Big West Big Dud to Rest of Country

If the best hope of your favorite basketball conference to make a name for itself nationally is that some clueless 7-footer calls the office of a men’s coach and asks if it’s OK to come to school because the name of the school is Pacific and the poor foreigner assumes the school is, yes, located on the Pacific Ocean, then your favorite college basketball conference is the Big West.

Michael Olowokandi is gone now, a No. 1 NBA draft pick from Pacific, a team that couldn’t get an NCAA tournament bid because the Big West Conference is respected so little it couldn’t get two teams invited to last year’s tournament.

Maybe the heir to Olowokandi is at Nevada, where Coach Pat Foster has brought to Reno a 6-foot-9 player from Athens, Greece; a 6-9 player from Toronto; and a 6-9 player from Lisbon, Portugal. But for now the Big West is going to drop back to obscurity, a dark, dank place not located on an NCAA map, it seems, and a place where it has lived pretty much since Nevada Las Vegas bolted in 1996.

It has been one and out for the Big West in the last five NCAA tournaments. One team in, one game lost.

In 1993 New Mexico State won two games and in 1992 New Mexico State won one game. The mastermind of those triumphs, Neil McCarthy, is suing the university and, as part of that lawsuit, has literally been told to have his head examined, being ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

The 12 Big West men’s basketball coaches gathered at an anonymous LAX hotel the other day to talk about their anonymous teams and their anonymous conference, which includes Orange County’s two Division I programs, UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton.

Stew Morrill, the new coach at Utah State, told a Mormon joke (he’s a Mormon himself so calm down) and then gave a passionate speech about how stunned he is about the lack of respect he finds his new conference is given.

“It is,” Morrill said, “a crying shame that two teams from this league did not get into the NCAA tournament last year.” Morrill, who came from Colorado State and the Western Athletic Conference, said that “in the WAC we felt like we needed to get four teams into the tournament every year. There’s no doubt we need to get two teams in. We all need to be ambassadors for the league.”

But then Morrill explained how one of his new recruits, a player deciding between Utah State and New Mexico, “a kid just back from a [Mormon] mission,” Morrill said, was told by Morrill that something like 80% of the students at Utah State were Mormon.

So, Morrill said, the recruit acquired a large smile and said, “I’m coming to Utah State. I’m gonna find me a wife.”

That doesn’t seem the way to basketball success in general, though.

After this begging for respectability, Morrill also said that Utah State, which was the one team to represent the Big West in the NCAA tournament last year, “will have five guys who have ever checked into a Division I game” on its 1998-99 team.

Of course, just before Morrill spoke, North Texas Coach Vic Trilli, who used the word “schedule” more times than a New York City bus driver, pointed out that his 1998-99 nonconference “schedule” is: Texas A&M;, Texas Tech, TCU, Iowa State, Tulsa, Wyoming, Louisiana Tech, Maryland, Arkansas.

All but two of those games are on the road. By the time the Mean Green opens the Big West “schedule” at Irvine, it might be 0-10 because “we have seven freshmen on the roster plus two sophomores and two transfers,” Trilli said.

Did anybody in this league recruit anybody before this season?

Pat Foster’s Nevada team plays nine nonconference games from teams in, according to Foster, “higher-ranked conferences than ours.” That includes a national TV game against Final Four participant Stanford. The Cardinal is ranked in the top three nationally in most preseason polls.

Foster, who lamented that “we’ll probably have two foreign players in our starting lineup,” stressed the importance of Big West teams “going out and playing good schedules, yes, but it’s more important to go win some of those games. We do need to win more games than we’ve won in the past to get credibility.”

Last season Utah State did beat Minnesota. New Mexico State did beat Virginia and Ohio State. Long Beach State did beat USC. But mostly Big West teams were losing to the likes of Pepperdine (which beat four Big West teams), Norfolk State, Eastern Washington, Sacramento State, Southern and Florida International.

Temple Coach John Chaney has taught the Atlantic 10 how to gain credibility. Chaney would take Temple anywhere, any time to play anyone. The higher-ranked the opponent, the better. If his teams got beat badly early in the season, that didn’t matter. He was sure it would toughen up his Owls for conference play.

And, slowly, more kids, better players, would come to Temple for the chance to play against all these great teams. Temple would win some of those games.

Other coaches in the league noticed how Temple was always on national television and always winning the Atlantic 10 too. John Calipari came to UMass and did just like Chaney did. Played anyone, any time, anywhere. Now the Atlantic 10, once just a poor sister to the Big East, is arguably the strongest conference in the East.

Would this formula work in the Big West?

Maybe it’s worth considering.

But not until conference schools quit doing things like this--New Mexico State Coach Lou Henson has taken four transfers and an assistant coach from Northeastern Illinois, a school that dropped basketball, so pathetic were its efforts at competition.

It is impossible to imagine Nevada or Pacific beating Stanford. Or UC Irvine beating Arizona or Long Beach State beating Utah. Easier to see Fullerton losing to Montana State or New Mexico State losing to Texas Southern.

“I thought several teams in the league were as good as teams in the Big 10,” said Henson, the former Illinois coach.

Uh, which teams, coach?