Faulkner: No bubble for UCI
Students can earn a degree in social ecology at UC Irvine. Bracketology, however, is only a casual concern for even the most ardent Anteaters’ men’s basketball backer.
And the only bubbles occupying the aspiring minds of the UCI campus this week are those floating upward from boiling beakers.
So it is that the Anteaters (24-8), regular-season co-champions of the Big West Conference, must win the conference tournament that takes place Thursday through Saturday at Honda Center, to earn a return trip to the Big Dance.
UCI won its first Big West Tournament title in 2015 to land the program’s first NCAA berth in 38 seasons in Division I.
This season, Coach Russell Turner’s ‘Eaters, the No. 2 seed, will open with No. 7-seeded Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (10-19) in Thursday’s 6 p.m. quarterfinal.
Should UCI not win three games in three days, it would likely earn a spot in the consolation postseason tournaments (including the NIT and CIT) in which it competed in 2013 and 2014.
The Anteaters, who have won 20-plus games for a school record four straight seasons, need two wins to break the school single-season wins record set by the 2000-01 squad that went 25-5. That 25-5 team, incidentally lost in the Big West Tournament and had to settle for the NIT.
The annual win-or-don’t-dance Big West Tournament conundrum could be viewed as the ultimate pressurized pursuit. But Turner said he prefers to embrace the competitive anxiety, rather than try to insulate his players from it.
“I don’t try to diffuse it,” Turner said. “I think that the pressure, for a team like ours and a conference like this, is just a reality and we face that reality head on. We’ve done that consistently here since my first year (2010-11), when we were scrapping to get into the [conference] tournament more than believing we could win it. Now, I think the belief that we can win it is there. What we have to have is the focus and urgency to execute more plays than the team that we play against each night.
“We know there are going to be close games that have ups and downs and that’s where I think the experience can be a benefit for this team. We should know that we can pull out tough games. I’d hope that our urgency and energy is at its peak, because that’s what is required in March in college basketball.”
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•UCI defeated Hawaii in last year’s tournament final, but the Rainbow Warriors are the only conference team the Anteaters have yet to beat this season.
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•UCI, which has won 14 of its last 17, has shot 62.9% from the field in the second half of its last seven games. During that stretch, UCI has shot 54.5% overall.
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•The Anteaters entered the week ranked No. 10 among 351 Division I teams in field-goal-percentage defense (.387) and No. 19 in blocked shots per game (5.3). UCI ranked No. 37 in scoring defense (65.6 per game) and it is 17-0 this season when holding opponents to worse than 40% shooting from the field.
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•Mamadou Ndiaye, UCI’s 7-foot-6 junior center, is the Big West Defensive Player of the Year for the second time in three seasons, and joined junior guard Luke Nelson on the all-conference first team. It’s the first time two UCI players were first-team honorees.
UCI fans are hoping this won’t be Ndiaye’s last season in the program, and that the engaging and entertaining standout will elect to return, rather than venture off to the professional ranks.
Turner, who advised Ndiaye through a similar decision last spring, said he does not know what Ndiaye will decide this time around.
“I know he loves it at Irvine,” Turner said. “He has done well and is in a great position to stay. I also believe he will be in a good position if he decides to leave. It really just comes down to what he wants to do. I don’t think there is a clearly better choice for him, because he is the one who knows what he is supposed to do and what is important for him. I want to make sure that I support him with whatever he does and I don’t know what that’s going to be yet. We haven’t talked about it, because that’s not something he needs to think about now. Right now, we need to focus on the task at hand. I don’t think that’s much of a story now, but it will be at some point.”
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•The Vanguard University men’s basketball team’s Golden State Athletic Conference Tournament semifinal game against host Hope International on Saturday provided a trivial connection between both coaches.
Vanguard’s Rhett Soliday and Hope’s Bill Czech, likely created the only game in the country at any level, in which coaches from both teams had both coached the same NFL player.
Soliday coached Arizona Cardinals tight end Darren Fells as an assistant when Fells played at UC Irvine in the late 2000s. Czech was Fells’ basketball coach at Fullerton High.
