I’ve scheduled my outdoor exercise around the game so I can listen to Scott Marsh while exercising. Sweeps are tough, but we could really use one

Video is already up on bigwest.tv . Women are on espn3 at 4:00. Going for double sweeps.

Tried to find it on ESPN3. Nada. I'm not going to bother with ESPN anymore unless a game is missing on BigWestTV.

Beach much more aggressive today getting us in foul trouble. Down 13-10 with 12 to go in half

Good job by the Ag sin coming back from 11 down. Their foul shooting is better than yesterday's (which--if you subtract Anigwe's 0 for 7 was merely mediocre). but both teams fouling a lot. That is usually a sign of tired defense, meaning that the players are not moving their feet and reaching in a lot. If their shooting imrpoves (35% at the half) they should win.

Nice run to take the lead. Fouls might be a problem down the stretch

Big guys have lots of fouls. What happened to Hoagland?

Down 2 8 to go

OT!

Got a little scary at the end there, but glad they pulled off the win!

And a win! Never easy but gutty on a short turnaround. Pepper was huge. Shaw did some good things. I’ll wear my autographed Brian Shaw BB camp shirt in his honor!

I'm getting too old for this kind of excitement, especially two days in a row. In two weeks against Cal Poly, I'm hoping for a blowout win. I agree with DrMike, BJ Shaw is a heady, solid player. I saw him nearly steal a dribble, then quickly move to his opponents opposite side in case the guy tried to move around him. Shows that he's a coach's son. My only criticism of the Ags is that they both forced and missed a lot of shots in the paint. At least they ball faked on their perimeter shots enough to avoid the blocks that the Beach got yesterday.

Ba is playing well, maybe the most improved. Murphy had to play bigger minutes than normal and they went after him.

Someone pointed out the fouls were likely due to tired legs - good observation. Playing a competitive game and coming back less than 24 hours is a challenge. Hats off to both squads. One thing I noticed is the Saturday games get a little chippy. Thankfully, refs and coaches have been very good to get things settled.

I just got back from a couple of hours of cycling and thought I'd get to watch today's game at 4 pm. Oh well, I blew that one! Looks like I missed a white knuckle affair...maybe it was for the best that I missed it given my old age!!

Don't look now but UC Davis is in 5th place in the Big West. With four games left they could hold onto that seed for the tournament. If they keep improving (I felt that the Beach games were a bit of a step back) they could give the top dogs a run for the money. Watch out for CSU Bakersfield.

Santa Barbara is on a real roll. Our OT loss (should have won) was one of the only close games in their current 9 game streak. I watched a bit of Irvine-Bake and they looked good, but not great. Not as strong as recent Irvine teams. Riverside has some nice wins. The back to back format is bringing parity to the standings - hard to pull off the sweep.

I don’t know that seeding means much this season, although I’d like to skip UCSB in the first round. Looking for a winning conference record.

And there’s some funky way that the big west is dealing with the uneven number of games played. I’ll try to find a link as I don’t remember the details. It’s going to be a very unpredictable tournament

So this is from the bigwest site. They are going to use an adjusted winning percentage to determine seeding.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/bigwest.org/documents/2021/2/12/2020_21_BWC_Manual_Section_6_Mens_Basketball_1_15_21.pdf#page27

Wait. This is in the tiebreaker section, but the adjusted winning percentage writeup makes it sounds like this procedure will be used across the board, not just for ties.

This could be really bad news for the Aggie Women depending on how the final average number of games played shakes out and how the BWC handles dropping multiple data points on the high end. On paper this isn't the most unfair strategy in the world, but adding any losses to a team that's increasingly likely to to go undefeated or 1-loss in conference is really eyebrow raising.

Zander: From Appendix 6, if I figured this correctly, based on the current standing, the Aggies and Long Beach State would have played the fewest number of games (6). Using paragraph 2, the adjusted average would be 9.25. Since an adjustment occurs only if the team has 4 or more games below that average, no adjustments will take place unless more games are cancelled, but if they are, then the adjustment would be to add losses?! That makes no sense because it penalizes the school just because they had the rug pulled out of them once already. If the Cal Poly games are cancelled, and the Aggies split with Hawaii, they'd be 4-4 and might have their record adjusted to 4-5 which could cost them their earned position in the playoffs.

Yeah I was confused when I first read it. The men might lose a spot as toke said, but the women might lose the regular season championship streak. On the women’s side right now the average I think is 10 games. We are 6-0. If we fall further behind the average it’s possible the added losses move us to 2nd. I assume we win a tie breaker with beach so it’s pretty important for us to win out if we want to keep the streak going.

Assuming I’m interpreting the rules right, as long as the women play their remaining 4 games and win them, they’ll win the title. Assuming no other game for any other teams get cancelled (which would make the average games played the highest), the conference average would be exactly 15 games played. UCD’s adjusted record would be 10-1. Beach could get to 16-2 and Irvine to 13-2. Winning percentage would determine the order and we’d get that.

If we have one game cancelled and win the other three games, our adjusted record would be 9-2. Then it would come down to what LBSt and Irvine do in their games. A three loss LB would have a better winning percentage with no cancellations but not a four loss. Irvine would have to win out because we’d have a slightly higher winning percentage than a 12-3 UCI team.

If we get two games cancelled, winning the conference is probably not happening without some upsets. Adjusted record would be 8-4. A five loss LBSt has a better winning percentage as would a 4 loss UCI.

As for H2H to matter, that only matters if we end up with the same winning percentage, which is unlikely. I think the only way that would happen is if we end up at 8-4, LB would be 12-6 and UCI would go 10-5. That would take us either having games cancelled and/or losing a game, plus some upsets of LB/UCI (those two playing each other means two losses but it also means two wins as well).

So basically we just need to hope the four games get played. I like our odds of at least going 3-1 which would make it hard for either LB or UCI to pass us.

It seems like they took steps to make this policy seem reasonable on its surface, especially in the context of not wanting to reward teams that get positive COVID tests or anything. But considering this is the conference of a team that has been so disadvantaged by following rules that it's drawn national media attention, the setup definitely comes off as draconian.

On the Men's side, dropping a few seeds could be very annoying and the difference between getting to the finals or not, especially if the team has a strong back half of the season and kinda demonstrates that the early results were rust-related. On the Women's side, it would be a very bad look if LBSU wins it over the Ags with more losses, given this weekend's results.

Yeah, if teams are close, you could do some sort of common opponents ranking standings tiebreaker. So we don't get penalized for not getting to play 1-11 Fullerton twice but LBSt doesn't get penalized for having to play us and Irvine while UCD and UCI don't play. This year, as of now, you could group the top three, the middle four and the bottom three and sort that way.

It does look like it matters less this year though since the tourney is similar to the men's - everyone has to play three games to win it (except the 8 and 9 seeds) as opposed to having single byes and double byes. So from that aspect, if we did drop to, say, the three seed (this is almost impossible since Irvine and LBSt play each other), it wouldn't force us to play an extra game. I know the team wants to win the regular season tile but ultimately, they want the tourney berth. I'd be much more annoyed if we had to play the extra game because we got losses tacked on due to missed games.