gaels hammered opponents so pitilessly that a Vegas assemblyman drafted a bill to ban them from the state playoffs.

A profile emerged of Sanchez. He is 41, barrel-chested, with thin, tapered ankles, tightly shaved hair, and a carefully groomed goatee, not to mention that voice, which rolls like a trolling boat's motor, weathered and strained. Not only did he become the biggest football name in town but, off the sideline, he proved to be a savvy motivator, marketer, and fundraiser. In essence, he was just about everything a college administrator looks for in a coaching candidate today: smooth, articulate, and with a command over Xs and Os that is commensurate to his ease in a roomful of big donors.

The downside was that Sanchez was not a college coach. Then again, UNLV had not been relevant as a college program. The last Rebels coach to leave with a winning record was Harvey Hyde, in 1985. The six men, including Hall of Famer John Robinson, who tried to follow in Hyde's wake finished with a combined record of 108-230. The last time a UNLV football player was drafted by the NFL was in 2010.

Regime changes, budget cuts, and a lack of sustained success had hollowed out the athletic department into a fiscal mess. When Mike Sanford was fired, in 2009, he blamed a "systemic infrastructure and commitment issue." When his successor Bobby Hauck resigned in November, little had changed. UNLV was still spending only $8 million on football, still in the bottom half of the Mountain West. The program was hardly in a position to improve. UNLV hasn't been under budget in almost a decade. Two years ago, its deficit of $35.3 million outpaced all other schools outside the power-five football conferences. It dropped to $19.7 million last year, but the athletic department still required a 45 percent subsidy from the university to remain solvent.

"We were on life support," athletic director Tina Kunzer-Murphy succinctly put it.

Meanwhile, much of the competition for recruits is flush with cash. In recent months, six league competitors have triumphantly announced multimillion-dollar expansion or renovation projects for their football facilities. Clemson's recruiting strategy this summer involved showing off new athletic dormitories like they were on an episode of MTV Cribs. Auburn has a new LED video board the size of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Wisconsin budgeted more than $3.2 million this year to keep an athletic cafeteria menu stocked with prime rib and crab legs. Even league rival Boise State has a new $22 million football center, complete with underwater treadmills and a video-game lounge.

The spending frenzy reveals a vast gulf between those who have the free flow of funding and those who don't. You can guess where UNLV had been landing. Recently, there was some humbling and heartening news: Kunzer-Murphy said her department had finally met its $33 million budget. She credited Tony Sanchez.

THE OREGON OF HIGH SCHOOLS

Bishop Gorman High School, named after Reverend Thomas K. Gorman, the first bishop of the Reno-Las Vegas diocese, is a sprawling collection of low, stucco and stone-clad buildings dug out of the sand 18 miles southwest of the Strip, at the very edge of Las Vegas valley, in a residential community known locally as Summerlin. The elevation tilts upward toward the Red Rock Canyon range, which looms to the west, forming a natural barrier on the horizon toward California. Between the school parking lots and the golden mountains are miles of flat, rocky, desert terrain. It makes the grass and turf of Gorman's half-dozen athletic fields stand out even more.

The school moved here in 2007, after spending its first 53 years along Maryland Parkway in downtown Las Vegas, a few blocks over from the Stratosphere; at 56 acres, the new campus is nine times larger than the original location. Today Bishop Gorman enrolls 1,475 students, most of whom pay $12,700 a year in tuition. They follow a dress code, fulfill community service requirements, and take a religion course each semester. There is also a chapel and a small grotto, donated by Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III, in honor of their father, Frank Fertitta, Jr. The brothers are co-founders of Station Casinos, a network of ten luxury hotel and gaming properties in Las Vegas, and both were Gorman graduates.

Zipping around Gorman's expansive acreage in a golf cart recently, Grant Rice, the men's basketball coach and assistant athletic director, offered what was supposed to be a quick tour of the facilities. It took an hour. There was a lot to show off: two basketball gyms, the soccer and softball fields, the wrestling room, the baseball stadium, and the two lighted practice fields. Many of them bore Fertitta's name, most notably the gleaming, magisterial football stadium that seats 5,000, with often many more left standing.

