Utah Women’s Basketball Independent

I said the winner of the 2023 Pac-12 tournament would face a harder road at the round of 8 than the eventual NCAA champion.

Preposterous? Inconceivable? Last year, South Carolina beat NET #31 Creighton, #5 Louisville, #4 Connecticut. If UCLA wins the conference tournament, the NET rankings of Arizona, Stanford, and Utah are #26, #3, #7. (Fine, if Stanford beats Oregon, UCLA, Utah; or Utah beats WASU, Colorado, Stanford, it’s a wee bit easier.)

Er, I’m assuming Utah won. Another long night of coding, after which I fell asleep at halftime of Stanford-Oregon. How’d we do?

Huh. I think #5 UCLA could win the tournament. They have to do is beat Arizona, then probably Stanford and Utah. Nothing to it.

The Bruins are #25 NET, behind #19 Oregon. NET even places Oregon ahead of Colorado and Arizona, but I think the Ducks are frauds. I must be quite wrong, since these numbers don’t lie like so many other numbers do.

I didn’t think Oregon would beat Washington yesterday, and there’s no way they’ll beat Stanford today.

Is there?

To the question “Who’d you rather play in the quarters: Southern Cal or Colorado?”, the answer was a toss-up. In the NET, Colorado is #21, USC #32, both outstanding defensive teams.

You might think the choice between Colorado or Oregon State is easier, but the Beavers — 4-14 in conference play — are #55. OSU is 13-17 overall, 9.5 games behind #54 St. John’s, who just beat Connecticut. The Pac-12 is that insanely good.

Arizona St. was 1-15 in Pac-12 play. The Sun Devils are NET #109, though their 8-20 record is 13 games behind #113 Drexel of the Colonial Athletic.

Another team in that boat is Texas Christian, NET #142 with a record of 7-21. TCU coach Pebley resigned, but no one’s calling for Arizona St. coach Adair’s head.

I’m always interested in Coach Pebley’s goings-on, because she’s the only person I know who blocked me on Twitter. There are surely others, but Coach Pebley is the only one I’m aware of. I still wonder what it was that I said that could’ve irked her that much while she (and Colorado coach Payne) were at Utah State.

The people for whom the NCAA men’s tournament is all there is, they don’t notice the 270 teams who are already done. For the truly nuts, the madness and sadness began yesterday, when some kids played the last game of their lives.

I was complaining about the sprints in March demeaning the regular season marathons, like, half an hour ago, but if I pause to think about having to win 10 games in a row, holy crap. TEN!?

I’m fair sure that the team that wins the Pac-12 tournament goes through a tougher field of eight than the eventual NCAA champion. Take UCLA — to win the Pac-12 tournament, the Bruins have to beat 2021 national finalist Arizona, followed by 2023 conference co-champions Stanford and Utah. Utah hardly gets an easier run as the 2nd seed: Washington State, Colorado, Stanford.

I’ll stop pondering the enormity of those three games, then seven more. The Cougars are first, a fair dark horse bet as the #7 seed.

Indulge me this trivial observation after the first day of the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament: Something’s amiss with the hardware.

How many times do you see a field goal attempt stick itself between the right or left heel of the rim and the backboard? Once per week if your team if the team shoots around six times?

It happened at least three times Wednesday. If the balls are under-inflated, the kids would notice that. Maybe the rims aren’t rigid enough — perhaps for one bolt turned left by 1/32 of an inch — who knows, but 400 shots went up in the first round, and three of ’em wedged between rim and backboard.

Chalk it up to my odd powers of observation, or that I’m aiming to distract you from the fact that I slept all day.

I was absorbed in a programming project all night. By the time the sun was up, I thought I should stay up. Groceries were scheduled to be delivered around 10, while UCLA and Arizona St. were to tip off at 12:30.

When the Bruins led by a dozen, I thought to take a nap, and boy, was I surprised to wake up during overtime.

I couldn’t stay awake for Oregon and Washington because Oregon bores me. Coach Graves sure looks genius when one of his players has a great day, like Endiya Rogers scoring 10 of 28 points and pulling 4 of 11 rebounds in the fourth quarter (which the Ducks entered trailing).

Perhaps it’s just as well Washington left early, which could defuse any lingering sentiment that Coach Langley was most worthy of coach of the year honors.

I was awake for Cal and Washington State because I had a game to play at 7:30. I told my opponent at the tournament director that I wouldn’t leave the house today, and they let me play on an Internet server.

As the Golden Bears let their 5-point lead late in the third dwindle, I looked at my own clock to find 8 minutes left (and my own lead getting away). Opponent blundered grossly, whew.

#11 Oregon St. 56 #6 USC 48

A TV announcer said: “How can Oregon State be 4 and 14? How can they be seeded 11th?”.

