MBB: Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference

[Titan Q]

Having been to Westmont's Tom Byron Classic with Illinois Wesleyan in 1996-97, 2001-02, and 2005-06, wins over Westmont College certainly get my attention.  That is a strong NAIA D1 program with a good coach.

[Hoopsallthetime]

On your GSAC comment.  Knowledgeable folks agree that it is a tough, tough conference.  Wooster clearly just found that out.  The SCIAC has been scheduling games with that conference for years; mostly because it is convenient, cost-effective scheduling.   Smarter folks than me can comment on those games but I don't think that a W against a Westmont would turn any heads outside of the SCIAC, whereas a W against a Wooster or St. Thomas would.     

Good luck against Chapman.  The SCIAC needs you to win that game, one of your few non-conference decent DIII games this year. 

Your right Ghetto, I guess a win against a team like Westmont wouldnt turn any heads. Are u crazy! Westmont is one of the top 3 teams in the GSAC this year with a win already against Asuza Pacific at home. Last time I looked Azusa was 3rd in the Nation.  Sure playing division III teams would probably help the stags get national attention in Indianapolis, but here in Southern California I believe playing teams in the GSAC should honor the attention as well. Defeating the teams out of the GSAC is a tough thing to do, and I would like to see how some of the teams around the SCIAC would play. If I remember right, Laverne got beat by almost 50 to Point Loma. So that isnt saying much.

[Pat Coleman]

That's funny -- I just told one of the Mississippi College people who was asking about the poll that I didn't really care much about the win against Johns Hopkins but beating Westmont on the road was quite impressive.

[TeeDub]

Wooster clearly has learned of the virtues of playing tough, athletic NAIA squads, and I'm certain that's why Cal Baptist appeared on the schedule instead of, say, Redlands.

E tu, Brute?

[DIIIghetto]

Collinge, thanks for the info.  Although, since your Scots experienced the GSAC first-hand this year, you have more knowledge than most.  PC, GS and others who really follow college hoops understand the GSAC better than a majority of the rest of the country.   

Stag, your team lost to Westmont, so it doesn't make too much sense for us to debate the value of beating them.  Playing good teams from the GSAC closely but losing is only as good for a team as a coach can convince his players to look past the loss and understand that it made them better.  Playing the GSAC is not a substitute for playing elite DIII caliber teams.  Never, ever.  The budget reasons that drive the scheduling of most of those games didn't seem to be in play this year, where CMS could have picked from a number of quality DIII opponents who recently travelled to the southland (Missippi College, J. Hopkins, St. Thomas, Puget Sound, Wooster, Williams).   How can a W over a Williams or an Amherst always not be better than a close game with a Cal Baptist or a Westmont?  Are the latter schools competitive with Claremont, Harvey Mudd or Scripps in anything outside of sports? 

Pat, I'm glad you noted the impressiveness of Mississippi College's W over Westmont.  Nobody else seemed to pick up on it.  None of the fans in the ASC seemed to care about that.   MC got some front page mention for beating Hopkins, but nothing for bringing down a tough NAIA team.  Maybe that is because Hopkins has a better SID.  Or maybe it is because few people outside of the core hoop fans have an understanding of how good Westmont is.   

[Ralph Turner]

Pat, I'm glad you noted the impressiveness of Mississippi College's W over Westmont.  Nobody else seemed to pick up on it.  None of the fans in the ASC seemed to care about that.   MC got some front page mention for beating Hopkins, but nothing for bringing down a tough NAIA team.  Maybe that is because Hopkins has a better SID.  Or maybe it is because few people outside of the core hoop fans have an understanding of how good Westmont is. 

DIIIghetto, actually we had a few comments on the ASC site when MissColl won, but for us in the ASC, it was a "dog bites man" story.

We know that Miss College is good.  Their style of play matches very well against the style of play in the ASC.  The ASC-West has been the tougher division top-to-bottom until the development of UT-Dallas in the last 2 1/2 years.  MissCollege will cruise thru the East, host the post-season tourney most years, and then earn a bid.

