Friday, Jan. 7, 2005 | 10:48 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
Well, ready (perhaps in Utah's case) or not (most definitely in UNLV's case), it's here: The start of the conference basketball season in the Mountain West.
Actually, the Rebels aren't the only MWC team that seems ill-prepared to start playing games that count. In terms of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, you'd have to put the current edition of Mountain West pretenders right alongside the Charles Rocket cast of Saturday Night Live.
Any conference that has UNLV anointed as its preseason favorite, which the media who cover the MWC did, has big problems if the Rebels' 82-70 victory against Fort Courage -- er, Lewis -- on Wednesday at the Thomas & Mack is any indication.
There were 16 lead changes in a game that was supposed to be a mismatch, as the Rebels had trouble guarding Corporal Agarn on the perimeter. Fort Lewis is a tiny Division II school from Durango, Colo., a remote skiing town most noted for its narrow gauge railroad that climbs north through the aspens along the Animas River to the even more remote mining town of Silverton. But FLC nearly made UNLV look like the Little Engine That Couldn't.
The Skyhawks trailed by only two points inside of four minutes to play before the Rebels figured out that a loss to a tiny Division II school was not going to impress the NCAA tournament committee.
Based on his unusually frank comments afterward about not being ready to play Utah in the conference opener Monday night, Rebels coach Lon Kruger wasn't impressed, either.
But I've been saying all along that the Rebels will do just fine once the conference games start, and I still believe it. Not because I expect them to suddenly start passing the ball to one other instead of selfishly jacking up shots, but because the MWC looks even weaker than usual.
Over the past three seasons, Rick Majerus and the Seven Dwarfs have somehow become a three-bid league, which might be the best argument yet for scaling back the tournament to 48 teams. None of those nine MWC tournament teams have made it past the second round, as the league has perfected the strategy of having its regular season champion lose early in the conference tournament, thus multiplying the number of No. 12 seeds it sends to the big dance.
Based on this week's Rating Percentage Index, the all-important-but-impossible-to-decipher formula that weighs significantly in who gets the at-large bids, that tack may not work this year. Utah and UNLV are the MWC's top RPI teams at 55 and 56 (collegerpi.com), followed by Wyoming at a distant 91. It's hard to envision MWC teams improving in the power ratings by beating up only on each other from here on out.
So at least the displaced conference tournament in Denver should be a little more intriguing (and Lord knows it can use some intrigue, to make up for all those empty seats) in that the team that wins it will probably be the MWC's only NCAA tournament qualifier.
As for those preseason ballots, I'm sure if this were Cleveland and they were recounted today, most would be marked for Utah, given it now has a big man on campus instead of a heavy one.
In 7-foot Andrew Bogut, who seems to have blossomed without the departed Majerus constantly harping on him, the Utes have a potential NBA lottery pick, and there aren't many of those roaming around the Mountain Time Zone. Utah was also competitive in losses to ranked opponents Arizona and Washington, and beat up on Colorado and LSU, two schools from power conferences which made the mistake of visiting Salt Lake City during the holidays.
On Thursday, the Mountain West held its annual start-of-the-conference-season teleconference, during which the coaches spent 90 minutes making excuses for their teams. But cutting through the rhetoric, here's basically what you need to know in a nutshell that resembles a paragraph:
The Rebels are good enough to play Texas close and bad enough to play Fort Lewis close; New Mexico is 13-2 and has an outstanding player in Danny Granger but lost badly at home to Wake Forest when the spotlight was on; Air Force isn't quite as beguiling without Joe Scott baiting the officials; Colorado State has a bulwark in 7-footer Matt Nelson who simply refuses to use up his eligibility; Wyoming is up and down; BYU is just down; and San Diego State hasn't gone on NCAA probation, as far as I know.
Of course, there's a lot of basketball to be played between now and when they would cut down the nets in the Pepsi Center in March, if only the Nuggets would allow it.
But based on what has transpired during the MWC preseason, this is one year where a BCS in basketball might not be a bad idea.
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