UPDATE December 17, 2014 : Sanchez unanimously approved by UNLV board of regeants

As of this afternoon, Tony Sanchez has been unanimously approved to start his 4-year, $2 million coaching contract for UNLV's football program.

UNLV's board of regents has unanimously approved Tony Sanchez's head coaching contract.

He's already started putting his new coaching staff in place...

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The speculation that UNLV would hire Bishop Gorman high school coach Tony Sanchez to replace Bobby Hauck was confirmed and made official. Pending confirmation by UNLV's board of directors, Sanchez will be the next head coach of the Rebels, and will be granted a $500,000 per year salary. Starting over the next few weeks, he will have to start building his coaching staff and looking to recruit some players.

Sanchez helped establish Bishop Gorman high school as a top-ranked high school football program in the nation. He compiled an 85-5 record and won six consecutive state championships, as well as a No. 1 overall national ranking after their most recent championship. In addition to dominating Nevada schools, Gorman has also won victories against some powerhouse out-of-state schools (including beating California's #1-ranked Centennial High on their home turf), which cements their status as a top national team.

In addition to being a successful high school coach who has already turned around some high school programs, he also comes with some intangible benefits.

For one thing, he could potentially sway some of his current Bishop Gorman players to sign with UNLV, thus bringing national-caliber athletes to UNLV - something that former coaches Sanford and Hauck could not do. But this is only a temporary benefit. Within two or four years, all players who had associations with Sanchez will have graduated from Gorman, and he wouldn't have the relationship or sway with later students.

Tony Sanchez accepts Bishop Gorman's sixth straight Nevada state championship
after a 70-28 victory over Sparks High School (Reno, Nevada).

This means that expectations will be very high for Sanchez right out of the gate, especially if he can land a few top-tier recruits this coming spring.

Despite looking good on paper, this hiring is not without controversy.

There has been criticism that UNLV railroaded this job for Sanchez due to financial promises from Gorman boosters ...

Prior to UNLV's season-closing game against rival Nevada, head coach Bobby Hauck announced that he would be resigning after the season. It's unfortunate that Hauck couldn't accomplish more in his time at UNLV. He had a repuation as a winner at Montana, and his teams at UNLV definitely had the talent to be successful.

But the team was inconsistent, often playing well for half a game and then crashing and burning in the other half. Third quarters were real killers for UNLV this year, as the team regularly collapsed and allowed their opponents to break away after halftime. And that is exactly how UNLV lost (49-20) in Hauck's final game against rival Nevada. Hauck accumulated four seasons with only two wins, as well as one outlier year in which UNLV won seven games and earned a trip to the Heart of Dallas Bowl on New Year's day last year (which my dad and I attended).

It's hard to tell where exactly the problem was. I had some issues with the decisions that were made by Hauck and his staff over the years. Specifically, I thought that Hauck set up former starting quarterback Nick Sherry for failure. Sherry performed well as a pocket-passer in his first few games running a west coast-style offense, and when the Rebels starting running a spread pistol formation focused around the read option, Sherry struggled. He was clearly uncomfortable as an option quarterback. He wasn't very mobile, he didn't make the right reads, and his accuracy and decision-making out of the pocket was terrible. So when Hauck continued to run that pistol spread offense, I was frustrated. Maybe Sherry handled it well enough in practice that Hauck honestly believed that he could handle it in games? But as game after game went by, and Sherry just kept looking worse and worse, it should have become obvious that he and that offense did not fit together.

UNLV collapsed in the third quarter to lose the Freemont Cannon to rival Nevada.
A sadly fitting - and representative - conclusion to Bobby Hauck's tenure at UNLV.

But UNLV's players didn't make Hauck's job easier. Both the offense and defense were horribly inconsistent year in and year out. It's hard to tell if that was the result of bad coaching or just bad players. But there was definitely some physical talent on the field. UNLV has had a quality receiving corp during most of Hauck's tenure, but aside from Caleb Herring, they just didn't have a quarterback that could reliably get them the ball. And even when the ball was on the mark, those receivers still dropped quite a few of them. The offensive line had trouble stopping blitzes, and the defense struggled to fill gaps and make tackles, leading to opponents regularly accumulating over 200 yards rushing against UNLV.

So it's difficult for me to be able to say with any degree of confidence whether Hauck was unfit for the job.

In any case, Hauck has decided that he and UNLV are not a good fit for each other, and he is moving on. UNLV will now have to search for a new head coach, ...