Crown Eludes Slumping UC Irvine

A couple of weeks ago, the Anteaters must have looked down at their jerseys, noticed the “Irvine” on the front and accepted their fate.

How else to explain their dismal slide?

UC Irvine lost four of its last six regular-season games--including Sunday’s 80-74 defeat by Pacific--and failed in a bid for its first conference championship.

Long Beach State, 17-10 overall and 12-6 in the conference, wins the Big West title with an assist from the Anteaters. Irvine and Pacific, both 15-11, 11-7, are tied for second, but the Anteaters will get a first-round bye in the tournament, which begins Friday at Reno. Irvine will play in the second semifinal at 9 p.m. Saturday.

Irvine and Pacific each won once in head-to-head competition and both split with top-seeded Long Beach. The Anteaters were seeded second because they swept fourth-place Utah State while the Tigers were 1-1 against the Aggies.

Irvine trailed by as many as 23 points in the second half Sunday and the 3,465 in the Spanos Center were both cheering and jeering.

“We didn’t win, but we extended a message that we’re not done,” Irvine Coach Rod Baker said after the Anteaters missed only two shots in the last 2:39 to make the final score respectable.

Pacific Coach Bob Thomason still likes the Tigers’ chances in the tournament, however.

“We’re 8-1 in the second half [of conference play],” he said. “We’re the hottest team in the conference right now. We have depth. We have two or three ways to beat you.”

It may, however, be time to wonder about the state of the Anteaters going into the tournament. This is a team that left on this trip with two chances to go down in school history as the first to capture a conference title, and looked feeble during consecutive losses. Only forward Paul Foster, who made nine of 11 shots and scored a game-high 22 points, and guard Brian Keefe, who was six of nine from the floor and scored 21, were in sync Sunday.