Would UNLV have played in the 1991 national championship game if it had beaten Duke?

UNLV whooped Duke 103-73 in the 1990 Final Four.

Duke's revenge? A 79-77 win against the Runnin' Rebels in the 1991 Final Four in which Christian Laettner scored 28 points on 9-of-14 shooting.

But one of the greatest mysteries since then has been: Would UNLV have played in the 1991 national championship game if it had beaten the Blue Devils?

UNLV and its head coach Jerry Tarkanian had always been at odds with the NCAA over potential rules violations.

Rachel Bachmann at the Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at whether or not they would have really boycotted the game if they had beaten Duke and the NCAA in general:

A rumor, which has never been substantiated (and won't be in this article), is that some UNLV players made a pact at some point that if they made it to the final, they would refuse to play. In other versions of the story, the players would have simply delayed the start of the game as a form of protest.

Given that there's no proof the players made this pact, it's impossible to know what their motives might have been. But people close to the team say the players had a long list of gripes about the NCAA.

Jerry Tarkanian, the team's head coach, said in an interview last month that he had not heard anything about a boycott of the finals. Evric Gray, a member of the team, said in a recent interview that he hadn't heard any boycott talk either, but that he didn't socialize with everyone on the team. Stacey Augmon, one of the team's stars, declined to be interviewed. Three other starters, George Ackles, Larry Johnson and Anderson Hunt, couldn't be reached for comment.

Greg Anthony, UNLV's star point guard, who is now an NCAA tournament commentator for CBS, passed on a chance to settle the mystery once and for all. Asked in a recent interview about the boycott rumor, all he would say about the matter was "anything's possible."

To be clear, the opportunity to do such a thing never presented itself. UNLV was upset in the tournament semifinal by Duke, the same team it had beaten in the title game the previous year. It's also important to note that if the UNLV players did consider this move—or had acted on it—they would not have been breaking any laws. The school might have disciplined them, or the NCAA might have disciplined the school, but college sports—even the NCAA tournament—isn't subject to any binding labor agreement.