Wow...just what they did to us! The stars are aligned for them!

Fullerton 58 Hawaii 46 Final

The two best teams in the Big West will meet in the final. Fullerton's defense is impressive.

Unfortunately I think Fullerton wins. I don’t like that group. Would rather see Monson win

You know, I thought that with the unbalance schedules due to Covid, we might see a lot of upsets in the bwt. #1vs2 on both the mens and womens side. So much for that thought.

UCSB was close to pulling off the big upset as were our women.

LBST gets the ball down 1 with 21 seconds left and can't get a shot off. Fullerton played some good D on that last possession but you have to get a shot up there.

For their efforts Fullerton gets Duke in Coach K’s last tournament.

OOOF....Duke will be playing with a lot of emotion...

Seems like the gap between Big West and other western mid majors WCAC and MWC is getting wider.

BYU beat the Beach 93-72 in the NIT. That’s the fourth place team in the WCC vs our regular season champ

Will be interesting to see, after a few years of data, if the wide-open transfer portal help or hurts the little guys, i.e. are the low-/mid-majors losing or gaining more talent, on balance?

USF is in the tournament for the first time since 1998; they have 7 transfers (not counting JC players). I think a lot of middle majors, especially private schools, will follow that model.

It will probably be a mixed bag. For every team it helps it will hurt another team. Smaller schools will lose a guy after a year or two who wants tougher competition but they'll also gain guys who might be less hesitant to transfer from a bigger school they're not playing as much as they'd like to if they don't have to sit out a year.

"Come here for playing time!" Similar recruiting model for the FCS football schools, I guess.

I just wonder if Davis could have kept Hawkins or TJ Shorts in the current "market."

Well in Hawkins's case, he had already transferred from Arizona St so he would have been eligible a year earlier for us. Then he would have had to sit out a year had he transferred from UC Davis. I assume he would have been able to use a redshirt year like he did when he transferred from Arizona St. He could have still done that though and might have wanted to if he felt it would help his pro prospects or if he wanted to give a big school another shot. In a world where he doesn't have to sit out a year going from ASU -> UCD, he could have redshirted and still been a junior at his new school.

Shorts is a trickier case. He would have been going into his senior year with only one year at the DI level already. I would guess he would have just stayed at UCD.

:up:

Another interesting foster is Saint Peter’s who knocked off Kentucky. 5 players from Africa. I just heard someone on the radio talking about Africa as the next recruiting hotbed since the NBA has started a serious developmental program. Again, another area Private schools can cash in more easily than public

Don’t know how Les will do recruiting in Africa. But go for it!

most come byway of some small academies that seem to specialize in producing athletes

St Mary's has been successful mining Australia and New Zealand for years and they have also been getting players from Eastern Europe. They destroyed Indiana in their first round game 82-59 and it wasn't even that close!

Fullerton is battling Duke hard but Duke's size has been simply too much so far. Duke is up 37-27 at the half. Dedrique Taylor has built his team around high level transfers.

A lot of the best mid-major teams are heavily recruiting Europe, Australia, Africa and New Zealand. We're going to see more of that in the BW also as well as a lot of transfers. I think the Ags will need to do the same soon to keep pace. The best players in the USA get identified early and almost invariably go to the Power Conference schools. Mid-major programs need to recruit internationally to find players of that caliber.