Tourney Time
The Aggies posted an impressive 21-6 regular season record.
With Thursday’s game against the Idaho Vandals in Anaheim, Calif., in the first round of the Big West Conference basketball tournament, it’s a whole new season.
“It’s a new season,” Utah State University forward Desmond Penigar said. “There’s preseason, there’s season, there’s conference and the post season – which is right now. Everything else is in the past and we’re working on the future.”
That they are.
No. 1 seed USU will face No. 8 UI at the Anaheim Convention Center at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, a team the Aggies have defeated twice this season.
Utah State first saw the Vandals on Jan. 26 in Moscow, coming away with a 57-46 victory. UI was one of the only teams to outrebound USU this season.
The two teams met again on Feb. 23 in the Spectrum, closing out the Aggies’ home season.
Following a ceremony honoring seniors Tony Brown, Brennan Ray and Jeremy Vague, the Aggies went on to defeat the Vandals 65-56.
“It’s always more difficult to beat a team three times in one year,” Utah State assistant basketball coach Randy Rahe said. “Idaho is going to be a very difficult game for us.”
Rahe knows this because he said he has done his homework. Despite the Aggies’ co-championship winning season, they are not quick to look past the Vandals.
“It was tough,” Penigar said of losing the last two games of the season. “We wanted to win the conference by ourselves. We didn’t want to win co-champions.”
Rahe said the team knows it can’t focus on the second round before the first round is over.
“People that do that don’t understand,” Rahe said. “They don’t understand what tournaments are all about. Just look around the country. If you get in a tournament situation, anything could happen. It’s a great opportunity for the lower seeds to knock somebody out because the natural thing to do is to look at the second round.
“If you buy into focusing in on the second round you will lose, he said.
“Idaho is hoping our media, or whoever’s media is focusing in on that [the second round for USU], and then they have a better chance,” Rahe said.
Aggie guard Ronnie Ross said the Aggies won’t even have a chance in the second round if they don’t complete the first round.
And Ross said he feels the team got an important factor out of the way before heading to the tournament.
USU lost the last two games of the regular season on the road to Pacific and Cal State Northridge.
“When you get a lot of wins sometimes you’re due for a loss,” he said. “Since then we got the losses out of the way, we can continue winning again.”
Rahe believes a key element to winning will come through defense and rebounding.
If the Aggies are outrebounded by Idaho again, he said there is a good chance the team will lose.
USU might also be packing its bags earlier than it would like if it defends like it did when Idaho visited the Spectrum- and the Vandals shot 48 percent and the team boards like it did against Pacific – coming away with 30 compared with 37.
“In any tournament you go into you have to defend and rebound. Our past experience the last two years we’ve focused in on that and our kids [the players] believed that and they carried it out. Defensive boards are the things that win tournaments,” Rahe said.
He said another thing the team needs to work on is executing a little more on offense.
Penigar said he thinks USU will be ready for UI, especially since they have played each other twice this season.
Even with the two recent losses, Rahe said he doesn’t think it will be a major factor unless it is focused on.
If USU would have lost the games at Pacific and CSN earlier in the season and would have gone out with a bang, everyone would have forgotten about the losses, he said.
“The bottom line is we have to play Idaho,” Rahe said. “Those last two games don’t matter. We just have to focus on what we need to do to beat Idaho.”
Although the team hasn’t thought much about how fan support will be affected, because Spring Break will not fall on its traditional time around the tournament, Rahe said he hopes they show up.
Last year the Aggies had a lot of fan support and the team notices it, he said.
“I think it’s a positive if it happens, but it won’t be a negative if it doesn’t happen,” Rahe said. “We are going to be focused on the games.”
Penigar said the team will still have a lot of support in Anaheim, especially from family members of the players.
“A lot of people will be down there supporting us,” he said.
The Aggies will take everything they can get, though.
Rahe said it helps in a huge way to have fan support, and if they could find any way to get down to the tournament it would be a big help.