O'Sullivan to Niners

ESPN is reporting that UC Davis legend J.T. O'Sullivan has been signed by the 49ers.

This report has been picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and, in one of those strange twists of modern media, a blog on the 49ers website. Both cite the ESPN report. The 49ers have said nothing official. But the report sounds right. From everything we heard, the relationship between Mike Martz and O'Sullivan was pretty much love at first sight when the two were in Detroit together last season. I have no clue if this is a good fit for O'Sullivan or not, but one imagines he'll have a chance to compete with Shaun Hill for the back-up job.

CORRECTION (4 p.m. Saturday): Shaun Hill, not Shaun King.

Pregame at Spanos

STOCKTON – Greetings from courtside at Spanos Center, where the building is perking up slowly. Big West Commissioner Dennis Farrell is listed as attending tonight’s game, so things aren’t bad on the dignitary front. Also attending the game tonight is forward Shane Hanson, who has been cleared to play after separating his shoulder in practice last week. He’s not 100 percent, but he could give it a shot.

UCD has lost nine straight, but has played relatively well over the past two weeks only to come up short. It’s not difficult to envision a similar scenario tonight. Things aren’t exactly rosy here in Tiger Town. Head coach Bob Thomason benched the entire starting line-up for Saturday’s Bracket Buster game. The second five are listed in Pacific’s game notes today, although we’ll believe that when they announce it. It’s easy to send messages when it’s not a conference game.

And just as a reminder, the Aggies haven’t beaten Pacific in men’s basketball since the 1939-40 season. That’s Steinbeck territory.

Philosophical questions

Here's a question that's been bugging me all week: When is a team's fate out of its own hands?

Take the UC Davis men's basketball team. The Aggies are 2-11 in the Big West and sitting in last place by 1 1/2 games. But as things stand at this moment, all they have to do is win at UC Riverside on March 8 and they will grab the eighth seed in the Big West Tournament. Even with the way UCD tends to play on the road, that's not an impossible task. So in that regard, the Aggies control their own destiny in the Big West.

But that's not really true. Because there's a scenario in which the Aggies could win out and still not go to the tournament. Of course, that involves the Highlanders beating Cal Poly, Santa Barbara on Saturday and Pacific a week from tonight. If they pull off any of those victories (and tonight would be the best bet, you would think) then the Aggies would need multiple victories to reach the Big West Tournament. Given the way things have gone, it's difficult to construct a scenario in which that happens.

So anyway, in their own hands or not?

Here are the remaining schedules (with non-conference games noted as not counting:
UCD: at Pacific, Sacramento State, at UC Irvine, at UC Riverside
UCR: at Cal Poly, at UC Santa Barbara, Pacific, UCD

We'll check in from Stockton late this afternoon.

Good sign of things to come?

The college baseball season is long and grinding, so it's tough to take too much out of one game. However, Friday's 4-2 win over No. 18 Fresno State is potentially a good sign for the UC Davis baseball team.

The Aggies often had trouble closing out games like this last season. And a win against a nationally ranked opponent to begin the year certainly can't hurt confidence.

The pitching was particuarly impressive. Check out these numbers: Eddie Gamboa (5 IP, 2 Hs, 7 SOs, 0 BBs), Bryan Evans (2 1/3 IP, 2 H) and Justin Fitzgerald (1 2/3 IP, O Hs, 3 SOs).

Catcher Jake Jefferies hit third and went 4-for-5 with two RBIs and the Aggies had 12 hits despite the rain. Coach Rex Peters hinted that Jefferies might be ready for a breakout season and the opener did nothing to dispel that theory. Ryan Royster had two hits and stole his first base.

Today's doubleheader has been moved up to noon. The Aggies are expected to face Western Athletic Conference preseason pitcher of the year Clayton Allison in the opener.

No Cinderella slipper

TRACY - The 15th-seeded Davis High School girls basketball team has grown to like playing teams in the southern part of the Sac-Joaquin Section. But West of Tracy got the better of the Blue Devils this season, posting a 52-37 win on Thursday in the first round of the section playoffs.

