West Coast Bias
Early last week, I spent a pleasant evening flipping back and forth between two fantastic college basketball games involving top 10 teams. On ESPN was Kansas State’s stunning obliteration of newly minted No. 1 Kansas. Jacob Pullen, the enigmatic K-State point guard was chucking silly three-pointers from way outside and just burying them. The crowd was freaking out. Great basketball atmosphere, great game (unless you’re a Kansas fan, of course).
The other game featured arguably the best team out West, sixth-ranked San Diego State, scrambling to hold off a game UNLV in Las Vegas. Every time UNLV made a run at the Aztecs, San Diego State guard D.J. Gay had an answer. Big shot after big shot. Another great basketball game.
I was enjoying both so much I did something I rarely do and got online during the game to tweet about how much fun it was to watch both games at the same time. It was sometime the next morning that I finally discovered one of those games — the SDSU-UNLV matchup — had actually already been over for two whole days. Huh.
Thankfully, it’s not like I have some massive Twitter following and was going to get called out. But given that I consider myself something of a college basketball expert and write multiple weekly columns on the subject, it was a pretty weak showing. Plus, it was a game involving a top-10 team. I should have been more aware of it. Like most screw-ups in my life now, and there are plenty, I blame fatherhood for this one, too.
But I still enjoyed the game, and echoing an old network summer schedule ad campaign, it was still new to me. And since I’m as likely as anyone you’ll ever meet to watch games that have been over for decades, much less a couple of days, in their entirety, then it’s not surprising I’m not that bothered at being fooled by cable TV into momentarily losing my grip on reality. Wouldn’t guess I’m the only one with that problem these days.
I’ve confessed to some pretty nerdy stuff in this space over the last few months, including but not limited to boyhood obsession with aeronautics, spending time at K-Mart and keeping regular tabs on triple backup point guards in far flung basketball conferences for the fun of it. But perhaps I top this when I reveal that I own somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 old, already completed college basketball games on DVD, not to mention the many dozens more I still keep on inaccessible VHS tapes (My VCR finally broke.). I know there is an ESPN Classic that shows old games, so it’s not that weird, and certainly a bunch of the games I own one might deem classics: the 1983 NCAA final, a 1990 Elite Eight matchup between Georgia Tech and Michigan State, etc.
But too many of them are pretty pedestrian affairs as well. Bad mid-00s Kentucky games where the object was apparently to try and out-mediocre your unsuspecting opponent. I think there’s even a football game or two thrown in there for good measure and I barely even watch football. I guess I enjoy old games as an aficionado of sorts, like a cinema buff might re-watch Francis Ford Coppola movies. I’d make the argument the 1998 title game is better than The Conversation, personally.
So given my predilections, watching and tweeting on a game in real time that had already taken place might not prove I’m unattached to reality in toto. But what it does prove is that even a self-described basketball junkie like myself isn’t paying attention to what the purported best teams out West are doing. Not really. It’s that East Coast bias, baby, going strong.
Then again, part of the problem is that we just don’t take teams out there seriously anymore. Only a handful of teams west of Kansas have even maintained anything resembling relevance. Sometimes it seems like the basketball punditry just keeps propping the Gonzagas of the world up because they feel like they have to. Why doesn’t Xavier get the darling treatment that Seth Davis or Jay Bilas offer the Zags? Or Washington? Xavier has been much more dangerous, and good, in the last few years. Excepting the three-year run by UCLA in the mid-00s, and it’s a big exception, it’s mostly much ado about nothing out there.
And this year, West Coast basketball is particularly bland. The PAC-10 is just terrible. Like, historically terrible. Arizona and UCLA are running away with the conference and neither of those teams passes the ‘eye test’. Are either capable of finishing in the top half of the Big East, Big Ten or probably even the SEC East? Arizona’s best win outside the conference was N.C. State. That’s like saying Paulie Shore has a best movie. The PAC-10 is trying hard, I guess, but gosh, I wish my Kentucky squad could face Oregon State and Oregon and Arizona State and their ilk twice a season.
The two best teams in the West by record and reputation are San Diego State and BYU, both of whom play in the same conference, the Mountain West. It’s hard to tell whether either of those teams is a legit threat to make the Final Four. Both have had great seasons and have fantastic individual players, but four wins in two weeks in the tournament seems like a lot to ask either of them based on what I’ve seen, and on recent tournament history. But we keep hearing from folks who do this for a living about BYU’s Jimmer Fredette and San Diego State’s Leonard and Gay and their teammates, so we have to assume they’re worth the trouble, right? I’d argue no.
