In This Case, West Is Not the Best

The Big West men’s basketball coaches gathered electronically Tuesday to discuss the start of conference play this week.

Here is the best quote of the morning’s group telephone call: “I think we’re pretty average,” Idaho Coach Dave Farrar said. “Kind of up and down. We’re pretty good in Montana but, unfortunately, there are no Montana teams in the league.”

Even its coaches can’t blow smoke. The best you can say about most of the Big West teams is that they are pretty average. Long Beach State has posted victories over USC and Kansas State, and this is good. The 49ers are trying to save the job of their coach, Wayne Morgan, though, and this isn’t the best way to play basketball.

New Mexico State has held up the honor of the Big West. Coach Lou Henson’s team already has beaten New Mexico twice, a real slap in the face to New Mexico’s hotshot coach, Fran Fraschilla, who arrived from a stint at St. John’s and brings a real New York attitude to the state. New Mexico State also has knocked off Washington and UTEP.

But New Mexico State is also leaving the conference, along with North Texas, Nevada and Boise State. This is bad.

Welcome to the Lame Duck Conference.

Maybe, eventually, the Big West will become something special. The expected additions of Cal State Northridge and UC Riverside will make this a California-centric Division I conference. The conference basketball tournament will be moving back to the Anaheim Convention Center for the 2001 event.

This could offer Orange County another chance to be part of something special. There is nothing better than the basketball tournaments of conferences like the Big West, conferences where only one team is going to get an NCAA playoff spot. The gathering of teams, no matter how talent-challenged, that know that getting hot for three or four games will bring them a brief spot of national attention, almost always provides spectacular shots and spectacular misses.

There will be a chance for the Big West to nourish some existing rivalries and create some exciting new ones. Cal State Fullerton, UC Irvine, Long Beach State, UC Riverside, Cal State Northridge--these teams, and their fans, could look forward with a little extra emotion to games against the others. Local players who know each other from high school and playground ball can work up a little extra animosity. What fun.

That’s a year away, though.

This year, we have a bunch of teams packing up and looking forward to their big moves.

You know how it is when you’ve bought that new house, but you can’t move for two months? You still live life every day, but you keep yourself at arm’s length from this place, which suddenly seems a little shabby around the edges, a little used up, a little worthless.

Is North Texas ever going to bring a team to Fullerton or Irvine after this season? Not likely. Will anybody care? Even less likely.

Henson and New Mexico State would be happy to use the Big West one last time for an NCAA berth. Win the conference tournament and never look back. And Henson said that, after his Aggies have had their big victories, maybe their attitude toward the Big West teams might be a little cavalier.

“What happens in our league,” Henson said, “is that everybody goes out and plays good teams on the road in the preseason so the records are not that good. But I’ve been telling our players that teams in our league are just as tough as these other people we’ve been playing.”

The best hope for the rest of the league is that Henson’s players don’t listen to him.

It is Morgan at Long Beach State who most needs that automatic NCAA berth. In his fourth year at the Beach, Morgan, who came highly regarded after a long career as an assistant at Syracuse, hasn’t yet managed to take the 49ers to the NCAA tournament. As bad as the Big West has been, this lack of NCAA postseason play has not been welcomed by administrators. “Win, Wayne, Win” is the slogan now.

Which brings us to our local guys.

There are no expectations.

Fullerton, suffering from a probation that cost them the chance to play any exhibition games, gave the conference its most embarrassing loss, to Simon Fraser, a team from Canada. Steady center Matt Caldwell is gone, injured. Any victory the Titans get this season is going to be a surprise.

And to make things worse, Fullerton opens the conference season on the road. At Utah State. “Eighteen straight years we haven’t won there,” Titan Coach Bob Hawking says.

For Irvine, things are a little better. The Anteaters (7-4) already have won more games than all of last season. Irvine did lose 14 consecutive conference games in 1999, and that is not easy to do. Coach Pat Douglass says a last-place finish would be a disappointment. Maybe. But any other spot in the final standings will be considered a success.

So let the Big West season begin. Come on, wake up. We said the Big West men’s basketball season is about to begin.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com