The No. 2-seeded Wolf Pack (23-5) may not be as good as their record, but they were strong enough to eliminate DHS, a section semifinalist the last two seasons. Star Whitney Howard had 19 points and 10 rebounds for West.

The Blue Devils got 12 points and 14 rebounds from junior Nikol Allison, although Allison was just 4-for-24 from the field. Torryn Taylor added seven points for the Blue Devils (13-14), who lose just one player to graduation.

For more on the game, check out Friday's Enterprise.

- Conor Tekautz

Midweek Madness

Cal Poly is banged up coming into tonight's game, but UC Davis may have responded with two fresh injuries. As reported in today's newspaper, the Aggies could be without the services of Kyle Brucculeri (ankle) and Shane Hanson (shoulder) tonight in a must-win against the reeling Mustangs. Both will attempt to play, but neither would be at 100 percent. Poly will be without three of its top four guards in the game, which means this game may have an entirely different feel to the last one. In the previous meeting, the Mustangs' backcourt speed was too much, as dribble penetration shredded UCD's defense. Poly's front line is still big, athletic and dangerous, but the short-staffing at guard could change the way this one plays out. The Aggies will have most of their primary ballhandlers.

Elsewhere in the Big West tonight, Northridge travels to Long Beach, Irvine is in Riverside and Pacific hosts Santa Barbara. For tiebreaker reasons, Aggie fans should be rooting hard for the Anteaters, who have struggled on the road (3-9) this season.

Devils are in!

Despite losing three of its last four games, the Davis High girls basketball team has qualified for the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I playoffs. The Blue Devils (13-13, 7-6), who finished in third place in the Delta Valley Conference, will hit the road to take on West of Tracy (22-5, 8-2 Tri-City Athletic League)in the opening round on Thursday at 7 p.m.

DVC champion Kennedy earned the top seed in Division I and will take on the winner of a play-in game between Golden Valley and Grace Davis. In Division II, Elk Grove is seeded fourth and will host No. 13 Monterey Trail on Tuesday.

In other local girls action, Dixon and Pioneer both qualified for the Division III playoffs as the No. 13 and No. 14 seeds, respectively. Dixon will take on No. 4 Placer and No. 14 Pioneer will go to No. 3 Del Oro with both games taking place on Tuesday.

On the boys side, No. 10 Woodland and No. 11 Dixon made the Division III postseason though neither will travel far for first-round games. No. 7 Foothill of Sacramento will host the Wolves and the Rams will go to No. 6 Natomas. Both games are on Wednesday.

From the DVC, champion Elk Grove was seeded second in Division II and will host No. 15 Oakmont in the first round on Wednesday. DVC runner up Franklin earned the second spot in Division I and will host No. 15 Grace Davis on Friday. Kennedy will travel to face Edison in the 8-9 matchup in Division I.

– Conor Tekautz

Devils still probably in

The official Sac-Joaquin Section playoff brackets will not be released until Sunday but expect the Davis High girls basketball team to be included in the Division I field of 16.

According to my calculations – and this is assuming the results posted on maxpreps.com are correct – the Blue Devils (13-13, 7-5) would get the No. 15 seed and would face West of Tracy (20-5, 8-2 Tri-City Athletic League) in the first round. This is the same first-round matchup as last year when DHS pulled out a 60-46 win over the host Wolf Pack.

The Blue Devils put their hopes in jeopardy by losing both games of the Delta Valley Conference tournament when winning one would have assured them a playoff berth. They fell on Wednesday to fifth-place Franklin and lost to third-place Elk Grove, a team they had defeated twice this year, on Friday.

In my spreadsheet, DHS tied Golden Valley for 15th place. But because DVC foe Kennedy should get the top seed and the CIF’s tendency to not match up teams from the same conference in the first round, Golden Valley will likely be seeded No. 16 to create an all-Cougars matchup in the first round.