It seems like every year some ostensibly mid-major team pads its record out West, plays its way into the top 10 or 12 of the polls, earning a seed it still can’t advance with, while others with tougher conference schedules duke it out for scraps back East. Usually, it’s Gonzaga or UNLV. Last season, New Mexico came in with the big, and as it turned out, predictably hollow, reputation. Money here says one of BYU or SDSU will tank in the first or second round, probably BYU, while the other may win an extra game or two then get pounded.
This undue hype raises the question: if we keep getting told these guys are so good, but they really aren’t, then who out there is more deserving of the ink and TV face time these guys are getting? This past weekend’s Bracket Buster games made for a nice lead-in to who we aren’t hearing enough about. Last year, you’d have made a mint if you’d known that Northern Iowa was capable of destroying a bracket. This year, as I mentioned last week, there is a good chance for even more tournament parity, meaning there are plenty of Northern Iowas out there lurking, waiting for a chance to be an utter surprise to the under-informed come bracket time. That is, assuming they can edge out all the overrated Big East teams and actually get in.
Maybe the best league outside the major conferences this year is the Colonial Athletic Association, which features a whole slew of quality upset candidates. George Mason has been the class of the league to date, but not far behind are Old Dominion, Hofstra and VCU. The real danger for napping BCS schools among these squads is not just talent — each of these schools has it — but actual star-level, NBA good talent. An All-Star team from just the CAA would be a handful for a similar team from any of the name conferences. Add in a recent history of legitimate NCAA tournament success, and whoever from this league gets into the Dance will give someone a nasty headache.
Last year, small school darling Butler nearly won the national title, coming as close as a so-called mid-major has ever come to bringing home the hardware. But this year, the Bulldogs — top-20 ranked in the preseason — aren’t even the best team in the Horizon League. That would be Cleveland State. Led by Norris Cole, maybe the top point guard playing in college right now, and coached by Gary Waters, the Vikings are probably going to cream somebody in the first round. Two years ago CSU was a tournament surprise after pummeling Wake Forest in the Vikings’ first trip back to the NCAAs in over 20 years. Don’t be shocked when it happens again.
Waters’ onetime coaching home, Kent State of the Mid-American Conference, is going to be a tough team to face in the postseason, too. Former Ohio University star Geno Ford has brought the same bulldog toughness he played with at Ohio to Kent State as coach. His Golden Flashes will be a tough draw in the opening round this March.
The league that gave us Northern Iowa last year could give us Northern Iowa again. But even if the Panthers can’t make a return engagement, the team that eventually wins the Missouri Valley Conference’s automatic bid will be battle-hardened. The top tier of the MVC has bloodied itself all season long, with Missouri State and Wichita State currently riding atop the standings. The league has for years played basketball at a very high level, and it will probably earn multiple bids to the tournament this go around as well.
I talked in this column last week about Oakland (MI) center Keith Benson, but the bigger concern for potential NCAA tournament opponents should be Oakland’s experience playing against the big conference schools. In addition to beating Tennessee in Knoxville, Oakland played road games at Ohio State, Michigan State, Michigan, West Virginia, Purdue and Illinois. Yes, they lost each of those games, some of them close and some not so. But on a neutral court in a one-game playoff, you’d much rather your lower seeded opponent not be completely unfazed by the bright lights and the name on your uniform.
Last year, Cornell was one of those teams that showed little intimidation in the spotlight, making a run to the Sweet 16 out of the Ivy League. This year, two teams are vying to take the struggling Big Red’s place at the table. Princeton and Harvard are both quality teams full of the kind of fundamental, smart basketball players we’ve long come to associate with the Ivy. Either would love to see a fundamentally flawed Virginia Tech, Marquette or Nebraska on the tournament’s first weekend.
There are too many of these teams to go in depth on them all. Some are unfamiliar schools coached by plenty familiar names, like College of Charleston, whose white mop-topped head coach Bobby Cremins is well known to longtime basketball watchers from his days at Georgia Tech. Former Clemson and Auburn boss Cliff Ellis’ Coastal Carolina could all be in the mix as a first-round spoiler. Likewise for former St. John’s boss Mike Jarvis’ team at Florida Atlantic, currently the Sun Belt conference leader.
But even for programs you almost never see on TV and whose personnel and coaches are mostly completely unknown, places like Belmont, Morehead State, Bucknell and Long Island, the tournament represents a chance at tasting even a sliver of the success that the Kentuckys and North Carolinas and Dukes take as a birthright. One school which would probably relish a nationally televised shot at the big boys is the Big Sky Conference’s Montana, which has already beaten a pair of PAC-10 schools this year.
Maybe for the last few weeks of the season instead of hearing about the manufactured fluctuation of an underachieving UCLA’s NCAA “bubble status” we can talk about which pod the Grizzlies should be slotted in? Heck, maybe we can just give them the PAC-10’s spot in the field. It would probably take a few days for anyone on this side of the country to even notice.
Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.