• Previously On… Just when things were beginning to look a little sticky for Hall-of-Fame coach Chris Ault, he got his breakthrough: Riding a strong senior class and the most prolific offense in school history, Nevada rallied from a mid-October lapse at Hawaii to ride out on a seven-game win streak, one that included a come-from-behind upset over perennial WAC overlord Boise State that most viewers on the East Coast still assume was an incomprehensible fever dream.
That very real triumph bought the Pack a share of the conference championship, and a vanilla bowl win over Boston College a month-and-a-half later bought them the best record ever at Nevada, 13-1, to go with the program's first appearance in the final polls.
• The Big Change. Guy walks into a bar, asks the bartender, hey man, how do you go about replacing two players who each rang up back-to-back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons on the ground and graduated as two of the top four career rushing leaders among all active players? Bartender shrugs, says, "I don't know."
| The Least You Should Know About... |
 Nevada |
| In 2010 |
| 13-1 (7-1 WAC, co-champion); Won Fight Hunger Bowl; No. 11 in final AP poll |
| Past Five Years |
| 2006-10: 42-24 (28-12 WAC); 1-4 in bowl games. |
| Five-Year Recruiting Rankings* |
| 2007-11: N/A (no classes ranked in Rivals top 50) |
| Best Player |
| Originally an Oregon signee in 2007, Rishard Matthews showed up in Reno last winter two years older and 25 pounds heavier and already on track to take over as Wolf Pack's go-to receiver by the end of the spring. He came through in the fall with team highs for catches, yards and touchdowns, good for a second-team All-WAC nod on the league's most run-heavy offense, and a memorable, MVP night in the win over Boise State, where he piled up 216 all-purpose yards and two critical fourth-quarter touchdowns. |
| Best Year Ever |
Prior to 2010, Nevada had never won 10 games as a I-A/FBS program and hadn't been ranked in the AP poll since 1948; it had never finished there. The offense set a school record for points, the final record tied a school record for wins on any level and the final vote of the season put the Pack on the cusp of cracking the top 10 for the first time. |
| Best Case |
| Lantrip keeps the passing game on track, the veteran line keeps the running game on track, the Pistol continues to average upwards of 35 points per game. 9-3, WAC champions, fringe of year-end top 25. |
| Worst Case |
| Offense struggles in the transition to a less mobile quarterback, defense regresses with impotent pass rush and vulnerable secondary. Brutal early schedule (road games at Oregon, Texas Tech and Boise State) sends the season into a tailspin by Oct. 1. 6-6, New Mexico Bowl. |
| * Based on Rivals’ national rankings |
Oh, were you waiting for a punchline? No, seriously, Chris Ault is the guy in the bar, and he needs some answers. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick and fullback Vai Taua were such steady, productive, indispensable parts of the Pack's patented Pistol scheme the last three years that truly replacing them with anything resembling their over-the-top yields seems absurd.
In fact, the option looks that gave defenses so many nightmares with Kaepernick at the controls will be significantly fewer and further between – perhaps nonexistent – in the hands of his successor, senior Tyler Lantrip, who brings Kaepernick's NFL-ready size at 6-4, 220 pounds, but nothing like his wheels. The Pistol has never been as one-dimensional as its outrageous rushing stats suggest (Kaepernick averaged 25 passes per game over four years as a starter and joined Tim Tebow and Cam Newton last year as the only players in NCAA history with 20 touchdown runs and 20 touchdown passes in the same season), but given the success of the option, more mobile redshirt freshman Cody Fajardo has to get a long look.
• Big Men On Campus. The offensive line is lamenting the loss of its own stalwarts at tackle, where Jose Acuna started every game last year, and guard, where John Bender started every game for the last three. Unlike the backfield, though, the front five still qualifies as a grizzled group, bringing back four vets – Chris Barker, Steve Haley, Jeff Meads and Jeff Nady – with 62 career starts between them, almost half of those belonging to Barker, a second-team All-WAC pick last year as a sophomore. Continuity, especially where the running game is concern, begins up front.
• Open Casting. Kaepernick's counterpart on defense was end Dontay Moch, the WAC's Defensive Player of the Year in 2009 and a first-team all-conference pick against last year with a league-best 22 tackles for loss. Only three guys nationally made more plays in opposing backfields, and all three are going in the first round of next month's NFL Draft. Moch is a player.
Or, for our purposes, was a player. In his absence, the 2011 edition has no heir apparent to pick up the slack in the pass rush; the next best rusher on paper, Brett Roy, is an undersized defensive tackle (260 pounds) fighting off blockers up the middle, and the other bookend, Ryan Coulson, is also on his way out. Behind them, linebacker James-Michael Johnson was a reliable tackle machine, but with a perpetually vulnerable secondary, someone has to emerge up front to keep the heat on opposing passers.
• Overly optimistic spring narrative. The offense has always earned the headlines here, for obvious reasons, but that's one of the reasons to resist the sense that the sky is falling without Kaepernick and Taua: Nevada has averaged 30 points per game every year since Ault came out of retirement in 2004. This edition of the Pistol may not have any records in its sights, but it's solid up front and should fire true enough to bag another WAC title before the Pack set out for the Mountain West next year.
• The Big Question. Can the defense maintain mediocrity? A repeat is only within range, though, if the defense holds up its end, and it has nowhere near the long-term consistency of the offense. Quite the opposite, in fact: Before holding opponents to a more-than-respectable 21 points per game last year, the Wolf Pack had yielded at least 31 per game in five of six seasons since Ault's return, consistently below par even by WAC standards. (The one exception was 2006, when offensive numbers were severely depressed across the board by bogus clock rules.) If the D reverts to that level without its own resident playmaker – or even halfway to that level – it's hard to see where the offense is going to come up with the firepower to stave off the two or three shootout losses that will put a championship out of reach.
- - - Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Other premature assessments (in alphabetical order): Nebraska.
Eva Longoria Susan Ward Emmy Rossum Kim Yoon jin Melania Trump
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