Interestingly enough, the Blue Devils may have been bailed out by former MEL rival Napa which defeated Vintage on Friday night. Had the Crushers won, they would have been in the playoffs ahead of DHS and Golden Valley, which would have been tied for the final spot in that situation. The CIF doesn’t list tiebreakers on their web Site, so not sure which team would have gotten the final spot in that scenario.

– Conor Tekautz

Live from behind the Orange Curtain

FULLERTON -- A trip to scenic Fullerton might not have been my first choice for Valentine's Day, but, alas, we live at the mercy of the schedule. The only major piece of news I have comes from the Fullerton side. Guard Marcus Crenshaw (who, like me, is from Detroit) is expected to play tonight in a mask after breaking his nose aganst Cal Poly last week. He wasn't wearing the mask during the warm-up. UC Davis' Kyle Brucculeri wore a mask during the early part of the season and reported not liking it all. The Aggies can only hope it slows Crenshaw down. He hit four 3-pointers the previous meeting.

UCD has posted info on Friday's 10th anniversary game on its Interweb site. That's about everything on the logistics side. The Aggie had a nice story about the event today. We'll have one in Friday's paper. We also dug out some extra old photos from the 1997-98 for our Web readers. So have fun with that.

While we're on the subject, rivals.com posted a story about about Division I growing pains. I'm not sure it covers any real new ground, but it's worth a read if you have some time.

Big West--Entering play tonight

UC Davis got some help from Long Beach State on Wednesday night.

The 49ers beat UC Riverside 56-46 down at The Pyramid, removing themselves a bit from the flurry at the bottom of the Big West. With tiebreakers factored in, the Aggies sit eighth in the Big West entering play and would have a spot at the Big West Tournament. If UCD finishes in a tie (including a season split) with the Highlanders, its win over UC Irvine is currently better than Riverside's win over Cal Poly.

Here are the standings including tonight:
UOP 8-2
CSUN 8-2
CSUF 8-3
UCSB 6-4
UCI 5-5
POLY 4-6
LBSU 3-8
UCD 2-8
UCR 2-8

Also of note, Pacific sits first tonight because it has split the series with Northridge and beaten Fullerton. The Matadors lost to Fullerton.

What could have been

With the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the 1997-98 Division II championship team scheduled for Friday night, I've spent much of the week in the archives looking at old stories. Here's an interesting one I found from the March 19, 1998 edition, in which The Enterprise first discussed the possibility of then-UC Davis coach Bob Williams going to UC Santa Barbara:

According to the News-Press, University of the Pacific coach Bob Thomason is the favorite for the position, along with Northern Arizona's Ben Howland, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's Jeff Schneider and (Tom) Asbury, who is currently coaching at Kansas State.

Division I assistants being considered include Oklahoma's Ray Lopes, Rhode Island's Larry Farmer and UCSB's Gary Stewart, the head coach at Cal State Hayward until this season.

It's always fun to look at these prediction stories in hindsight. Williams ended up getting the job as is doing pretty well with the Gauchos.

Thomason, of course, is still in Stockton where he is a legend. But what of the other names? Howland went on to bigger and better things at Pitt and then UCLA. Jeff Schneider does whatever this is, Asbury is an assistant at Alabama, Ray Lopes is the NBDL after resigning under the cloud of scandal from Fresno State, Farmer is an assistant at Hawaii. And of course, Gary Stewart ended up in Williams' old job, just five years later.

A little knowledge...

The rapidly shrinking regional paper across the Causeway made reference Sunday to the UC Davis men's basketball program having six scholarship players. I don't blame them. Aggie head coach Gary Stewart made reference to that in his postgame comments after the loss to Northridge. It was picked up without further explanation. We're all about context here at your local paper, so I'm going to fill in the blanks here.

