I guess Santa Clara entered a 2-and-1 deal starting this past season. Cal really isn’t good enough to be throwing their weight like that but fine. I’d rather play Cal than not play them and hope that SCU can win more than it loses.
Not a bad group of competitors.
I’ve never been to the Bahamas…
Kind of a perfect tournament for SCU–major conference teams but a field that SCU can reasonably hope to beat.
Agreed. Looking at some of the projections next year and Bart Torvik has Oklahoma State 31, Depaul 94, and UCF 99. Pretty similar to the TCU/Fresno State tournament we played this season in terms of competition.
Last season was the probably the best top half in WCC history. This season looks to be more about lifting up the bottom, maybe at the expense of teams 2-5. I think that Gonzaga is clearly at the top, Pacific is less clearly at the bottom. How you rank the rest will depend on various biases. I could see BYU being as low as 7th or 8th and USD being as high as 3rd. I’ll inevitably overrate SCU and underrate USF. Such is life.
I think Portland is going to be overrated in almost every preseason projection because they were the hot team last year. The ladder gets a whole lot harder to climb the higher you go, and I don’t see the Pilots being able to get higher than 90 or so with their roster.
Pepperdine will be their usual selves: offensively capable of beating anyone, defensively capable of losing to anyone.
The bummer is that the Zags’ rise has been so parabolic that their fans will still whine about the WCC even if the conference has 8 top-100 teams (a stretch but not an impossibility). But for us, the conference only gets more competitive and exciting.
I don’t get the need for this?
Ever tried to travel to Laramie in the winter?
Wyoming as a state has 500k people (including a lot of members of my family), and Laramie has 30k or so.
I would imagine that 1) there’s a bunch of Wyo alumni in SLC and 2) it’s easier for SCU to go to SLC than Laramie. Playing at a random community college doesn’t exactly scream “big leagues” of college basketball though.
I wonder if the trip is bundling another game somewhere in Utah, or perhaps Nevada.
I remember years ago, when KK was first coaching (maybe his first year?), we did a trip to Reno, and then onward for a game against the Utes.
My hometown! I might have to make the trip. Personal factoid…when I was a kid and worked for my dad’s construction company, one jobsite I toiled on was @ SLCC. We were demo-ing the current basketball offices to build out their space.
The SLC neutral site location may have been an easy way to agree on a location for a single game instead of fighting over who got the home game. And maybe one or both parties weren’t interested in a 2-game, home and home.
So summarizing what I think we know to date re: the non-con schedule:
-Nov. 7th vs. EWU (home)
-Nov. 18th vs. DePaul (neutral site)
-Nov. 20th vs. OK State or UCF (neutral site)
-Nov. 30th vs. Wyoming (neutral site)
-Dec. ??? vs. Cal (home)
-Dec. 13th vs Portland St. (home)
-Dec. 22nd vs. Boise St. (home)
Plus Assumed (annual game):
- vs. San Jose St. (assume at home, was at SJSU last year)
That’s 8 games. Will need another 4 to 7 depending on how many WCC league games are played…I heard the league is considering going back to 18games.
Other possibilities to fill out the schedule:
- Home game vs. a sub-D1 school. At least 1, maybe 2. There’s always at least 1 of these.
- We had home games vs. Stanford, Nevada and UC Irvine last season…could see a road game vs. one or a couple of those.
- Cal Poly has been on our schedule more often that not the last dozen+ years, played them at home as part of SoCal Challenge last season, played @ SLO in 2020…so maybe another away game vs. CalPoly in 2022.
- Beyond that there’s bound to be another Big West or Big Sky or WAC school.
- Since the WCC will likely be looking to fill BYU’s shoes would be interesting to play Seattle U who’s a likely candidate to join the WCC, plus they’ve been decent of late.
If the Broncos can get 2/3 of Stanford, Nevada, or UC Irvine plus Cal Poly, Davis, or another local-ish D1 program, I’ll be pretty happy with the OOC schedule for the second year in a row.