Even the stadium is outdone by the opulence of the $15 million athletic center (called the ATC), and in particular its 11,000-square foot weight room, its 26 lifting stations, and its 40-yard sprinting track. There is also a 90-seat auditorium, a spa room (with in-ground hot and cold tubs), and a carpeted locker room with a large "G" engraved into the ceiling.

"Mentally, it just helps people," Kenny Sanchez, who took over for his brother as Gorman's head coach, said. "You want to come in there and work."

In the ATC, the fridges were always stocked with free Gatorade, and the gym clothes were always the freshest Nike apparel. Players had as many as seven different uniform combinations, helping them earn a new nickname: the Oregon of high-school football. This was Tony Sanchez's imprint.

"He always had the newest stuff for us," said UNLV offensive lineman Zack Singer, who graduated from Gorman in 2014. "He'd never want to show it, but we knew behind the scenes he was working his butt off to raise money, to do this or that. He knows that's what his players want. He knows that's how kids are these days. That's how people look at a program sometimes."

Sanchez, to be clear, has helped Bishop Gorman raise a lot of money. In 2012, the school's capital fundraising organization — for which Lorenzo Fertitta and other Vegas powerbrokers are officers — reported $14.5 million in gifts and contributions that year alone. Much of it went back into the program, supporting chartered planes to cross-country games, cushy hotels, inflatable tunnels, and smoke machines. The actor Ving Rhames started narrating the team's pregame hype video, Randall Cunningham's son played quarterback, and Aaron Rodgers showed up at practice. The team won six consecutive state titles. Critics decried Gorman's advantages, from its facilities to its boosters. And a sports-crazed city took notice of a football team that was finally winning.

Sanchez, the face of it all, has maintained a strong relationship with the Fertittas; he coached Lorenzo's two sons and Frank's son. When he was hired at UNLV in December, rumors swirled that financial backing from the Fertittas had been secured as part of the deal, though nothing was substantiated. Speculation was rehashed again in April, when it was publicized that UNLV's fundraising arm, the UNLV Foundation, was negotiating a land purchase for a $500 million football arena to replace the 44-year-old Sam Boyd Stadium. Recently, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a new football training facility — with a first-class weight room and academic center — might also be in the works.

Sanchez has not been shy about stressing the value of a facilities overhaul to the success of his program, even before he has coached a single game. Within weeks of his hiring by UNLV, he ripped up the carpeting in all the football offices, repainted the walls, cleaned the weight room, and redesigned the uniforms. One sensed that the to-do list stretched a lot longer than that.

"Come on now — it is not just fairy dust," Sanchez said. "We've got to do some things to show that we can recruit at a high level."

He glanced around his office with a look that suggested toleration, at best.

"I don't want to say what we have is terrible," Sanchez said. "But we've fixed that since we've been here, and we shouldn't have had to fix it. That should've been something that was done periodically. There's something wrong with that. We have to attack it, we have to be aggressive in creating support and generating funds."

At times, it became hard to gauge where winning games actually fell among his priorities this fall. When asked what challenges he hoped to tackle first with his new job, Sanchez listed football-related needs third, after an academic overhaul and infrastructure improvements.

Pressed on why appearances mattered so dearly to him, he answered with one word: recruiting. The top prospects have a certain expectation of pampering now (as Gorman would attest, it starts in high school), and the competition for them is fierce.

His message was as clear as the Nevada sky. The modern coach can't even wait until the season starts to begin shopping for the window dressing.

"If I'm opening up a restaurant, and I find a good spot, I don't just open the door and start cooking," Sanchez said. "No one's going to want to go in. But if I open it up, I invest in it, I make it a welcoming place, I'm going to have an opportunity to have people taste my food."

