UNLV looking at next step in the desert

LAS VEGAS >> On a good day, when he gets lucky enough to hit more green lights than red, Erick Harper can make it from his parking spot outside of his office at the Thomas & Mack Center to the tunnel of Allegiant Stadium in about 15 minutes. It’s a 3.3-mile drive from the edge of UNLV’s sprawling campus to the bright lights of the $2 billion NFL stadium — built to welcome the Las Vegas Raiders — where the Rebels also play their home games.

“There’s no reason we can’t get 40,000 to 60,000 people to come to UNLV football games on a regular basis,” said the UNLV athletic director entering his fourth year at the university.

Build yourself into a marketable winner in college athletics, and fans will follow. Even in the city in the desert that offers anything and everything, Harper believes that UNLV is on the doorstep of transforming into one of Sin City’s most talked-about attractions. It’s the same talking point bandied about in recent years: University leadership believes the Rebels can carve out a spot in the hearts of Vegas sports fans and visitors alike.

The Rebels have come within one game of hoisting a Mountain West Conference title in consecutive seasons but have come up short against the crown jewel of the Group of 5, Boise State. The required next step is making the hypothetical a reality.

There’s a ceremonial 2024 Mountain West title game floor mat inside Harper’s office that serves as a reminder of just how close UNLV has been. UNLV, long a floor mat itself in football, had its two best consecutive seasons in football history in 2023 and ‘24, winning 20 total games. A win over the Broncos likely would’ve meant a berth in the 12-team College Football Playoff that debuted last season. Former coach Barry Odom took the job at Purdue two days after the Mountain West title game loss. Less than a week later, Harper stunned the college football universe and hired former Florida and Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen.

“I’m taking over a team that was one half away from the College Football Playoff,” Mullen said. “There’s a lot in place already here that we just have to build on.”

In March, Harper fired men’s basketball coach Kevin Kruger after four years in charge and replaced him with former Memphis and Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner, who was named ACC Coach of the Year in 2017. Like Mullen, Pastner spent recent years as an analyst at ESPN. Outside the Thomas & Mack Center, a massive new banner of Pastner is plastered on the glass windows as a sell to the UNLV fan base that better days are ahead on the hardwood, too.

Once a lightning rod of college hoops under legendary coach Jerry Tarkanian, the Rebels have failed to qualify consistently for the men’s NCAA Tournament since the early 1990s. Their last appearance was 2013, the longest dry spell in program history. Harper says all the pieces are in place for UNLV to make its move among the elite contenders outside the power conferences. Now comes the hardest part: Proving you’re worth the price of admission year-in and year-out.

UNLV averaged over 32,000 fans at home football games in 2024, a jump of nearly 10,000 from the 2023 average of over 23,600 per home game. It’s there inside the stadium, just a few minutes’ jaunt away from the radiant glitz and glam of The Strip, where Harper dares to dream.

Such an uptick might not make the stadium look packed yet on TV, but it’s proof of concept that in Vegas, winners become a draw.

“If you look at the history of the Mountain West, we were the league of BYU, Utah, TCU,” said Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez. “Schools come here and really rise to the top if they really put their minds to it and invest. I do think there’s a lot of opportunity going forward.”

But for its grandiose ambition and recent success in football, UNLV is saddled with significant debt in the athletic department, estimated to be in the range of $25-30 million. And as college realignment in athletics continues to swirl, UNLV is one of many universities with options and massive decisions on the horizon.

“We definitely want to be in the upper echelon of the G5, but also we have to be the best we can possibly be,” Harper said. “The same challenge of getting there with every institution in the country is always going to be financial. That’s just the matter of the business. To weather the storm, the best way to generate more revenue is to win, and win at a high level consistently.”

One of those big choices came last fall, when UNLV opted to stay in the Mountain West rather than join a rebuilding Pac-12 with Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State. On Sunday, those five departing members officially filed their intent to leave the Mountain West, meeting a deadline to avoid doubling their exit fees, a person involved in the decision told .

UNLV, which was thought to still be a potential Pac-12 target, stood pat. That would seem to fully rule the Rebels out of becoming the eighth football-playing member of the Pac-12, which must still add one more school by next summer. Asked in April whether UNLV was still committed to remaining in the Mountain West, Harper said yes.

What kept the Rebels in the Mountain West was a hefty payday from the $150 million in exit fees and poaching fees to come from the Pac-12. Forty-nine percent of the first $61 million will be split between UNLV and Air Force, according to a copy of the conference’s memorandum of understanding obtained by . Another $21 million would be split the same way.

That money is needed. In a Nevada Board of Regents meeting in March, Harper and other UNLV administrators were challenged by several regents regarding the financial state of the athletic department. Regent Joe Arrascada asked Harper whether he’s transparent with current and prospective donors about the department being in an estimated $30 million hole, and how he planned to fulfill Mullen’s five-year, $17.5 million deal.

Harper responded that the school had the funds to pay the first two years of Mullen’s contract, then watched national reports fixate on that answer as an implication that the school had promised Mullen more than it could afford to pay over the final three years.

Harper shoulders the blame for not being more direct in his explanation, saying he has “zero fear” the athletic department will have trouble fulfilling any coaching contracts on the books.

“We work with the generated dollars, we work with state and institutional support and we work through our endowments,” he said. “Our salaries and payroll for all coaches and staff is generated through revenues on an annual basis. What was missed is the fact I said, ‘and we also generate ticket sales, donor contributions, multimedia rights partners with Learfield, all those self-generated revenues that pay for salaries.’”

