UNLV held its first-ever Spring Showcase inside Allegiant Stadium on Saturday evening and hundreds of recruits were among the thousands of fans enjoying the spirited free event.
After traditional stretching and drills, the squad scrimmaged in their $2 billion home for nearly two hours with 83 snaps producing plenty of highlights on offense, defense and special teams.
Following the proceedings, third-year head coach
Marcus Arroyo had this to say to the large throng of media on-hand:
On the Spring Showcase overall and atmosphere inside Allegiant:
"This was fantastic, man. I couldn't be more excited and thankful for number one, our fans,and Allegiant Stadium and our athletic department putting this together because I've been a lot of spring practices and showcases and this is just, this is as good as it gets, as far as our opportunity to get in front of our people and have the fans out, have recruits out. Have you guys out. And I think that this is huge. This is a huge step for us. We take a lot of take it seriously and this is awesome."
"The game was pretty clean. There weren't a lot of flags. I thought guys were good fundamentally. There was a lot of discipline shown out there."
"I'm excited. We're 12 practices in and we've got three left. We've tried to elevate the standards of everything we do and we've tried to do that in a lot of different ways. The way we play, the way we've recruit, the way we treat each other. We're trying to turn it over to them. You know, it's in the first stage you're always coach-fed, you're teaching them how to do things. What it's got to evolve into -- from coach-fed to player-led and that's what we really try to instill in these guys."
About the deep receiving corps:
"They've done a really good job in camp. Obviously we've added a lot of depth in a lot of situations but that one probably shows up the fastest because it's probably the one that stands out right now. Even holding Kyle (Williams) out, we still had a bunch of guys making plays and got some maturity in that room. Our attention was to raise the competitiveness and the skill level in that room and it's good to see them gelling together."
About quarterback Doug Brumfield:
"Doug just brings that extra element with his feet, you know, and I think that that's a real pain (for the defense). We saw that in the short time (he played last season) and the reps that he's had (this spring), and he'll continue to grow and develop that. We've got to make sure that we don't box him in too much but again, he's a weapon with his feet."
On the quarterback play in general:
"There's a lot to tell off the tape. There's some good, there's some bad and we turned the ball over but also created some explosive plays and some missed ones. Those guys are doing a good job of competing. So there'll be some things that we really liked and some things we want to hone up before we get out of here (for the summer)."
Â
On the defense getting multiple interceptions:
"That's what we want -- a bunch of takeaways. They've had more takeaways this spring than we've had collectively since we're been here, which is really good."
On the final week of spring ball:
"We got three more left. This will be great film for us to watch. We'll break it down tomorrow as a staff and watch it with them on Monday. Tuesday we'll be back out and have a regular practice. Wednesday, Thursday we'll have more of an OTA-style type of practice and getting a lot of checklist stuff done because what happens in spring is you want to be able to have a library of stuff for your guys going into summer. So we've got three good days that I'm really excited about."
