UCI Back at Home in the Cellar

You think I like this?” Bill Mulligan said as he frowned at the reporters who gathered around the carcass of another UC Irvine basketball defeat. “And now I have to go into the boosters (meeting) and face them?

“No, I don’t enjoy it all. . . .

“This gets old.”

They’re b-a-a-a-c-k. Back in the saddle of the horse that falls rounding the turn. Back in the tank they thought they sealed off last March. Back on the skids, back to the cellar floor, back in last place in the 1991 Big West Conference standings.

The Anteaters got there Thursday night after losing to Cal State Long Beach, 72-60, at the Bren Center--Irvine’s ninth defeat in 12 conference games and seventh in the last eight.

That’s not quite the same level of despair the Anteaters reached last season when they lost 15 in a row en route to a 5-23 washout, but it has been enough to exhume the sordid memories that everyone in Irvine wanted purged from the cranium, if not the files of the sports information office.

“It is hard trying not to think about it,” said center Ricky Butler, a veteran of both the droughts of ’90 and ’91. “I know we have a better team now. We’re going through a bad time, that’s all. . . . We’re doing all the same things we did earlier in the season when we were winning, there’s just been some mental slippage.”

Such as forgetting how to shoot the outside jumper.

“I’ve never had a team before that couldn’t shoot the ball,” Mulligan lamented. He couldn’t believe the final score--Long Beach 72, Irvine 60. Who could? Most years, the Anteaters score 60 points and then leave the court to listen to Mulligan’s halftime talk.

“We had seven baskets in the second half,” Mulligan said, shaking his head glumly. “I don’t know if I should give Long Beach credit for that or what. . . . They don’t guard some of our guys. If they’re double-teaming Butler and they’re double-teaming (Jeff) Herdman, someone’s got to be open.”

Oh, they were, they were.

Jeff Von Lutzow and Gerald McDonald were open for a total of seven three-point attempts. They missed all of them.

Cornelius Banks was open for seven field-goal tries. He made two of them.

In the second half, Irvine shot 30.4% from the field and for the game, the Anteaters were 38%, which doesn’t help their season mark of 43.3%

This defeat was tougher to accept than most because the Anteaters had walked this trail before. Last month at Long Beach, Irvine led by 12 points in the second half before trailing by three at the buzzer. Thursday, Irvine led by seven points at halftime before returning to the floor and watching the 49ers score 15 of the next 17 points.

And this free fall from a respectable early season form causes the teeth to grind even harder because, aside from reigning NCAA champion Nevada Las Vegas and No. 16 New Mexico State, the Big West has become the Big Less, where 6-5 is enough to stake a claim to third place.

“I don’t think any of the other (eight) teams are very good,” Mulligan said, “and that’s what bothers me the most about this. I looked at (Irvine assistant) Ernie Carr at halftime and said, ‘How the hell are we winning?’ It’s because Long Beach doesn’t shoot the ball or take care of the ball any better than we do.

“I haven’t been impressed with any of them. You look at what we’re doing and you say, ‘Geez, how can I say that?’ But we played Fullerton here last week and knocked the ball down really well. We played Fresno here and scored 105 points.

“Any one of us can get third place. But right now, third place looks a pretty far ways away.”

Right now, last place is reality. Before tip-off, Irvine was tied for ninth with San Jose State at 3-8 but San Jose got lucky. It had a bye. So the Anteaters said goodby to ninth, hello to 10th and maybe farewell to the conference postseason tournament, now that the Big West has limited this year’s invitations to eight.

And next up for Irvine: New Mexico State on Saturday, followed by UC Santa Barbara and back-to-back road games at Fullerton and Las Vegas.

Irvine is 1-10 on the road this season.

“We really needed this one,” Herdman said. “The way we play on the road, we have to win every game we can at home. In that respect, this might have been our most important game of the year.”

A sign of the times: Before Thursday’s game, Mulligan booted two players--junior forward Elgin Rogers and walk-on guard Todd Knight--off the team. He said he did it for their own good.

“I haven’t become Hussein yet, where I just tell a couple kids, ‘We’re losing, you’re gone,’ ” Mulligan said. “We just had too many bodies. They were slowing up practice. I think both of them are happy.”

And getting happier with every new Irvine defeat.

* TOUGH DEFENSE: Cal State Long Beach kept UC Irvine’s top scorers in check for 72-60 victory. C6