This Pac-10 season lived up to all expectations set forth by numerous prognosticators throughout the country. The highly touted Freshmen delivered almost beyond expectation as we saw O.J. Mayo, Kevin Love, and Jerryd Bayless practically carry their teams during the course of a brutal in conference schedule. Take any one of those guys away from their respective teams and each would suffer considerably. Just look at Arizona. They lost Bayless for a five game stretch and could barely muster 2 victories. The Pac-10 has proved to be the nation’s top conference, on par with the Big East at the very least.
Unfortunately the Pac will probably only see 6 teams invited to the dance as a result of all the parity, a number which has been equaled in the past, but deserves to be surpassed. Only UCLA and Stanford really separated themselves with everyone else playing catch up. The exception would be the lowly Beavers of Oregon State, whom we’re not sure could beat the Oregon high school state champions at this point. They have a chance to do what no one has done since the league expanded to 10 teams…go a full 0-18 in conference play. Anytime you get the chance to do something no one has ever done before…well that’s just impressive. After the Miami Dolphins failed us, let’s hope that the Beavs can pull through.
Going into the NCAA tournament, what has not been discussed at great length is the poor Pac-10 officiating. What we really mean to say is the worst of any major conference in the country. Possibly of all time. If you were lucky enough to watch the fantastic battle between UCLA and Stanford for the Pac-10 crown on Thursday you would have seen a great game marred horribly by bad officiating. Stanford was called for a shooting foul with 2 seconds left that gave UCLA the chance to put the game in overtime. Replays showed the block to be completely clean. Short of molestation, that call should never be made in that situation. But alas, these are the feckless officials of the Pac-10 and they have been this way for years. That’s not even mentioning the intentional foul call on Stanford in overtime, which replays showed to be equally as offensive.
Every team has had to deal with their ineptness at some point which I guess evens the playing field. The issue at hand is how will this affect the conference teams moving on to the NCAA’s? It could go either way. The guess here is that it will help to have competent officials. The Pac has proven they want to play hard and just about every team wants to play physical (thank you Ben Howland). If teams are allowed to play a game whereby the officials are not controlling every minutia then the Pac-10 should represent itself very well come tournament time.
Photo by Monica’s Dad via Flickr
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