OUR VIEW: Aggie men: Is that not the winning team?

When we get back from Spring Break, WAC play will be over for our Utah State Aggie men’s basketball team. We will have finished regular-season WAC play against New Mexico State and La-Tech, rocked it at the WAC tournament in Las Vegas, Nev. and will know our seed for the NCAA tournament.

    This basketball season has been a phenomenal one so far, and Senior Night was definitely one to remember, with the career-capping performances, sweet revenge for our only conference loss  against the Idaho Vandals, celebration of our fourth championship in as many years and a whole row of Wild Bills – but it’s not over yet.

    This postseason has the potential to be the biggest and best ever for Utah State. These 12 athletes – Tai Wesley, Nate Bendall, Brian Green, Tyler Newbold, Pooh Williams, Matt Formisano, Brady Jardine, Morgan Grim, James Walker, E.J. Farris, Brockeith Pane and Brad Brown – have built for themselves the chance to go further than any other team ever has in the NCAA tournament, bringing March Madness closer to home than ever before. In each of the previous occasions that we’ve made it to the NCAA tournament, we’ve lost in the first of six rounds.Several times in the past dozen seasons, we’ve come close. This is head coach Stew Morrill’s 10th championship in his 13 seasons at the helm of Aggie basketball, and if that doesn’t say that this is a top-notch program, I don’t know what does.

    We are ranked No. 21 in the nation right now – that’s 21st out of more than 300 teams in the country. That is impressive. This is a really special team. Aside from the one conference fluke against Idaho, the Aggie men have lost only two games this year, neither at the Spectrum and both to teams that were ranked when we weren’t. And BYU, now ranked third in the nation, needed some pretty bogus calls to bail them out of a near-loss at the Marriott Center.

    If you don’t have Spring Break plans yet, see about getting down to Las Vegas to get in on a piece of history and cheer our Aggies on to victory and into the history books. The team is going to need the Spectrum on Wheels with them in Nevada, if not for the Spectrum Magic, then to have someone to celebrate with when they win.

    We at The Statesman are fans of Aggie basketball, and we want to make sure we give Stew and his crew due credit for entertaining, inspiring and delighting us this season and let them know as they head into the postseason – We believe that they will win.