The Aggies are currently playing with six scholarship players because of injuries (Michael Boone), redshirting (Adam Malik, who was also injured at one point) and transfer rules (Joe Harden and Todd Lowenthal). What Stewart meant is that of the nine people currently in the rotation, six are on scholarship. The UCD men's basketball program is currently at 10.6 scholarships or 82 percent of the maximum (13). For the 2008-09 academic year it will be at 90 percent of the maximum of 11.7 scholarships. Those are in-state equivalencies.

UCD does not tier sports. So scholarships are added proportionally across the board as student-fee money becomes available. For basketball to be at 90 percent, football, soccer, swimming, golf and the rest of the 27 sports also have to be at 90 percent. And when tuition and fees rise, i.e. all the time, the adding of scholarships is slowed for everyone across the board. This is one of the athletic department's core principles. This is not, however, the way it works elsewhere in the Big West. In some of the other programs, basketball is identified as the No. 1 sport and protected. That means scholarship levels are insulated against budget fluctuations. There is also money available to give out-of-state players full rides.

It doesn't take a UCD education to understand that all 90 percents are not created equal.

The .7 of a scholarship he has for next year won't do much for the Aggies in terms of attracting talent. In the world of college basketball, UCD head coach Gary Stewart has said, a team has to offer full scholarships to attract top-level talent. Basketball is what is known as a "head-count" sport. Division I teams can award a maximum of 13 scholarships to 13 players. It's a one-to-one situation. When the Aggie men's basketball team is in a competitive recruiting situation, i.e. all the time, it is going against schools that have full rides to offer.

This is in contrast to equivalency sports, such as Championship Subdivision level football. In that case, a program has up to 63 scholarships to spread among 85 players. In fact, because of being at 90 percent, the football program's market value when it comes to attracting guarantee games against Bowl Subdivision opponents will improve. FBS opponents will no longer have to petition the NCAA to have their victories over the Aggies count toward bowl eligibility.

This post (dedicated to the seething malcontents at Aggie Sports Talk) is meant as context. So you should consider this as you judge the Aggies' 8-15 record and how it competes against the difficult fixture list immediately in front of them. But it's fair to point out also that Stewart chose to recruit transfers and to redshirt Adam Malik this year. Those decisions may pay off in the future. Even without the injuries and ineligibility of Ryan Silva, the Aggies were always going to be short of scholarship depth this season. There's little doubt that missing out on the Big West Tournament would be massively disappointing given now cognizant everyone was of not getting to go the previous few years. That would turn this into the fifth reclassification year for men's hoops. At some point the transition has got to end, right?

Celebrity sightings

Accompanying the UC Davis women's basketball team home from Southern California on Sunday morning was actor Tony Shalhoub. He was flying from Burbank to Sacramento. This is the second time the Aggie women have flown with a B-list celebrity this season. On the way from Des Moines to Chicago after their trip through the midwest back in December, they shared a flight with Richard Schiff, Toby from The West Wing. My tipsters report that both were quite friendly.

Big West -- Up to the Minute

Here's how things stand in the Big West table heading into today's action:
Pacific 7-2; Northridge 7-2; Fullerton 7-3; UCSB 6-3; Poly 4-5; Irvine 4-5; UCD 2-7; UCR 2-7; Long Beach 2-7.

Today's games:
Fullerton at Poly
Northridge at UCD
Long Beach at Pacific
Irvine at UCSB

Here are some tiebreaker notes as it stands heading into action today:
--Pacific and Northridge have split the season series, but the Tigers currently lead due the results against third-place Fullerton. Pacific is 1-0 and the Matadors are 0-1.
--UCSB owns a season-sweep over Fullerton.
--Poly and Irvine have split the season series, but the Mustangs' win over Pacific would currently put them fifth and the Anteaters' sixth. Irvine's best win is against Santa Barbara.
--The situation is a mess in the bottom three. UCD loses the tiebreaker to Long Beach courtesy of the season sweep. It currently leads the season series against UC Riverside 1-0. Riverside, however, holds the tiebreaker with Long Beach courtesy of its victory over the 49ers earlier in the year. So that will have to play out further.

