With the men’s basketball regular season drawing to a close and March fast approaching, it’s tournament season.
And with the Pacific-10 Conference Tournament just around the corner, it might be easy to get caught in the tourney fever.
But there’s still a regular season to finish and a conference champion to crown. Despite the controversy over who will be crowned official league champion — the regular-season champion or the tournament champion — the conference office confirmed Monday that the regular-season champ will get the crown.
That’s good news for Oregon, which can clinch the top spot in the Pac-10 with a win over USC on Thursday or a victory over UCLA on Saturday. The Ducks can assure themselves sole possession of the championship with a sweep in Los Angeles.
Other teams have a harder road to the championship. Five teams are bunched behind the Ducks, all separated by a single game. California, USC and Arizona, all one game behind Oregon, have the best shots at the conference championship if the Ducks get swept.
All of the season-ending posturing will have a direct impact on next week’s Pac-10 Tournament. The top seed will play a team with a losing record, either 12-15 Oregon State or 10-17 Washington. The second seed will play Arizona State in the opening round, and the Sun Devils have had a penchant for killing giants this season. ASU has knocked off Oregon, Arizona and UCLA on it’s way to a 14-11 overall record this year.
The winner of the conference tournament, while not the official Pac-10 champion, will receive an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament.
Oh! You’re Back!
When Jimmie Haywood and Brian Jackson left the Oregon State men’s basketball team last week, the future looked dim for the Beavers.
A key stretch of the season. Two starters leave. To top it off, the Beavers lost their seventh home conference game of the season, to Washington, in the great Battle For Eighth
— the final spot in the Pac-10 Tournament.
But then Jackson rejoined the team after a reported late-night tête-à-tête with coach Ritchie McKay. Then the Beavers creamed Washington State in a game that kept Oregon State one half-step in front of Washington in the Great Battle for Eighth.
Then there was much joy in Corvallis.
Pollsitting
California finally got some national recognition this week, entering the Associated Press top 25 for the first time this season at No. 21. The Golden Bears squeezed out UCLA, which dropped out of both the AP and USA Today/ESPN Coaches’ polls after splitting with Cal and Stanford.
The Pac-10 still has five ranked teams, the most of any single conference. In the AP poll, Oregon is the highest-ranked Pac-10 team at No. 13, Arizona is 14th, Stanford is 17th and USC is 19th.
How to spell W-O-O-D-E-N
USC forward Sam Clancy could be rejected early for the Wooden Award — given to the nation’s best player — as he cannot meet the minimum GPA requirements, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. Clancy reportedly has a GPA of 1.9, which meets the minimum for the NCAA but not the Wooden Award selection committee, which requires a minimum GPA of 2.0.
The news of Clancy’s academic struggles proved to be perfect material for the rowdy fans at California, who waved signs that said “1.9 G.P.A.” at Clancy during the Trojan-Golden Bear game on Saturday.
The affect was dramatic. Clancy had his string of 11-straight double-doubles snapped, and scored only 11 points in USC’s 83-64 loss.
But afterwards, Clancy told the Daily Californian that the taunting crowd didn’t affect him.
“You can’t let the crowd get in your head,” Clancy said. “It’s not the first time the crowd was talking stuff about me.
Oregon’s better anyway.”
E-mail sports reporter Peter Hockaday
at [email protected].