Bronco Nation,
I kinda can’t believe I didn’t know this page existed, but I just found it. I graduated last year as a manager and started the Santa Clara Basketball Podcast this year (I recognize HoopsGuy from Twitter). There is nothing more in the world I want than to see this team play in the NCAA Tournament.
If you’re interested, here is the link to my latest episode talking about the L at SMC, W against LMU, W against Wazzu, and the WCC Tournament seeding scenarios.
If you don’t want to listen, I’ll break down the scenarios here; assuming that we take care of business at Pacific (pray to God I don’t have to eat my words on that), Santa Clara cannot fall below the 4 seed even if Oregon State finishes 2-0 with wins over USF and SMC. We have the tiebreaker over them due to their loss against Portland.
In my opinion, the best case scenario by far is actually not the best seed we could end up with. Here it is;
Santa Clara beats Gonzaga
San Francisco beats Gonzaga
In this scenario, Gonzaga would fall all the way to the 4 seed, we would be 3, and the Dons would be 2. This would mean that we would NOT have to beat both the Gaels and the Zags to win the tournament, we would only need to beat one of them, and would instead face San Francisco in the semis assuming we win in the Quarters, which I would guess would be against Washington State.
Why is this episode called “Tomorrow is Everything?” Because if we win tomorrow (and again, assuming we beat Pacific), there is no world in which we are ranked LOWER than the Zags come Vegas. We would have the same record as they do and we would have the tiebreaker winning both games against them (imagine saying that three months ago). The Leavey Center will be jumping tomorrow, it’s a big game by default because its the Zags. But I would venture to say it’s the biggest non-post season game I have experienced since I began paying attention to the team when I started working for it my sophomore year (Jalen’s year)
I apologize for the audio at the beginning!