LARAMIE, Wyo. – Three thoughts on San Diego State’s 72-69 win at Wyoming on Saturday night:
1. Perfect timing
BJ Davis?
Well, he’s back.
The sophomore guard had a torrid start to the season, which was even more impressive considering these were his first meaningful minutes after being buried on the bench on a veteran team the year before. He had 28 points in a closed-door preseason exhibition at UCLA in October, then 11 in the opener against UCSD in his first career start with senior guard Reese Waters injured. He followed that with 16, 15, 18 and 18.
First five games: 15.6 points, 60% shooting overall, 10 of 20 behind the arc.
And then …
Next 19 games: 6.7 points, 35.5% shooting, 18 of 61 behind the arc (29.5%).
And then …
Last three games: 12.7 points, 61.1% shooting, 10 of 16 behind the arc (62.5%).
“I just had to get back to my roots,” Davis said after equaling his career high of 18 points in his first trip to the 7,220 feet of Wyoming. “I had to do all the things that got me here to this place, be the same person I was that got me here. That’s what I fell back to, just trying to be myself, more comfortable in my own skin.
“Getting in the gym extra, getting an early night’s rest. It’s just the little stuff that the greatest athletes do, and it shows.”
The timing couldn’t be better. Miles Byrd also had 18 on Saturday, his most in 11 games. His sprained right thumb continues to heal, and he said he received a pain-killing injection last week in his balky hip that has bothered him on and off for the last two seasons.
Nick Boyd also is playing his best basketball of the season. So is Miles Heide and Jared Coleman-Jones. So was Magoon Gwath before hyperextending his knee, but his rehab seems to be progressing. He could return as early as this week.
“Goon went down, everybody had to pick up the slack for him because he’s an incredible player,” Davis said. “We all have to be better to make up for his absence.”
Consider this mind-blowing stat: Over the past three games (an eight-point loss, an eight-point win, a three-point win), all but two minutes of which were without Gwath, the Aztecs are an aggregate plus-3 points. And plus-43 when Davis has been on the floor.
And don’t forget that he was the primary defender on the first and fourth leading scorers in the Mountain West, New Mexico’s Donovan Dent and Wyoming’s Obi Agbim.
“Just got his confidence back up,” Dutcher said. “He got back in the gym. He wasn’t shooting as much as he was earlier. I think he was tired over (the semester break) and rested more. Now he’s got his swagger back up. It’s great to see.”
2. Metrics deception
The Aztecs are 20-7 and projected as a No. 9 or 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament by most leading bracketologists, which translates to somewhere between the nation’s 33rd and 40th best team. So how come the NET and a few other metrics have them in the 50s?
The simple answer is that they play their best basketball against the best teams, which also means the opposite is true.
Bart Torvik’s T-rank includes filters for date parameters as well as quality of opposition. Remove Quad 4 games (against the bottom tier of teams), and the Aztecs go from 56 overall to 36 – the highest jump among the top 75 teams which, presumably, are vying for NCAA Tournament spots.
Compare that to Boise State, which sits at 43 overall in T-rank but drops to 63 when you remove Quad 4 games. Or Colorado State, which goes from 50 to 65.
That’s because they beat up on lesser foes, gaming the metrics with lopsided wins that overperform the computer’s projected margin.
The Aztecs aren’t built that way, a defensive-oriented team with what at times is an anemic offense incapable of achieving 30- and 40-point routs. They rank 13th in defensive efficiency this season, 111th in offensive efficiency.
Their nonconference schedule, ranked as the ninth most difficult in the nation, wasn’t built that way, either. They played four straight games in November against teams ranked in the Associated Press top 25 instead of a diet of metric-juicing cupcakes.
They’ve played 12 Quad 3 or 4 games this season and outperformed the projected margin of victory in only four – and just once in the last seven. Over the course of the season, they’re a combined 50 points worse than the projected spread.
In one two-week stretch, they lost a Quad 3 home game against UNLV despite being favored by 10.5 points and had three close calls against Air Force, San Jose State and Wyoming despite being favored by 13 or 14 points. That was accompanied by a nine-spot slide in the NET metric.
Saturday’s projected spread was seven. The Aztecs won by three.
“I’ve got one more trip here,” Dutcher said of Wyoming, which won’t be part of the reformed Pac-12 in 2026-27. “God bless, I love Laramie, I love the people of Laramie, but I won’t be coming back. As long as I’m an Aztecs coach, I won’t be bringing a team here. I know how hard it is.”
3. Consortium conundrum
When the Pac-12 disintegrated and the Western Basketball Officiating Consortium (WBOC) followed suit, the other five Division I conferences in the West needed to find a new source of striped shirts.
The WCC, Big West, Big Sky and WAC all followed WBOC coordinator John Higgins to the Big 12, where he assumed a similar role and brought many of the top Pac-12 officials with him. The Mountain West broke ranks and ed the College Officiating Consortium (COC) that supplies the Big Ten and several smaller Midwest leagues.
“The Mountain West,” Commissioner Gloria Nevarez said in a statement last spring announcing the move, “will continue to see high-level officiating, evaluations and trainings that will enhance our conference and the student-athlete experience.”
The idea was that the top Big Ten officials would make West Coast swings to work conference games with UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington, then detour to Mountain West schools along the way. But whether because of the travel logistics of shipping Midwest-based officials across the country or a deprioritization of the Mountain West, it hasn’t quite worked out like that.
The Kenpom metric ranks officials on the theory that the best refs are assigned to the best games. Eight of the current top 15 are regulars in the Big Ten, working a combined 173 conference games but only 18 in the Mountain West.
Another way to look at it is the average Kenpom ranking of a three-person crew. In eight SDSU games between Feb. 1 and March 1 last season, it was 84.
This season: 110.
Saturday’s crew at Wyoming was the latest insult for a program that reached the national championship game and Sweet 16 in the past two seasons.
There was No. 59 Michael Irving, one of the West Coast-based officials who jumped to the COC after the WBOC disbanded. There was No. 125 Chad Barlow, who hasn’t been deemed worthy of working a single Big Ten game this season and instead is primarily assigned to the MAC and Horizon League. And there was Juan Corral, a Division II official who has worked only 15 Division I games this season and none since Feb. 18 (when he also had the Aztecs). He’s ranked 361st.
Corral was the ref who whistled a technical foul on Davis after he made a 3 and looked at his own bench to, in his words, “turn my guys up, like, ‘Let’s go, guys. Let’s do it.’”
Barlow was the ref who T-ed up Miles Byrd seven seconds later.
“All of a sudden, it was about the officiating instead of the game,” Dutcher said. “I was hoping they wouldn’t interject themselves too much. I’m sitting courtside. I didn’t see a lot of crap talking between the two teams back and forth.”
SDSU and the four other Mountain West defectors have one more season of the COC before ing the new Pac-12, which has not yet decided on an officiating consortium for basketball.
