Nevada football coach Jeff Choate announced his February signing class Wednesday during an on-campus press conference, with our report on those seven player additions here and here. Here are some other news and notes from his press conference:

MW, Pac-12 television deals

The MW announced Tuesday national partnerships with CBS, FOX and The CW to broadcast games on linear television while Kiswe will help oversee the MW’s streaming app. This comes after the Pac-12’s deal with CBS, The CW and USA Network. The Pac-12 poached five MW members starting with the 2026 season rather than pursue a reverse merger after the league was whittled down to Oregon State and Washington State.

Choate has previously expressed disappointment the two sides didn’t merge, and he reiterated those feelings after both conferences announced their media-rights deals, albeit without providing financial details.

“It’s kind of a loaded question,” Choate said, “and here’s what I’d say — when you look at what the Pac-12 got and what the Mountain West got, it seems like it was a net loss for both organizations. It would have been really good if we could have found a way to make that work for everybody. That’s what my initial thought was on it. It was, like, ‘This seems ridiculous that we’re doing this when together the power of our brands would have capitalized a lot more opportunity for everybody moving forward from a TV revenue standpoint.’ And I suspect that this is an ever-evolving industry, and at some point in time people will come to their senses and realize that we’re stronger together than they are apart.”

Nevada’s game at UCLA moved

When the Big Ten announced its football schedule last week, it included UCLA’s game against Nevada being moved from mid-September to late October despite no new contract finalized between the schools. Indeed, the game has been moved from Sept. 19 to Oct. 31, which will impact the Wolf Pack’s MW schedule. Typically in these situations, the team impacted by the move will get a little more money to play the game. The original contract called for Nevada to make $1.3 million to play at UCLA. It is also unknown if the game will be played at the Rose Bowl, the Bruins’ current home, or SoFi Stadium, where UCLA is trying to move its home games for the 2026 season.

“That’s not ideal, obviously,” Choate said of the change. “You don’t want to have to play a non-conference game in the middle of your league schedule against a Power 5 opponent. That’s not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think there’s some positives, which I’m hopeful our willingness to work with the Big Ten and adapt our schedule will give us some flexibility on the remainder of where we’re playing and who we’re planning on different times of the season. Usually there’s a little bit of a quid pro quo there. I don’t know that we had a big stick to swing in that regard. I think a lot of it was going to be mandated to us, but I think that decision was best for us because we were hoping it was gonna create some other options for us.”

Nevada’s other non-league games are versus Western Kentucky (Sept. 5), Montana State (Sept. 12) and Middle Tennessee (Sept. 26). The Pack will either get a bye or have a MW game slide into the Sept. 19 slot previously slated for the UCLA game.

Weighing in on star ratings

Per 247Sports, Nevada’s 2026 high school recruiting class ranks fifth out of nine teams in the new MW, which will lose Boise State, Fresno State, Colorado State, San Diego State and Utah State and add UTEP and Northern Illinois. The Miners and Huskies ranked second and third, respectively, among MW schools behind only UNLV in terms of the 247Sports class rankings. But Choate said he doesn’t pay attention to star ratings at the Group of 6 level.

While an assistant at Texas, Choate was tasked with recruiting five-star prospects. But at Nevada, the biggest part of the evaluation isn’t measured in stars, he said.

“I think our evaluation and our process is the most important,” Choate said. “The star system, when you get to a five-star or five-star-plus, these are national recruits. I’ve recruited those guys. They’re there for a reason. Going into their senior year of high school, they’ve got college measurables. Oftentimes, I see our program still as a developmental program. We’re going to take young men that have talent and ability, and we’re going to try to plug them into our system and enhance what they already have. And to me, the stars are really about who they become and not where they start because you can’t measure someone’s willingness to work, someone’s desire to be the best they can be.

“There’s not a star system in the world that I’ve seen that can measure those things. And that’s what you’re trying to tap into through the evaluation process is how are these young men wired? How important is football to them? What kind of competitors are they? What kind of teammates are they? What kind of human beings are they? That’s not what the star system is ranking. That’s ranking something else. But what they become is 1,000 percent based on the things that I just mentioned.”

No MW team signed a four-star recruit in the 2026 cycle with Nevada’s 22 three-star recruits (out of 27 prep commitments) the fifth most in the league.