Nov. 6, 2001

LAS VEGAS - UNLV's season-ending football game at Air Force on Nov. 17 has been selected to be televised as the regionally syndicated Mountain West Conference Game of the Week, the league announced Tuesday.

The Rebels and Falcons will kick off from Colorado Springs, Colo., at noon Pacific Time and be broadcast to 20 cities via ESPN+Plus, including KFBT Gold 33 (Cox Cable 6) in Las Vegas. Jim Kelly will handle play-by-play duties with JC Pearson serving as analyst and Beth Mowins on the sidelines. It is the second appearance in two weeks on ESPN+Plus along with last week's Utah game.

The announcement means that every UNLV football will have been televised on at least a local basis for the first time in history. The school record, which was only three before the hiring of head coach John Robinson, was set with four in 1999 and then broken last year as 11 of 13 games were shown, including the Las Vegas Bowl on ESPN2.

At the end of the 2001 season, the Rebels will have appeared on ABC twice, ESPN twice, ESPN+Plus twice, SportsWest four times along with one local broadcast by ESPN Regional at UNLV. The Colorado State game was originally set for a national ESPN broadcast but was instead produced by SportsWest after the September postponement.

Before 1999, the school's football program made only 10 network TV appearances in 31 seasons. Since Robinson's hire, UNLV has been on network TV 14 times and televised overall 26 times with just one of those appearing only in the Las Vegas market (at Iowa State in 2000).

UNLV FOOTBALL TV APPEARANCES UNDER JOHN ROBINSON

SEASON          NUMBER              OUTLETS1999        four of 11 games    SportsWest (3), ESPN+Plus (1)
2000        11 of 13 games      ESPN+Plus (3), SportsWest (3), ESPN2 (2), ABC (1),                                        Fox Sports West 2 (1), ESPN Regional at UNLV (1)
2001        11 of 11 games      SportsWest (4), ESPN (2), ABC (2), ESPN+Plus (2),                                        ESPN Regional at UNLV (1)