Loyola Marymount Cracks Top 20 in Polls; Arizona Remains Top Team

The Loyola Marymount Lions may not even notice they’ve broken into the national college basketball rankings of the Associated Press and United Press International for the first time in the school’s history. A seven-second attention span makes it difficult to absorb information.

“There’s nothing very mysterious about me and my coaching,” said Coach Paul Westhead, whose high-scoring Lions have won 17 in a row and are ranked 20th in both of this week’s wire service polls. “I teach a non-stop running game, shoot the ball within seven seconds.

“We play so hard, play a full-court press every play and then shoot so fast, our guys have trouble knowing what their names are, to say nothing about national rankings,” he said.

” If there are 20 or so teams that get better than us, we’ll be playing so hard we may not even notice we’re out of the rankings.”

Temple held on to the No. 1 ranking in both polls. In the AP poll, the Owls (20-1) received 28 first-place votes and 1,141 points in the poll of sportswriter and sportcasters. The next three teams--Purdue, Arizona and Oklahoma--remained the same from last week.

Loyola (20-3) received 117 points to take the 20th place in the voting by UPI’s board of coaches.