Anything can happen in these conference tournaments. St Mary's just knocked off #1 Gonzaga 60-47 to win the WCC Tournament and punch their ticket to the Big Dance.
The Honolulu newspaper today noted that over the last 8 years, only twice has the #1 seed won the tournament and twice lower half seeds have won (#7 Cal Poly in 2014 and #5 UCSB in 2011). In other words, BlueGoldAg is absolutely correct that anyone can win. I think the Ags have a real chance here. Between their bad loss at Hawaii and TJ's injury they won 5 in a row and were beginning to turn things around. They need to get back to playing at that level. The paper also quoted Jim Les as stating that TJ has not been 100% but is now getting close.
This is a collection of all of the data since the 2010/2011 season. I think this Irvine team is the one of the best BW teams in a long time. When those lower seeds won the tournament, the regular season champs had pretty poor records.
It's puzzling because WBB uses byes and the system apparently works just fine. The conference has a model for how to implement byes right in front of it. Does it have to do with availability of the Honda Center? Unwillingness of ESPN/Fox to pick up the earliest games on TV?
Seems that any system that would work for the women would also work for the men, and possibly at a greater profit margin.
EDIT: I see you commented nearly the same thing on the WBB thread, whoops
March Madness begins today for the #6 seed Aggies at 2:30 pm when they take on #3 Fullerton. We split our regular season games with the Titans losing in Fullerton 62-58 and winning at home 66-59. Both teams ended the season with losing streaks: the Aggies lost 5 of their last 6 games and the Titans lost 3 of their last 4.
I think this is actually as good a match-up for the Aggies as any of the top 4 seeds. We know we can beat them since we've done it already at home and we came very close to winning in Fullerton. If we play great defense and make things difficult for Allman, Ahmad and Rowe we can put ourselves in a position to win the game.
2 point underdogs today. based on our performance the past two weeks at home, i'm not very confident. i know we defend Fullerton better than most, but i'm not sure we can score enough to win. we really need to (wait for it,.........wait for it.......) get our 3 point shooters all in sync to make it past the first round.
UCR is a 14.5 point underdog to Irvine tonight, so the Ags would most certainly be staring at the Anteaters with a win this afternoon coupled with the Gauchos’ win.