How UNLV Became the Center of Conference Realignment and NIL

Quarterback Matthew Sluka abruptly left the program over an alleged $100,000 verbal offer that was not paid, while the school was trying to make a long-term call on its conference home.

UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka is tackled by Kansas linebacker Tristian Fletcher (19) and defensive end Dean Miller. / Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has been a football underachiever for its entire existence. The Rebels have never been ranked in the Associated Press Top 25, even for a single week. Their most successful team went 11–2 in 1984, but all 11 wins were vacated as part of NCAA sanctions for using ineligible players. National Football Foundation Hall of Famer and future NFL star Randall Cunningham came and went, and barely anyone noticed.

The school was a men’s basketball super power for a time, winning a national championship and playing in four Final Fours. Its peers out West like Utah, BYU and Boise State have had extended stretches of gridiron glory—even Nevada, Air Force and Colorado State all have fielded top-10 teams. Yet, UNLV football has been persistently irrelevant. To put it in locally familiar terms, it’s been nothing but snake eyes for these guys. 

But much the way the city of Las Vegas improbably rose out of the desert sands to become an entertainment mecca, twists of timing and fate suddenly have thrust UNLV into the crosshairs of the two most burning issues in college athletics—conference realignment and player NIL compensation. For the first time ever, UNLV is the most current program in America.

The UNLV athletic program as a whole somehow became the fulcrum upon which the landscape of the lower half of the 134-school FBS rests. The Rebels held the key to the futures of multiple leagues. Wednesday night, the school ended several days of cliffhanger deliberations on its future—they opted to stay in the Mountain West Conference over leaving for the reborn Pac-12, which already raided the MWC for five members this month. 

“I believe we would leave if they do or stay if they stay,” a source from another Mountain West school told Sports Illustrated on Wednesday morning.

UNLV’s decision had a cascading effect—it kept the Mountain West together, maintained some balance of multi-conference power in the West and extended the tension for both the MWC and Pac-12. At present, both leagues have seven members but need eight to be eligible for full FBS designation. Embroiled in an increasingly bitter fight that has now landed in court, the Mountain West and Pac-12 must continue to compete with each other to fill out their memberships.

As the realignment drama was playing out, UNLV’s most promising football season in decades was thrown into turmoil by its starting quarterback. Matthew Sluka, a transfer from FCS power Holy Cross who helped lead the Rebels to their first 3–0 start in 40 years and College Football Playoff contention, abruptly left the program. In a social media statement Tuesday night, Sluka made reference to “certain representations … which were not upheld after I enrolled.”

pic.twitter.com/oK5BDRpoxK

— Matthew Sluka (@MatthewSluka) September 25, 2024

At issue: Members of Sluka’s family and his agent, Marcus Cromartie of Equity Sports, told various media outlets that promised NIL money had not been paid. Cromartie told ESPN that Sluka was given a $100,000 verbal offer from a UNLV assistant coach during the recruiting process, and that the money was not paid. Bob Sluka, the player’s father, told the network the assistant who made the offer was offensive coordinator Brennan Marion.

In a flash, the unregulated world of NIL deals had a face, a name and a real-time example of the fallout from deals gone bad. A quarterback of a team that has everything to play for up and left, with fingers pointing in all directions in his wake.

Rob Sine of Blueprint Sports, which manages the Friends of UNILV collective, tells SI he was not aware of any promises or offers by anyone at UNLV for $100,000 to Sluka. Sine says the only payment made to Sluka was for $3,000 for a summer engagement appearance.

By letter of the NCAA law, coaches can’t extend monetary offers to players in exchange for a commitment to a school. But as one source familiar with the NIL landscape says, “Is it far-fetched? No. It happens all the time.”

Sources familiar with the discussions tell SI that Cromartie didn’t even contact Friends of UNILV about NIL compensation for Sluka until late August. The agent made no mention of a $100,000 offer or unfulfilled payments, a source said. Instead, there were discussions about a much smaller salary—$3,000 a month—but no deal was agreed upon.

Then UNLV started the season 3–0, and a player who has accounted for 48% of the Rebels’ total offense and 54% of their touchdowns cleaned out his locker and left.

Blueprint Sports issued a statement Wednesday saying, “To clarify, there were no formal NIL offers made during Mr. Sluka’s recruitment process. … At Blueprint Sports and Friends of UNILV, we take our commitments very seriously. We would like to emphasize that we have upheld all Friends of UNILV contracts this season, and have not defaulted on any agreements with Mr. Sluka.”

And UNLV itself issued a statement that said in part: “Football player Matthew Sluka’s representative made financial demands upon the university and its NIL collective in order to continue playing. UNLV athletics interpreted these demands as a violation of the NCAA pay-for-play rules, as well as Nevada state law. UNLV does not engage in such activity, nor does it respond to implied threats. UNLV has honored all previously agreed-upon scholarships for Matthew Sluka.”

This jarring development has sparked even more debate about the Wild West nature of NIL compensation for players in college sports. While player compensation has done no tangible harm to the sport nor dampened its overall popularity, debate continues to rage as players move from school to school at an unprecedented rate. 