Fourth-quarter blues

On Senior Night, the Davis High boys basketball team let one get away. The Blue Devils (3-20, 0-10) held a lead for much of the second quarter and trailed by only five late in the third on Friday but fell to Laguna Creek 70-61.

DHS tried to pack the gym for a "break the record" night on the Blue Devils' final home game of the season.

Mauricio Davidson, one of four seniors honored, had a game high 16 points and Greg Carter added 10. Dan Goulding, Brent MacDonald and Steven Hoffart were the other seniors.

Despite one of its highest scoring outputs of the year, DHS just couldn’t come up with defensive rebounds when it needed to in the fourth quarter.

The Blue Devils were on a 7-2 run and had cut the deficit to eight with 4:05 left. But on consecutive Cardinal possessions, DHS allowed offensive rebounds that led to five Laguna Creek (7-15, 3-7) points and put the game out of reach.

All that remains for DHS is the Delta Valley Conference tournament next week.

For more on the game, check out Sunday’s Enterprise.

Signing Day

UC Davis expects to make its signing list public around 4 p.m. today.

We'll be sitting down with head coach Bob Biggs shortly afterward and will have a full story in Thursday's paper.

The most important game of the season so far

At first glance it doesn't seem that way. Long Beach State is 4-16 and has won just once since the calendar turned to 2008, a 71-53 thrashing of UC Davis at The Pyramid on Jan. 12. But the Aggies must return the favor at home on Thursday in what is now the most meaningful game of the Division I era to date. The Big West won't invite its ninth-place team to the conference tournament this year, and a UCD loss to the 49ers would put it in a precarious mathematical position.

Here are the Big West standings so far: CSUN 7-1; Fullerton 7-2; UOP 6-2; UCSB 5-3; UCI 4-4; Poly 3-5; UCD 2-6; UCR 2-7; LBSU 1-7.

The first tiebreaker is the season series. If the Aggies lose to the 49ers they will be even with Long Beach record-wise at 2-7, but really a game behind thanks to the series sweep.

The second tiebreaker is the season series against the rest of the teams in the league in descending order. That means to break a tie right now, each team's record against Northridge would be compared. If both were 0-2, it would go to Fullerton and then to Pacific until the tie is broken. Of the teams currently in the bottom three, UCD currently has the best victory (over UC Irvine) although it may not stay that way. Riverside beat Cal Poly on Saturday and it's impossible to tell what's going on with the inconsistent Mustangs. The Anteaters play the Mustangs on Thursday in a game that has implications for the Aggies. If you can't tell, I love this tiebreaker because it creates league-wide intrigue for the entire month of February.

The third tiebreaker, for what it's worth, is a coin toss. If a coin toss determines who goes to the Big West Tournament and who doesn't, then the Big West needs to change either its format or its tiebreakers. Because that's not right.

Bracket Buster

UC Davis will travel to Baltimore on Feb. 23 to take on Loyola of Maryland as part of the ESPN Bracket Buster, the network announced today. The game will not be televised and Loyola will be compelled to make a return trip to UCD next season.

For more, check out Tuesday's paper.

Jumper saves Devils

Monica Proeung hit a jump shot with 0.8 seconds left on the clock on Friday to lift the Davis High girls basketball team to a 36-34 win over Franklin.

The Blue Devils (12-10, 6-2 Delta Valley Conference) held a 34-29 lead with 1:05 left but Kim Manlangit hit a 3-pointer and Kynndal Cornelius made a layup to tie up the game with 30 ticks on the clock.

The final play was designed for Nikol Allison, but with the Blue Devil star covered and the clock winding down, Proeung took the shot.

It was an ugly all-around game as DHS turned the ball over 29 times and the Wildcats (9-12, 2-6) had 27 of their own.

Shelby Ferguson and Allison each had 13 points to lead DHS and Allison had 12 rebounds.

For more on the game, check out Sunday’s Enterprise.

- Conor Tekautz