The school also received a $3 million buyout when Odom left for Purdue. Harper said UNLV has surpassed $2.5 million in revenue sales for the upcoming football season, compared to $1.8 million last spring. He said over 1,000 new season ticket holders joined the fold and that the season ticket holder count was over 5,000. In that March meeting with the regents, Arrascada told Harper, “Impressive numbers, but fans are fickle. One bad season, those numbers can plummet.”

UNLV’s financial challenges made its decision to stay put during this round of realignment more logical.

Along with the influx of additional funds, that new Mountain West deal allows its members to leave the league for a Power 4 conference at no cost. So rather than pay potentially upward of $18 million to join a still-unsettled Pac-12 situation, UNLV stayed put to get some much-needed cash. People in the Pac-12 and Mountain West believe UNLV is instead hoping for a future Big 12 invitation.

“We all know conference realignment has not ended. It will not stop,” Harper said. “So where we land is the fact there is no buyout for UNLV out of the Mountain West, to be able to have your opportunity to have free agency and always be able to position UNLV in the best possible space for its growth as an institution. We’re one of the top markets that’s not in a (Autonomy/Power 4) conference right now.”

The Pac-12 and some departing Mountain West schools have sued the league over the exit fees UNLV and the MW leftovers are in line to receive, and the sides are currently in mediation, but Harper did not sound too concerned about the final numbers.

“If I was an attorney or judge, I could probably give you a better answer,” he said. “I don’t know. Do I think the numbers will be where they were reported? Should be somewhere in that neighborhood.”

To sweeten UNLV’s Mountain West decision further, the conference agreed to continue to hold its basketball tournaments at UNLV and plans to move its headquarters from Colorado Springs to a new home base: Las Vegas.

Like so many Sin City transplants, Mike Palm found himself hooked by one Vegas show in particular: Mountain West basketball. Palm, who grew up a sports fan in the Midwest and was once a middle school teacher in Iowa before rising up the gaming industry ranks, could not get enough of hoops at the Thomas & Mack Center. Kawhi Leonard was introducing himself to America at San Diego State. Jimmer Fredette was shooting it from the logo for BYU.

Palm, the VP of operations for Circa, The D and Golden Gate Casinos in downtown Vegas, said for so long UNLV football was a local afterthought.

Until Odom arrived. The city was in the midst of a sports revolution, with the Raiders arriving after the Vegas Golden Knights of the NHL and Las Vegas Aces of the WNBA. And UNLV football was suddenly something worth talking about. Palm knows a thing or two about the topic du jour as a regular on Las Vegas sports radio. And when Vegas became the epicenter of the name, image and likeness messiness last September, Palm attempted to get involved.

Before UNLV went on to compete for a second consecutive conference title, its former starting quarterback, Matthew Sluka, announced he was leaving the program amid a dispute over funds he said were promised to him but not delivered by the school’s NIL collective. The Rebels were 3-0 and coming off a 23-20 win at Kansas. Sluka’s exit was a flashpoint in college athletics — a starting quarterback leaving his team in the middle of a season with tremendous promise.

Palm, on behalf of Circa Sports CEO Derek Stevens, offered to pay Sluka $100,000 during the dispute. By the time the public offer was made, officials at UNLV informed Palm that there would be no negotiating with Sluka. In January, the former UNLV quarterback announced he was signing with James Madison.

That’s the singularity of Vegas in $100,000 nutshell. Stevens, a casino owner who isn’t a UNLV alumnus, offered to help keep the Rebels’ start red-hot.

Palm, who said he’s gone to several UNLV games the last two years, said the home game atmospheres are more vibrant than Raiders games. He said Mullen’s hiring quickly negated the deflation around town after Odom left for Purdue. But Palm said he’s realistic about what challenges still lie ahead.

Harper said this spring he has not yet mapped out how UNLV will share revenue with players if the House v. NCAA settlement is passed as expected sometime this summer. He did confirm that the majority will go to football. In conversations with his peers in athletic departments around the country, he’s heard some plan to invest anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of their allotment into the biggest money-driving sport in college athletics.

“Obviously Dan’s going to need financial support to help them get to the next level,” Palm said. “And he’s going to have to win, and he’s going to have to win pretty early.”

And with the Athletics on track to move to Las Vegas after leaving Oakland, the already-crowded sports marketplace around the shimmering lights of this town will only be harder to punch through.

“Great pro towns don’t tend to be great college towns,” Palm said. “The more this becomes a pro sports town, I’m not sure this doesn’t hurt the prospects of UNLV.”

Mullen vows that if UNLV plays an attractive style of football and can still contend for a CFP appearance, harnessing the aura of Vegas to get those 40,000 to 60,000 inside Allegiant Stadium won’t be hard.

“When you come on our campus and you go to the stadium we play in, you are around this environment, you feel like you’re at a major program,” Mullen said. “You go to recruit and kids are looking out here at The Strip and they go, ‘There’s a lot of opportunities for me in this town that didn’t use to be available that, in today’s world, is all legal.’”

Harper said the attraction of Vegas under coaches like Mullen and Pastner will be too good to pass up for some athletes. Here, you can get decent seats to a UFC event and fist-bump a bloodied fighter after a victory. Or you can have Kenny Chesney saunter through the halls of your $35 million football facility to work out while he’s in town for a series of shows at The Sphere.

“Nobody else can have what we have on a regular basis,” Harper said.

The stakes are high, which is one of the many reasons Mullen said he took the job. A good football season doesn’t move the needle locally or nationally like a great one. A great season gets you in the College Football Playoff, which could be a landscape-altering achievement for a university that would see immediate financial benefits and an athletic department still waiting to earn its long-desired close-up.

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This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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