Aggies: Heroes in Our Midst?

The scene: Inside the press room at Long Beach Arena, minutes after the completion of the 1992 Big West Conference basketball tournament.

The mood: Wall-to-wall anticlimax.

And this was after a championship final witnessed by only 1,631 misguided souls--presumed to be Shoreline Village shoppers with bad directions, or Long Beach Grand Prix fans with bad calendars.

“Not New Mexico State again.”

Yes, New Mexico State again.

The same New Mexico State that lost in the first round of the NCAAs in 1991.

The same New Mexico State that lost in the first round of the NCAAs in 1990.

And 1979.

And 1975.

And 1971.

Forlornly, conference officials and beat writers huddled around a TV screen, awaiting the announcement of the NCAA pairings, as if it really mattered. New Mexico State was in the first round. That’s all you needed to know. You already knew the rest:

New Mexico State, out in the first round.

When it comes to keeping March travel expenses down, the Aggies can do it all. They were 23-5 and ranked 17th in the nation in 1991--and they lost by eight to Creighton. They were 26-4 and ranked 11th in the nation in 1990--and they gave up 111 points to Loyola Marymount.

Their coach, Neil McCarthy, was also a five-time loser in the NCAA first round, three of the defeats charged to him while at Weber State.

Only once did McCarthy advance beyond the first round at Weber State.

He did it in 1979.

Against New Mexico State.

NMS. Never More than a Sub-regional. The Aggies seemed on course again in 1992, taking their least regarded team of the decade, ranked 44th in the country and seeded 12th in the West, to Tempe for their traditional in-and-out, with DePaul set to do the honors.

By now, your office pool knows that DePaul drowned, and Southwestern Louisiana right after it.

By now, UCLA is learning the names of Eric Traylor and Cliff Reed and wondering how a Westchester High point guard named Sam Crawford ever got away to Las Cruces.

By now, Big West officials are giving silent thanks that Fresno State couldn’t hold a nine-point lead in overtime . . . and Cal State Long Beach couldn’t take advantage of the home court . . . and Pacific forward Randy Lavender couldn’t sink a game-tying free throw with three seconds left in regulation.

Any of those things happen in the Big West tournament and the only first round New Mexico State gets to consider goes by the initials N, I and T.

Instead, New Mexico State is 2-0 in this NCAA tournament, ranking with UTEP and Cincinnati in the double-take division, and the Big West has just as many teams in the round of 16 as the the Big East, the Big Eight and the SEC.

“People who follow the conference were telling me in Tempe that everything’s normal,” Big West Commissioner Jim Haney says. “They were saying, ‘The Big West has another team in the final 16, just like always.’ ”

Love that Big West humor.

UNLV used to be the Big West’s lock on the final 16, but this year, the NCAA had the lock removed. As a conference member, UNLV has been to the Final Four three times and the round of 16 or beyond three other times. But besides UNLV? You have to go back to 1978 and Cal State Fullerton’s Cinderella Titans to find another Big West team that lasted three rounds in an NCAA tournament.

For New Mexico State, the last two weeks have been one long misdirection play. While the Big West grimaced at the sight of its tournament gate receipts and bemoaned its misfortune (“If you could have painted a worst-case scenario, we lived it,” Haney says), it actually couldn’t have been luckier in Long Beach.

UC Santa Barbara and Long Beach would have meant more fans for a Big West final, but UC Santa Barbara and Long Beach went a combined 0-2 in the NIT.

Pacific’s unconventional weaponry--Three-Pointers Over Stockton--would have made the Tigers intriguing dark horses in the NCAA field, but at 15-15, Pacific stood to draw a lower seeding than New Mexico State, and hence, a tougher road through the sub-regional.

At the time, New Mexico State only seemed like a known quantity. Quantity, not quality. McCarthy heard the Aggie-bashing and the second-round bye jokes. Lifting his trademark cigarillo from his lips, he took time to bash back.

“I think that’s foolish,” he said. “Generally, Vegas goes (from the Big West) and one of the rest of us. Vegas is always in the top 5, the top 10, so they’re always getting the highest seed in the West. We go in as an at-large team and we get the tougher draw.”

Two Sundays ago, McCarthy wasn’t so bold as to predict victory, let alone two, but he did help to foreshadow the upsets.

“The last couple of years, we were a running, gunning, pressing team,” McCarthy said. “Come tournament time, our kids would be exhausted. If you normally run 500,000 miles during a basketball season, you run a million when you press. By the time our kids started the tournament, their legs were dead.

“We had to play that way, because we didn’t shoot as well as this team does. But I gave up on the press early this year--I traded in our turnover ratio for better shooters, and it shows. Right now, our legs are still springy and not dead.”

Two rounds later, those legs continue to run. They have run uphill, no easy assignment, and next they run into UCLA, which should be the end of the 10K.

But win or lose, the Aggies have already run away from their bad reputation. They’ve shed their stigma and shipped it to another forgotten outpost in the Southwestern desert.

So, why can’t Arizona win a first-round game?