The system is cloaked in secrecy and lacking publicly available data. There are bad-faith actors and little binding players to schools. (All of which existed in the old days as well, but those were subterranean deals in order to circumvent NCAA rules. Now at least we know that the player-paying economy exists and is largely permissible.)

On one side of the debate, many see the simplest solution to be making athletes employees. That would create a structure for collective bargaining and binding contracts that formalize the vague constructs now in place.

But on the other side, many see formal athlete employment as the last breaking of the collegiate model, something that would lead to the destruction of many Olympic sports programs and even greater inequity between the haves and have-nots.

“Who is the regulator?” asks Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), one of the prime actors in Congress in trying to craft legislation that provides a national structure for college sports, in an interview with SI. “I want to use the federal government to empower the NCAA to set rules across college athletics. It’s good and right and fair that athletes be compensated. But if college athletes are employees I think it would be a serious mistake.”

NCAA vice president for external affairs Tim Buckley issued a statement as SlukaGate raged Wednesday: “The NCAA fully supports college athletes profiting from their NIL, but unfortunately there is little oversight or accountability in the NIL space and far too often promises made to student-athletes are broken. Positive changes are underway at the NCAA to deliver more benefits to student-athletes but without clear legal authority granted by the courts or by Congress, the NCAA, conferences and schools have limited authority to regulate third parties involved in NIL transactions.” 

UNLV, of all schools, finds itself in the thick of everything—so let’s supply some context for how this happened. The Rebels’ unlikely arrival in this cauldron is part happenstance and part newfound competence. 

The happenstance: Las Vegas’s rise as a college football destination has lifted the program to a more important status than its on-field performance had ever merited. Long a college basketball hub, the construction of Allegiant Stadium now is drawing major football games to the city: the Pac-12 championship was played there from 2021–23; USC and LSU played a Week 1 game there this season; and Notre Dame played BYU there in ’22. Also UNLV has moved its home games to Allegiant.

Thus, location has elevated the desirability of UNLV as a league member for both the Pac-12 and Mountain West. The Pac-12 erred in not making the Rebels part of the first wave of expansion targets from the MWC along with Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State. The Pac-12 pivoted to offering invites to members of the American Athletic Conference and whiffing, and has now come back to UNLV and Utah State—the latter of which jumped to the Pac-12 on Monday. Getting Vegas is harder now than it would have been two weeks ago.

As realignment has trickled down through the FBS ranks, certain schools have almost randomly been handed make-or-break power in decision making. Last year, when Pac-12 members Oregon and Washington decided to go to the Big Ten, the domino effect sent Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to the Big 12 (along with Colorado, which already was gone). This week, it was UNLV’s turn.

If the Rebels had left, Air Force was almost certain to either join them in the Pac-12 or bolt east to the AAC, where service academy brethren Army and Navy are football members. If the Mountain West were reduced to five schools, it could well dissolve—which would have been a massive blow to longtime Division I stalwarts like Wyoming and New Mexico. Vegas, to a degree, held their futures in its hands.

Then there is the newfound competence: In virtually any other season, UNLV’s starting quarterback leaving the team would not have caused much of a ripple—no matter how controversial it was. But the Rebels have, at long last, done enough things right on the field to become of interest.

That started with the hiring of Barry Odom as coach last year. Odom probably was prematurely fired at his alma mater, Missouri, in 2019. He rebounded as defensive coordinator at Arkansas from ’20–22, helping the Razorbacks to their best season in nearly a decade in ’21. 

Odom took the Rebels to the Mountain West championship game in Year 1. / Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images

UNLV was smart to grab Odom after a succession of failed hires. The school had tried rising assistant coaches (Mike Sanford, Marcus Arroyo), an FCS winner (Bobby Hauck), an old power-program legend making a comeback (John Robinson) and even a high school coach (Tony Sanchez). None of them worked.

In Year 1 under Odom, the Rebels went 9–5 and played in the Mountain West championship game. The stigma of a stepping-stone program remained, though—Bobby Petrino spent a few weeks there in early 2023 as offensive coordinator before jilting the Rebels for Texas A&M, and breakout freshman quarterback Jayden Maiava transferred after last season to USC with no guarantee of being the starter. (He isn’t; Maiava is backing up Miller Moss.)

Maiava’s departure spurred the recruitment of Sluka, who led Holy Cross to records of 10–3 in 2021 and 12–1 in ’22. Sluka didn’t pass the ball well at UNLV, completing just 44% of his passes through three games. But his running and crunch-time playmaking were key elements in the Rebels’ 3–0 start that included upsets of Power 4 programs Houston and Kansas. His impact was greater than his stats.

That’s how UNLV unexpectedly arrived in the lead pack of contenders for the Group of 5 conference automatic bid to the 12-team playoff. Three other contenders lost last week—Memphis, Toledo and Northern Illinois—which further moves the Rebels up the pecking order. At this point—which is admittedly very early—they may trail only James Madison of the Sun Belt Conference.

In a city where almost every visitor can spin a sad tale of rotten luck, it is now the hometown school’s fate to have a season of newfound promise thrown into turmoil. And it’s happening at the same time UNLV was making a momentous, long-term call on its conference home. A desultory past has given way to a tumultuous present and an uncertain future.

Las Vegas is a city built on risk. The Rebels are up to their necks in it right now.