Normally being a fifth, sixth or seventh seed in an eight-team conference basketball tournament is akin to a postseason kiss of death.
But in the Big West Conference it is a big hug of hope.
Clearly this isn’t your normal conference. Over the past seven years that the Big West Tournament has been played at the neutral-site Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif., teams seeded fifth or lower have captured the tournament championship as often as teams that have won the regular season.
| WHERE BIG WEST TOURNEY TEAMS RANK
(Ranking among 351 Division I schools by RPI rank)
RPI TEAM, RECORD
95 UC Davis, 21-9 12-4
112 UCSB, 22-8 11-5
130 UC Irvine, 16-16 11-5
162 Fullerton, 17-11 10-6
187 LBSU, 15-17 9-7
207 Hawaii, 17-12 8-8
300 Cal Poly, 9-21 4-12
304 UCR, 9-21 4-12
340 CSUN, 6-24 3-13*
* — Didn’t qualify for Big West Tournament.
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Hawaii in the 2015-16 season and Long Beach State in 2011-12 were the only regular-season winners to prevail in the tournament at the Honda Center.
Not for nothing do they proudly bill it as the “March to Madness” in the Big West, where being fair to middlin’ can still take you far.
So, that means two things when the men’s portion of the tournament opens Thursday: UC Davis (21-9, 12-4), the regular-season winner, is dribbling on eggshells and Long Beach State (15-17, 9-7), Hawaii (17-12, 8-8) and Cal Poly (9-21, 4-12), the fifth, sixth and seventh seeds, might actually entertain some hope of advancing in the postseason.
In this, Cal Poly is the poster program for what a bottom half team in the standings can do in March. The Mustangs won the thing four years ago as the seventh seed despite a 13-19 overall record, 6-10 in conference.
You don’t even have to be the hot team entering the tournament. Cal Poly had lost three consecutive games and eight of its 10 going into the tournament but still won to cut down the nets.
Six of the eight teams in the field — all but Cal State Fullerton and UC Riverside — have won the tournament once in the seven-year stay at the site.
History also tells us that the most common upset in this tournament is a seventh seed knocking off a second seed, which has happened three times in seven years.
This season the Big West has been more wide open — i.e. watered down — than most. Devoid of any dominating or ranked teams, it has at times been a head-scratching free for all. Consider that three of the four quarterfinal games Thursday feature matchups where the teams, such as UH against UC Irvine, are 1-1 against each other in conference play this season.
In fact, as Star-Advertiser basketball writer Brian McInnis posted, UH is 1-1 against everybody.
One quarterfinal pits top-seeded Davis against eighth-seeded UC Riverside (9-21, 4-12). Just two weeks ago, the Aggies required a basket at the buzzer by conference player of the year, T.J. Shorts II, to beat UCR 64-63.
So far down is the conference this year — it is ranked 22nd among 32 Division I conferences in Ratings Percentage Index — that if the tournament winner is anybody other than UC Davis (21-9) or UC Santa Barbara (22-8), it probably will be sentenced to a play-in game in the NCAA Tournament draw.
Or, as Cal State Northridge coach Reggie Theus put it at the start of the season, “If you’re going to be down, in my opinion, I think this is a good year to be down. I think there are a lot of teams in our conference who are not going to be (at) their best.”
Alas, the conference wasn’t quite weak enough for CSUN (6-24, 3-13) to slip in and make the tournament as the eighth and bottom seed.
Even in the Big West this season, it seems, there are some standards.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
