UCI Preview, Part 2

IRVINE – On the way out the door this morning, I grabbed the December issue of Atlantic Monthly that I bought for a plane trip from New York to L.A. but never got around the reading. The two top stories are about the Democratic presidential nomination contest – one touts Barack Obama as a transitional political figure while lamenting the upcoming Giuliani-Clinton race and the other positing Hillary Clinton as the only one of the three Democratic candidates with the will to win.

So it’s funny how much things change in a short amount of time, especially given what was gospel a couple of weeks earlier.

I re-read my story from Jan. 18 following the Aggies’ 74-57 win over UC Irvine today in the Oakland Airport. And more and more that result seems like a lightning bolt. The Aggies led 17-0 to start the game and cruised. They hadn’t been that comprehensive before and haven’t been since. Yet, that win was born from intense angst. The Aggies had just come home from an abject trip to Cal State Northridge and Long Beach State. The players were blaming themselves and meeting to discuss it. The coaching staff was frustrated. I thought this thing could spin out of control. UCD head coach Gary Stewart had this to say after the game.

“I felt like I put too much pressure on the guys to win. Now we’re back to ‘let’s get better at this,’ and ‘let’s get better at that.’ The wins will come, but we’ve got to start really thinking about executing properly, being in the right position and executing properly.”

We pick the quotations that seem most reasonable at the time, and I thought Stewart was on the right track when he said that. I walked out of The Pavilion that night fairly sure the Aggies would reach the Big West Tournament comfortably in seventh place, that this trip would be relatively low stress. But the Aggies didn’t win again for 43 days and 11 games.

Stewart said Monday after practice that he hadn’t changed his approach at all.

“We never talked about the streak and never talked about how many we’d lost in a row,” Stewart said. “We still had the same approach to take things one game at a time, and to have a short memory in terms of the bad things that happened and have a long memory in terms of the things we did right. Obviously there’s nothing like winning. It helps with everything.”

The question to be answered this weekend is what Saturday night meant. It could merely have been a long overdue victory over a bad team – and Sacramento State is surely that. Or it could have been a sign of growing of confidence, as players said this week. They have to say that. The point is that it’s always impossible to tell. That’s part of the fun of the job and why being able to bang out 700 coherent words in an hour about this stuff is an actual skill.

Tonight’s game only matters mathematically if the Aggies win Saturday. It should be noted though that UCD’s last two wins have come on the heels of terrible losses. So make of that what you will.