Arizona-UNLV pregame: Jetsetting weekend for Byrne, Jackson

If you won’t ever forget the day Greg Byrne remembers as “12-15-12,” neither will he.

The UA athletic director caught both the Wildcats’ New Mexico Bowl win over Nevada and UA's equally riveting basketball win over Florida at McKale Center on the same day in December 2012.

“There’s a lot of great memories from that time,” Byrne said.

Hard to imagine UA can duplicate the kind of down-to-the-wire victories in both the New Mexico bowl and UA's game with UNLV today, but Byrne plans to be at both games no matter what happens.

Byrne said he and UA play-by-play broadcaster Brian Jeffries are scheduled to take a booster's private jet from Albuquerque after today’s bowl game to arrive in Tucson in time for the 7:30 p.m. tipoff of the UA-UNLV basketball game.

While Jeffries will handle the game on radio as always, ESPN2 will have Roxy Bernstein and Sean Farnham on the call.

Josh Jackson helped Prolific Prep beat Memphis East (details appear to be unavailable) on Friday, though he’ll miss Prolific’s game today with Arlington while taking his official visit to Arizona.

Prolific co-founder and operations director Phil Doherty said that’s OK because his program isn’t about winning games as much as developing players, and he doesn’t want Jackson playing in every game this season anyway so as not to wear him out.

Jackson already spent all of last summer playing for USA Basketball and his mother’s travel-ball club, One Nation.

When Jackson does play, the difference is obvious.

“Josh is really, really competitive,” Doherty said. “There’s talent and there’s playing hard. And if you talented and play really hard? … Josh plays really hard. (If others aren’t playing hard) Josh will rip them. He’ll challenge them to play harder. When you combine that athleticism and the art of playing hard, good things happen.”

Today’s visit will be the first official for Jackson, who will also likely visit Michigan State later this month and Kansas for its game with Texas on Jan. 23, Doherty said. Jackson told Rivals in October that he was impressed with Michigan State's toughness.

FWIW, came across an old background story on Prolific Prep, which houses its players at Napa's Justin-Siena High School, a Catholic day and boarding school.

Some items related to Saturday night's game:

We had a look at how UNLV is doing with former UA recruiting target Stephen Zimmerman, plus a scouting report with notes.

In the preseason, the Las Vegas Review-Journal had an in-depth feature on Zimmerman, who was actually born in Tennessee and moved to Las Vegas at age 6.

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Further back, we had a look at Zimmerman before he took an official visit to UA in November 2014.

The Republic had this game story on ASU's comeback win over UNLV on Wednesday.

Here's the school-produced notes from Arizona and UNLV.

BTW, lots of good stuff about the bowl game including a live game chat, on our UA football page.

Could be interesting to see how Mike D'Antoni's arrival in Philadelphia changes things for T.J. McConnell, who continues to be one of the NBA's most productive rookies.

Another big win for the Pac-12 today when Utah edged Duke at Madison Square Garden.

Meanwhile, UCLA is playing North Carolina in Brooklyn.

The rest of today's Pac-12 schedule includes:

Houston Baptist at ASU, 12:30 p.m. (Pac-12 Networks)

Oakland at Washington, 2:30 p.m. (Pac-12 Networks)

Coppin State at California, 5 p.m. (Pac-12 Networks)

Hampton at Colorado, 7 p.m. (Pac-12 Networks)

Tulsa vs Oregon State at Portland, 9 p.m. (Pac-12 Networks)

Texas at Stanford, 9:30 p.m. (ESPN2)