Thursday, Jan. 5, 2006 | 8:48 a.m.
Ron Kantowski's column appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
So you couldn't drag yourself away from the USC-Texas game to look in on the Rebels' basketball team at Wyoming on Wednesday night? Couldn't get that TiVo Santa left under your tree hooked up in time, you say?
Not to worry. Of the two games of varying interest to local fans that went nearly side by side on TV on Wednesday, only one mattered.
It wasn't the one played in Laramie.
The Rebels' solid 88-77 victory really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It didn't even matter in the not-so-grand scheme of things, which is to say the Rebels' NCAA tournament outlook.
The conference season is only one day old and the Rebels already find themselves in "Three Days in March" mode. That's when they play the postseason conference tournament, and it has already become apparent that if the Rebels don't run the table at the Pepsi Center in Denver, they won't be able to muster a burp when the brackets are announced.
It's a situation the Rebels are getting used to. Their run of mediocrity combined with that of their conference, the Mountain West, has pretty much taken most of the drama/guesswork out of the regular season.
Basically, it's getting to where the best the MWC can hope for is that the regular-season champion gets knocked off in the conference tournament. And that the champ's body of regular-season work is such that the tournament committee doesn't bypass it for some at-large team with 17 wins from one of the power conferences.
Such as Kansas.
Normally, that's the position in which the Rebels find themselves in January. Not this year. Of the nine MWC teams, only two failed to post winning records during the nonconference schedule. At 6-6, UNLV was one. At 4-10, new member Texas Christian was the other.
Remind me again why the Horned Frogs were welcomed to the Mountain West fold (actually, not a bad word for it, given the league's bleak basketball outlook) with such open arms? Oh yeah, football. Well, football season is over.
While the Rebels will have you believe the basketball season is just beginning, it really won't begin until the teams take the floor at a mostly empty Pepsi Center during those all-important 72 hours in March. That's because the Rebels got next to nothing accomplished, at least in terms of NCAA tournament style points, before the holidays.
That home loss to Pepperdine surely won't impress the committee. Neither will a home win against Southern Utah. And when the Rebels had a chance to make some hay during a rugged four-game road swing against some opponents you've heard of -- Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Hawaii and Minnesota -- they got the pitchfork. They lost all four and blew a 22-point lead at Corvallis. So much for climbing onto the bubble.
The bubble is for Mountain West teams such as Air Force, 12-1, with a couple of quality wins against Miami and Georgia Tech of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Or Colorado State, 11-2, with a lofty Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) of 22.
The Rebels' RPI is a not-so-lofty 149. Or one above Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. And with no more nonconference games remaining and the Mountain West's RPI hovering somewhere around college basketball's equivalent of baseball's Mendoza Line -- at last check, the MWC was in lockstep with the Colonial Athletic Association in the power ratings -- there won't be much chance to improve it.
So even if the Rebels were to win the regular-season title, it's still probably going to come down to those 72 hours in Denver. Only this year, that may not be as ominous as it sounds.
For starters, the Rebels usually play well in the conference tournament. For finishers, the Mountain West is so devoid of quality teams that UNLV could become one simply by taking care of the basketball and knocking down a few 3-pointers.
The good thing is that there are nothing but tuneups between now and then for the Rebels to get it together.
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