Because the rest of the conference is very, very good, while the Beavers, a young team, are capable of contagious mental lapses.

OSU lost nine in a row until getting it together to upset Arizona on the last day, then Southern Cal. But besides a 19-point loss to Colorado, the other eight losses were by a total of 36 points.

Freshman of the year Raegan Beers showed what she’s capable of: 18 points, 9 rebounds, credited with 2 steals but she knocked another 3 cleanly away, 8-of-9 from the line.

The Beavers assisted on 13 of 17 field goals — 8 by senior Yeaney, which meant she could miss all of her field goal attempts but still wind up +15 +/-. It’s here where one might go so far as to suggest that OSU is better off while Van Oelhoffen is out with a foot injury — they’re forced to play together, and when Beers and Mitrovic are sharing the ball, they are a difficult team to defend.

It looked very much like the Trojans’ game with 7:11 remaining. A pair of treys by Marshall and Adika put USC ahead by 8, and the way USC plays, 8 points in 7 minutes feels like a lock. The Beavers went on an 11-0 run, including 6-of-6 FT.

A layup by Sissoko ended the run, making it a 1-point game at 2:13, but the Beavers made 8-of-8 FT from there.

While typing that, I had to think: “Wait a second, did Oregon State really make 14 straight free throws in the 4th quarter?”. Indeed they did. Beers made 1-of-2 at 9:24, and then they were perfect.

Oregon State got 15 points and 6 rebounds from someone named Adlee Blacklock, and I had no bloody idea who that is. Freshman Blacklock is evidently the emergency stand-in for Van Oelhoffen, and she’s helped save their season — she scored 36 of her 118 points (that’s 118 for the season) in the last weekend against the Arizonas.

The Beavers got 45 of 56 points, and 21 of 43 rebounds from underclassmen Wednesday. I must say this last-second resurgence by Oregon St. makes them interesting again, though Colorado makes a habit of making interesting teams boring (see: Utah’s first loss of the season).

I wrote a minute ago that when I began traveling for basketball, I thought I’d be traveloguing as well as sportswriting, but travel quickly grew to suck.

Rudy Tomjanovich said about scouting that hotel staff gets to know you better than your family does. I used to append: “AND you get to watch four games a week!?”.

When I was younger, living in airports and hotels and rarely seeing family while rushing from gym to gym sounded like an ideal lifestyle. I’m older, and traveling is much harder than it used to be. Although gathering intel for the team will always be an inspiring reason to get up in the morning, no matter which newspaper is available in the hotel lobby.

I’ve gone on long flights, changed planes, reached the destination in much shorter time. The cross-country part takes forever, but after reaching the hub, the second leg isn’t so far off.

Sometimes I’m on the second leg, or sitting in the layover airport, and think: There’s still the big fun to be had at the destination, but maybe I was supposed to make more of the initial San Jose-to-Chicago segment. Read that book, watched a movie, smacked that baby’s parents (though you never do, because they hated it more than you that their baby cried takeoff to touchdown).

The feeling is sort of the same at the end of February. It’s been four months getting here, then there’s a brief layover at the conference tournament, and finally, the NCAA tournament like it’s where we hoped we were going when we took off.

The post-season tournaments so heavily outweigh the regular season that it’s jarring at their ends. 25 games in four months, then bam bam, and it’s over. The madness of March is sort of like Christmas: you wait and anticipate and wait some more, then bam.

That’s something baseball has over all the other sports. The regular season is so long, corresponding with the longest days and sunniest weather. Long summer days are sometimes the best, and baseball is designed for sitting around, waiting for something to happen on the field.

Basketball happens when the days are depressingly short, and travel is most treacherous. But at the end, you’re wishing it hadn’t come and gone so quickly, and that your team had won more games or your pen written more words.

Then the kids you liked most graduate, and you never see them again, reminding you that the girls are always 18-to-22, and the only one getting older is you.

NET places Stanford #5 and Utah #7, which is a darn shame for this reason: I was so hoping the formula would’ve placed Utah ahead of Stanford, because then my theory about the AP voters could be tested: To vote Stanford behind Utah could cause an AP voter’s head to explode, and we mustn’t risk that. But given these NET placements, the AP will vote for their heads not to explode, accordingly,

We’ll revisit this after the tournament.

Brynna Maxwell had her worst shooting day of the season — 2-for-10, 0-for-4, 4-for-4 — though the Bulldogs held the Cougars to 4 points in the 3rd, so maybe Brynna cranked up her D.

On that odd scale where 1800 denotes great shooting, Brynna was 1944 Thursday. Today’s misses drop her percentages to 477 500 947, 1924. Brynna Maxwell is simply an off-the-chart shooter, depending on your chart.