The Choctaws then get to the Sweet 16 and lose, usually by playing a style of ball that the Great Lakes teams are very well suited to defend, IMHO.  I think that MissColl fans and I have had this disagreement about the style of ball that gets the ASC representative deepest in the tourney: a faster paced, Nolan Richardson "40 minutes of hell" style (McMurry Elite 8 in 2000/Sweet 16 in 2001 and Sul Ross State Sweet 16 in 2004 which lost in OT to Lawrence which lost in OT to national champ UW-SP on a neutral floor) versus the Miss College half court, tenacious defense "exhaust the shot clock" style.

If the Westmont win boosts the reputation of the conference, then great.  Finally!

(That McMurry 2000 team beat Pomona-Pitzer 111-76, after P-P had defeated a #9 Trinity on the road in the first round.)

[Pat Coleman]

Pat, I'm glad you noted the impressiveness of Mississippi College's W over Westmont.  Nobody else seemed to pick up on it.  None of the fans in the ASC seemed to care about that.   MC got some front page mention for beating Hopkins, but nothing for bringing down a tough NAIA team.  Maybe that is because Hopkins has a better SID.  Or maybe it is because few people outside of the core hoop fans have an understanding of how good Westmont is.   

Yeah -- the night MC played Westmont I had a Division I upset to deal with, a D3hoopsNet broadcast game to call and needed to catch a 6:46 a.m. flight out of Canton/Akron back home. I had to cut the front-page work off so I could make my 4:30 wake-up call.

[David Collinge]

Collinge, thanks for the info.  Although, since your Scots experienced the GSAC first-hand this year, you have more knowledge than most.  PC, GS and others who really follow college hoops understand the GSAC better than a majority of the rest of the country.

Every small college conference is relatively little-known outside its home region, ghetto, but I think you are overplaying your hand.  First, I have known about the GSAC since at least 2000 when Calvin came out and played Asuzu and Biola.  I attended Westmont's holiday tournament last year, when Illinois Wesleyan and Puget Sound played in Santa Barbara.  It didn't just come to my attention when "my Scots" played Cal Baptist.  I'm no GSAC expert by any stretch, but I am aware that there is very good basketball played in that league.  I think it's safe to say that there's more people in Ohio who have at least heard of the GSAC and/or its teams than there are people in LA who are familiar with the OAC.

Second, I don't think you should gauge national reaction by checking what's said in the ASC room, or any online fan forum for that matter.  For starters, Johns Hopkins has a far higher degree of name recognition than Westmont College.  Add to that the JHU was ranked in the D3Hoops.com poll, within two places of Mississippi College, so beating them is going to look like a much bigger cap-feather than beating an NAIA team they know little or nothing about.  But third, the great majority of us in these rooms are just fans.  The opinion leaders, however, are quite familiar with Westmont, and as several of us have suggested, those people were suitably impressed with MC's ability to go to Santa Barbara and beat Westmont.  Heck, Pat and Titan Q are two of the most prominent supporters of D3 hoops in the country, and they've both said in here that they are impressed by a victory at Westmont.

Third, Mississippi College moved up 49 points (i.e., the equivalent of two positions on the average voter's ballot) and moved into the top 10 this week, and I am certain that the voters weighed the win over Westmont at least as heavily (if not more so) than their blowout of JHU.

MC got some front page mention for beating Hopkins, but nothing for bringing down a tough NAIA team.  Maybe that is because Hopkins has a better SID.  Or maybe it is because few people outside of the core hoop fans have an understanding of how good Westmont is.

There's just one front page to this site.  Wins by top 10 D3 teams over good NAIA teams are impressive, but generally not newsworthy enough to make the front page.  Just ask Wooster, who beat a NAIA-I top ten team (Georgetown) and two NAIA-II top ten teams (Walsh, Cedarville) without making the front page.

Playing the GSAC is not a substitute for playing elite DIII caliber teams.  Never, ever. 

