Ags clinch outright WAC title thanks to NMSU loss
Wednesday night saw some unlikely playmakers deliver Utah State its fourth consecutive Western Athletic Conference title, and third consecutive outright conference championship.
San Jose State’s Keith Schamberger drove the lane, looked to pass, realized he was wide open, and put up a 4-foot popper in the paint to give SJSU a 72-70 lead over NMSU in the mostly vacant Events Center in San Jose with 1:56 remaining in overtime.
With the score unchanged in the final seconds of overtime in San Jose, NMSU turned to its star, Troy Gillenwater, to make a play and win the game. Gillenwater fired a wide-open three as time expired and watched it click harmlessly off the front of the iron. One hundred or so students rushed the court and partied in front of the SJSU bench.
SJSU might as well have gift-wrapped the WAC trophy and shipped it to Logan Thursday morning.
This is the second straight year that Utah State has won a regular season championship before hitting the hardwood to clinch under its own steam. In the 2009-10 season, NMSU’s 100-92 loss at Nevada gave USU the lead it needed to earn its trophy before playing NMSU in the Spectrum on last year’s senior night.
This year’s senior night will give Aggie fans their final chance to see the most successful senior class of USU’s history. In the four years that Tai Wesley, Tyler Newbold, Pooh Williams, and Matt Formisano have played for the Aggies, USU has only lost a single home game.
The team that beat USU, St. Mary’s College, eventually went on to win its conference tournament and advance to the Sweet 16 of the NCAAs. As we all know, USU got its revenge on SMC last weekend in the BracketBuster.
The Aggies have amassed a record of 67-1 at home and 106-27 overall during that stretch. Only once in the last four years has USU lost more than 10 games in a season, and that season was 2007-08 when USU took four conference losses and had to share the title with three other teams. To put that in perspective, Louisiana Tech has lost 16 games this year alone.
USU has been to the NCAA tournament two consecutive seasons. Senior JC transfers Brian Green and Nate Bendall have never known any division one postseason other than the NCAA tournament, not to mention these two players were NJCAA champions at Salt Lake Community College before coming to Logan.
This year’s seniors have brought national recognition and respect to both their basketball program and to the University as a whole, amassing win after win after win on national television in remarkable fashion.
The six players who will play their final game in the Spectrum on Saturday against the University of Idaho (the only WAC team to beat USU this year so far) deserve nothing less than a true Spectrum sendoff for what they have given to the University, to Logan, to Cache Valley and to the state of Utah. Their skill, desire and will to win – a will that brought four trophies to Logan in four years – is about as rare in the world of college basketball as WAC regular season championship trophies are in the cases of every other WAC school.
– la.hem@aggiemail.usu.edu