A LOT TO LEARN

"We're recruiting our entire lives," Sanchez said a little while later. "I mean, I saw my wife in an Applebee's. I had a couple of minutes to seal the deal. She's walking out the door and I asked her for her number. I wrote it down on a crayon on an Applebee's napkin. It worked out great. We've been married 17 years."

Reached by telephone, Tessie Sanchez cracked up at her husband's rehashing of their introduction. "And it only took him five months to convince me to get engaged," she added.

Not much has changed since Tony got the new job, at least from her perspective. He passed on UNLV's offer to lease him a courtesy Mercedes-Benz and picked out a new Chevy Silverado instead. ("We're truck people," Tessie said: Tony had been driving a Tahoe for 13 years.) He still rises early, around 5:30 AM, but returns a little later than before.

"He approaches it like he approaches anything he does," Tessie Sanchez said. "He's got a lot of work in front of him and he's not afraid of that work."

But there have been changes. With his new position, Sanchez has had to relinquish some of the responsibilities and roles that he loved. He is no longer a special education teacher or a dean of students, like he was at Gorman. He will also no longer be calling offensive plays, leaving that to veteran coordinator Barney Cotton, whom he first met at New Mexico State in 1997. Sanchez also brought in defensive coordinator Kent Baer from Colorado.

Practice is conducted before three gigantic speakers that blast music throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour session — an eclectic playlist that Sanchez typically handpicks, featuring everything from Usher and Ace Hood to Luke Bryan and Johnny Cash. The music echoes across the campus, triggering some grumbles from the tennis team, which practices next door. But there are rave reviews from the players, who discernibly pepped up when the Dropkick Murphys' rousing anthem, "Shipping Up To Boston," came on during a goal-line drill. Heads bobbed along the sideline.

Throughout it all, Sanchez zigzags across the fields, peeking in on drills, jotting notes on a memo pad, and chatting with everyone from academic advisors to a film crew to the new strength and conditioning coach, Keith Belton, a whirling dervish who sprinted and yelped after every breakaway play, when he wasn't thwacking receivers over the middle with a thick pad. Sanchez likes the energy, likes the intensity.

The Rebels were picked to finish last in the West division of the Mountain West in the preseason poll, and indications are that they will struggle again this season. The defensive backs are young, the offensive line is a concern, and the quarterback has much to prove.

Sanchez, admittedly, has a lot to learn as well. When athletic director Kunzer-Murphy began to investigate whether Sanchez could conceivably take over the role, she researched the missteps that tripped up the other four high-school coaches who made the jump. Each of them had brought a large portion of their previous coaching staffs with them to college. That was not going to happen at UNLV.

"We were real clear with Tony from day one," Kunzer-Murphy said. "We weren't going to come with a trail of high-school coaches."

An experienced staff has already paid dividends. During the spring, when his assistants were preparing to hit the recruiting trail, Sanchez enthusiastically started packing his suitcase, too. Whoa there, they said. The head coach can't go on this trip.

"I'm like, 'Shiiiiit,'" Sanchez said.

On his desk are handwritten notes from several FBS coaches, including Auburn's Gus Malzahn, congratulating him on the job. In 2006, Malzahn was hired as the offensive coordinator at Arkansas after 15 years as a local high school coach. It was a watershed moment that arguably paved the way for Art Briles, Todd Graham, and Hugh Freeze, high school coaches who leapt into coordinator roles and are now successful FBS coaches themselves. It allowed high school coaches to dream a little bigger.

Now Sanchez comes along. The naysayers scoff and point to 1973 or 1981, but only time will tell whether he has the right stuff to jolt UNLV out of its malaise.

"They've been running Power the same way for 100 years," Sanchez said. "You might read it now or do something different. But it's just about your ability to recruit, your communication skills, organization skills. It's about university infrastructure allowing you to recruit at a high level. It's about filling those stands and creating a game day atmosphere that people want to be part of. There's a lot of things to college football. We need to start looking at that."

UNLV opens its season at Northern Illinois on September 5. Las Vegas has put the Rebels at 19.5-point underdogs. The bets are already lining up against him.