COLUMN: Crank up the volume
Quick, name every single team who has won a regular-season Western Athletic Conference championship over the past seven years.
If your list was short, then you probably got all of the answers correctly. Utah State and Nevada are the only ones. In other words, Wednesday’s game between the two teams is a battle of perennial WAC juggernauts, even if Nevada doesn’t look like the team they once were.
The truth about Nevada is that they indeed are not the same team that they were a few years ago when they were climbing up as high as No. 9 in the national rankings and winning NCAA Tournament games. They’re even the same team that they were two years ago when they thoroughly crushed the last Utah State team to crack the top 25 on their home court in Reno.
At 8-13 on the season, Nevada looks like a program in shambles in comparison to where they were, but don’t be fooled. Anybody who looked at Nevada’s roster before the season, with the recruiting class they had and the big-time transfers coming their way, knew this would be a team to struggle early and who would likely put things together to become a threat as the season went on.
Guess what happened?
The Wolf Pack struggled early, but has indeed put things together as the season has gone on. Lone-returning starter Dario Hunt has emerged as a legitimate scoring threat to go along with the stellar rebounding and defense he always provided as a freshman and sophomore, and true freshman Deonte Burton has finally found his way as consistent scoring threat out of the backcourt.
Throw in a pair of transfer players from some legendary programs in Malik Story and Olek Czyz, and Nevada suddenly has itself a fearsome foursome of scoring options from inside and out.
All four of the aforementioned players are averaging between 13.4 and 13.7 points per game this season, with only one of the foursome averaging more than 30 minutes per game on the year. Story and Czyz are both shooting better than 41 percent from behind the 3-point line, making them legitimate threats to keep the Aggies’ wings on their toes.
Topping everything off is the fact that Nevada currently has the second-longest winning streak of any WAC team, having won their last four games. They have the third-best record in conference play with their 5-3 mark, and have a head-to-head blowout win over second place New Mexico, who sits at 6-3 in WAC play.
In other words, this is an improved team from the Nevada team that Utah State beat by 14 in Reno a month ago. Don’t forget, though, that Nevada did not make things easy on USU last time around. The Wolf Pack had as much as a 10 point lead in the second half of that game before the Aggies finally got their acts together and took back control of the game.
The main point is that even though this doesn’t look like a threat of a match up on paper with Nevada’s record and USU already claiming a double-digit victory over Nevada this season, the Wolf Pack are still that team that has been steadily improving, and has already proven capable of giving USU trouble.
Factor that in with the fact that the Aggies have got to still be recovering from that Hawaii trip and the double-overtime game that took about 10 years off everybody’s lives, this could turn interesting. This could turn into the type of game where Utah State needs an x-factor. An x-factor like the Spectrum maybe?
Don’t let 8-13 fool you. This Nevada team is the type that the Spectrum needs to get up for in prime form. Oh, and ESPN will be there too. So we’d best be boosting that national profile of our crowd a little bit more while we’re at it, and really crank up the volume Wednesday.
Matt Sonnenberg is a senior majoring in print journalism. Matt is an avid fan of Aggie athletics and can be found on the front row of every home football and basketball game. He can also be reached at matt.sonn@aggiemail.usu.edu.