The football teams from Kansas and UNLV will be squaring off in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Chase Field. The teams have similar trajectories after their head coaches took over losing programs.
Lance Leipold is in his third year at Kansas (8-4) while Barry Odom is rounding out his first, with the Rebels (9-4) arriving earlier than anyone could have expected.
This marks the UNLV’s first winning season and bowl appearance since 2013. The nine wins are the most since an 11-2 showing in 1984 when the team was quarterbacks by Randall Cunningham. The Rebels have also done it with a freshman quarterback. There was even more adversity with a shooting on the UNLV campus two weeks ago that claimed the lives of three professors.
The head coaches and a handful of select players were center stage Sunday at media day at the JW Scottsdale Camelback Inn Resort & Spa.
“I don’t think, in coaching, I never put a limit on what I thought the win total would be,” Odom said. “You’ve got to approach every single week with exactly the same, and then the senior class, they didn’t want me as the new coach coming in and saying, well, this is a rebuild. They didn’t want to hear that. They wanted to hear the plan on how we were going to win and win right away. The kids have done a great job on living to the standard and the expectation of what we can do.”
UNLV football coach head coach Barry Odom (left) speaks with cornerback Cameron Oliver at the 2023 Guaranteed Rate Bowl news conference.
UNLV has been led by freshman quarterback Jayden Maiava, who stepped into the position when veteran Doug Brumfield was sidelined first with a concussion, then with a torso/rib ailment. He threw for 2,626 yards and 14 touchdowns on the season and led all FBS freshmen with a .641 completion percentage, which helped land him Mountain West Freshman of…
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Author : AZCentral | The Arizona Republic
Publish date : 2023-12-24 23:09:11
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