UNLV is down with OPP (Other Programs’ Players)

The first number anyone looks at after a basketball game is the score. During Feast Week, the Top 25 poll was rewritten in this fashion: UNLV 90 – North Carolina 80. Those numbers were stunning enough. North Carolina has been the swaggering bully atop the polls and in the minds of aficianados since the end of last season. Most casual fans would have pointed to Michigan State as a more dangerous foe than then-unranked UNLV, a team that is breaking in a new head coach and learning to play without last year’s leading scorer Tre’Von Willis. Dig deeper, and the portents of this breakthrough become evident. Lon Kruger, now head coach at Oklahoma, may not have always won out in his attempts to recruit top prep stars to play in the desert, but he was absolutely dynamite at reeling in big-time players who soured on the grind of playing at the BCS-conference level. Chace Stanback – who paced the Rebs’ upset of the Tar Heels with 28 points and 10 boards – be...