(Photo by Marc Serota/Getty Images); (Photo by Marc Serota/Getty Images)
If you are a supporter of a team in the Mountain West Conference, today is not a happy day.
Unless you support San Diego State, then you are feeling pretty good.
BYU and Utah went out within a day of each other in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Both teams proved to be outmatched by opponents, who had understood what they needed to do.
Arizona's full court pressure defense forced mistake after mistake. Any time Utah gained momentum, it fell flat. Their biggest player Luke Nevill was in early foul trouble, and it just kept getting out of control.
They could not regain any sense of momentum. Instead, Utah could not show the resiliency to battle back.
BYU got down early. They could not recover due to pressured and forced to chase the game.
Mountain West basketball looked out of place at the tournament as the No. 5 and No. 8 seeds. Neither team was against a titan.
Each team should have been able to get up for the game.
Utah appeared to be plagued, as they have been a few times before, by lack of consistent scoring with defense that could not make critical plays. In some ways, they played very similar to the BYU game earlier in the month.
As head coach Jim Boylen looks back on this game, one wonders if he regrets giving up half of the court to Arizona.
As successful as the program has been, this record in the NCAA tournament this decade has made it out of the first or second round once.
The team is still building after missing the previous three tournaments. However, if the Mountain West Conference wants to claim a seat with the big boys, they needed Utah and, to a lesser extent, BYU to do better.
The conference has one last hope that San Diego State can win the NIT.
They are now into the quarterfinals after beating Kansas State. It is a first for the Aztecs, since they have never got this far in any national tournament since rising to Division One.
For Mountain West's sake, they need the Aztecs to prove they can win. To prove that the selection committee was wrong for keeping them out.
The Aztecs will play the winner of St. Marys versus Davidson game in the quarterfinals on March 25.
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