One good reason to play a Westmont instead of a CMS or Oxy is that the GSAC teams tend to be taller and more athletic than even the elite D3 teams.  It provides good experience for an ambitious D3 program to play against that calibre of athlete from time to time.  It's not unlike the discussion on the Daily Dose regarding the use of male practice players by women's teams.  As explained by Vassar coach Barb Bausch, there's a lot to be gained by making the practice sessions "more competitive than what the opponent can give."  The same goes for teams preparing for the postseason by playing the toughest, most athletic teams they can schedule.

Anyway, first you argue that beating a GSAC team should receive more recognition because the GSAC is so good, and then you argue that teams should schedule "elite DIII caliber teams" instead of GSAC teams?   

[Gray Fox]

I was in Southern California over New Years.

Nobody has mentioned the nice U of Redlands float in the Rose Parade.  They also got some good PR (at least on Channel 5).

[Pat Coleman]

Wooster/Georgetown was on the front: http://www.d3hoops.com/news.php?date=2006-11-29

[pineconefan]

Whitman's Kyle Born scored 53 points at Redlands on Wednesday night.  I imagine many of you SCIAC watchers have seen your teams/players put up big numbers against UR since the Bulldogs went with their "system."  Anyone know how many of the SCIAC schools have had their individual single game scoring records broken in games against Redlands?

You can see my own editorial comments about Born's 53 points on the NWC site, but I am interested in the opinions of those who see Redlands regularly.

[RFB]

Whitman's Kyle Born scored 53 points at Redlands on Wednesday night.  I imagine many of you SCIAC watchers have seen your teams/players put up big numbers against UR since the Bulldogs went with their "system."  Anyone know how many of the SCIAC schools have had their individual single game scoring records broken in games against Redlands?

You can see my own editorial comments about Born's 53 points on the NWC site, but I am interested in the opinions of those who see Redlands regularly.

Redlands won 153-149 to improve to 6-3. Here is the link for the game recap.

http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/sports

[David Collinge]

Wooster/Georgetown was on the front: http://www.d3hoops.com/news.php?date=2006-11-29

Oh, I thought DIIIghetto was talking about the lead story, not just a mention in the body of the story. 

[old_hooper]

John Moore is an excellent coach for the Warriors.  Always has his teams competitive.  he is also the brother in law to former UCLA head coach Steve Lavin.

[DIIIghetto]

My point got missed somewhere, lost in the hypothetical.  The shots I take at CMS are only because as our front runner this year, we need them out advancing our reputation nationally.  No GSAC victory would ever substitute there for beating a Wooster or top-ranked Amherst.  Not because the GSAC teams wouldn't be top 10 DIII teams, but because, those aren't as widely recognizable games.  Collinge, I'll put you in the PC and GS camp as having a DIII/NAIA knowledge in the 99.9th percentile of the country.  It also seems pretty obvious to me, having watched the SCIAC teams play the GSAC for years, that a SCIAC team has a better chance of beating a top 10 DIII team than they do a tough GSAC opponent.   Put another way, our chances couldn't be any worse.  We just don't win many of those games.  Nor really, should we.   But CMS, Oxy and Pomona, those schools and their Admins should care whether they are competitive with schools like Amherst, Williams and Hopkins.  We should be scheduling as many of those games as we can.   Why should we just have one SCIAC team in the top 20 consideration set?  Why not 2, heck, why not 3. 

Getting folks to care in the southland and in a historically deep bottom-tier hoops conference is no easy task.  The SCIAC post season record is horrendous.  Better scheduling (ala, find ways to get our best teams playing as good DIII competition as we can) is a part of what is needed to flip this thing on its head.

By the way, did the NWC duck the top 3 in the SCIAC this year or was it the other way around?  Maybe Whitworth's losing to PP and Oxy last year had an impact on that.  Folks from the NWC, I would think that as the West Coast's dominant conference you guys would never make a trip south without looking for some games with Oxy, PP or the Stags.  And don't sleep on CLU with the new gym.   

PineCone, some of us are boycotting discussing, as OB puts it, "the travelling freakshow".