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