Utah State Continues UCI’s Agony
Two Big West teams facing two different versions of adversity--one season-long, the other for about a week--squared off Saturday night, with Utah State dropping UC Irvine, 87-50.
The Aggies had lost starting guard Duane Rogers to a knee injury 11 days before and had fallen to Pacific and Long Beach State in road games. The Anteaters have little sympathy for such woes; they lost their 20th game of the season.
The victory keeps Utah State (16-7, 9-3) in first place in the Eastern Division of the Big West Conference. UCI drops to 1-20, 1-11 in the conference’s Western Division.
“I thought they were quite the rebounding team, as good as we’ve seen,” UCI Coach Rod Baker said, addressing Utah State’s 46-17 rebounding edge. “We knew they would be. We talked about it. There are certain fundamentals such as blocking out, but most of it comes down to determination and toughness, and Utah State demonstrated a tremendous amount of that in their rebounding.
“That is a very telling statistic.”
UCI’s 6-foot-10 freshman center Andrew Carlson agreed. “It was really physical under there, more so than usual. The refs were letting things go and sometimes that is a good thing, but I guess tonight [the Aggies] just wanted it more.”
Aggie senior forward Maurice Spillers, a former L.A. Southwest College standout, scored 22 points to lead the Aggies, who had three players in double figures. Marcus Saxon scored in 14 and Kevin Rice had 10.
The Anteaters were led by sophomore Lamarr Parker, who scored 21, and Wendell Robinson with 15. UCI’s second-leading scorer, Brian Johnson (11.1 point average), didn’t play Saturday because he was in Chicago attending his grandmother’s funeral, Baker said.
“It would have been nice for USU to see him; he would have helped us a little, I’m sure,” Baker said. “He’s one of the best freshmen in the league and together with our other freshmen we have a good little nucleus for next year.”
UCI went eight minutes without scoring and Utah State went on a 21-0 run that began with the score 22-18 with 6:40 remaining in the first half. Robinson made a three-point shot at the 18:20 mark in the second half to stop the scoreless streak. Utah State later put together a 16-2 run to make it 63-31.
UCI had outrebounded eight of its first 11 Big West opponents, but had only two offensive rebounds Saturday. The Aggies used their rebounding edge in the second half to get out front on UCI, scoring on a half-dozen transition dunks and layups, including one round-house dunk by Rice that delighted the sparse--by Utah State standards--crowd of 7,511.