Hall fouled out. Apparently confusion if she had 4 or 5 from her, not sure if Gross was intending to play her with 4

Falling asleep on D again and now 4 fouls on Cierra :(

mmmm about that

The T was an unexpected help on this one, but like cmt and BlueGoldAg said, there were some questionable calls the other way.

One bright side I see is that we're not exactly giving BWCT teams a recipe for success with the tape from this game. "Make a ton of threes and have UCD miss most of them in the first half" isn't a game plan

Hall and Stobbart both with 3 fouls, that's a little concerning

aaand the Hawaii lead is back to 9

Got it to within 3 once but Hawaii is hanging on

Some life with a good three from Hall and then back to disappointment

UCI won tonight so there are exactly six quarters left to try and claim the 1-seed (barring mass cancellations tomorrow).

If the Ags start lighting it up from 3 we have this, I'm just not sure that will happen. Honestly the last few UCD games didn't show any spectacular offense, it's just that Hawaii is finally an opponent that's had enough of their own offensive explosion to capitalize.

At this level of play against a mid-table team we don't deserve a conference title tbh

This is painful to watch

To be clear I think the team can recover and there were some upsides but man this is disappointing

Was that... our worst quarter of the season we just saw?

...in the most important game of the season where rust is no longer any sort of excuse?

It's funny to think about how every minute that ticks by makes UCD's odds of the championship and one seed go up. This is a very weird season.

Email from Coach Abeyta today mentions the title on the line but has a very peculiar wording:
"The Ags are prepped for the Wahine's aggressive Man-to-Man defense as they fight to keep their favorable seeding heading into next week's tournament play."

Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it seems UCD is being very cautious in talking about potential outcomes. I haven't seen an official statement mention a title being possible until today, and the quote above is weirdly vague for a team that should be top-two seeded regardless if we understand the conference formulas right. Maybe the department has just completely decided to let the BWC announce the results and not do the math for us.

Given the abbreviated schedule and normal East Coast bias of these things I'll take it.

UCD is sitting at 61 in NET ranking, which I believe is 13th among counted mid-majors so computers track with the poll pretty nicely. (Not sure I agree with the poll's criteria for mid-major but it is what it is).

None that I can see

Thanks for the great analysis! That does seem very hopeful. So if Aggies get on the plane at all we're in good shape sounds like.

Still don't like this system. It has the potential for punishment against teams that did nothing wrong; for example if Irvine had a slightly better record and was our final opponent they could game the system by not making the trip out of "an abundance of caution" and then have it hurt our record worse than theirs -- effectively getting away with a forfeit that counts against the other team's record.

I don't think any team would do that in this conference, but the rules should be crafted to explicitly discourage or render obsolete that kind of gamesmanship

I believe the Big West Board folks think we're mathematically alive for first and a sweep guarantees us third seed. This week's women's thread features some nice calculations by cmt, who is currently calculating an extra loss via formula to be counted for the Women so we can expect at least the same for the Men.

https://bigwest.org/documents/2021/2/12//2020_21_BWC_Manual_Section_7_Womens_Basketball_1_15_21.pdf?id=4566

It's on page 28. Inspection reveals the procedures are the same for Men and Women.

I get that this setup seems very fair in abstract, but it was written (especially on the women's side) in the context of being perfectly aware that their top-ranked team was in the middle of a required hold (these rules were dated January). So this rule section is basically just a roundabout way of formalizing how much they'd penalize Davis, the most likely team to not meet the threshold, in the event the Ags returned and started going on a rampage -- which is what happened on the Women's side and starting to look like is happening on the Men's side.

Irvine thread seems to think they're mathematically alive for the 1-seed but the title is most likely going to Davis.

There's a noticeable lack of information about chasing the five peat in the UCD website writeups and recaps I've seen. Also the KDVS commentator vaguely said "the Ags still don't know what seed they're going to get" during a discussion of the adjusted W/L system, again without mentioning title hopes. It's all a bit uncertain and weird and sounds very much in the air whether the Aggies will be called the champions this year regardless of wins.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to have a season at all and that this great group of players got to play together safely for a dozen more games. But I think there should be a little bit of justified outrage if this team finishes with the best win percentage in conference (and especially if they finish undefeated) but get the streak taken away from them due to a conference formula that specifically penalizes them for following local health restrictions.

62-53 final. Cal Poly is good.