There's no paper on Monday as The Enterprise celebrates President's Day. The Aggies play at Pacific on Monday night, looking to snap a seven-game losing streak and end a a streak of futility against the Tigers dating back to the 1940s. The Tigers will be on the back end of an extremely tough travel weekend. They played at Montana on Saturday as part of ESPN's Bracket Buster and have to turn around 48 hours later to take on the Aggies. Pacific will get no sympathy from anyone involved at UCD.
As part of the Big West's agreement with ESPN, UCD will participate in the Bracket Buster next year. Aggie coach Gary Stewart said he didn't yet know whether the Aggies would be a home team or a road team, which is a challenge in budgeting for the coming season. Getting 20 or so plane tickets on relatively short notice, is not as easy as it sounds.
If you're curious, here's the process for picking who plays whom. The first consideration is RPI, which is used to create the most attractive possible match-ups for television (See No. 16 Southern Illinois vs. No. 13 Butler).
After that, the next consideration is ease of travel. This would, at first glance, seem to dictate regional match-ups. But actually, "ease of travel" is an extremely relative term. Since it's "easy" from Los Angeles to just about everywhere, you'll see teams from the Southern half of the Big West paired with any old team. Cal State Northridge hosted Cleveland State on Saturday and Cal State Fullerton ended up traveling to Dayton, Ohio for a game with Wright State. A year ago, Long Beach State drew Manhattan College (which is actually in the Bronx). UC Irvine was matched with Drake University in nearby Des Moines, Iowa.
For what it's worth, the Big West went 3-5 on Saturday. There were three games against Big Sky teams, Two against teams from WAC, two against teams from the Horizon League and one from the West Coast Conference.
No comments:
Post a Comment