Washington State at Oregon

We are slightly behind as you can see :) But here we go: The battle of the contrasting style of plays, episode #23405. The run and gun Oregon Ducks hosted the Vulcans of Washington State! The game started faster than we anticipated, but sluggishness took over the second half where it took the Cougars a few centuries to go from 41 to over 42.

Despite all that, Washington State showed once again they are very capable of beating teams outside the Sweet 16. The Nike Ducks are one of the crazy teams of the year, like Texas and Xavier, that can beat almost any team on a good day, and lose to any team on a bad day. And this was not a good day for Oregon.

However, the clock is ticking for Oregon, and with the crunch in the middle of the Pac-10, an NCAA bid will be hard to come by. Unlike the many pundits who dream of 7 or 8 bids for the Pac-10, we would like to point out that the Pac-10 will get 6 bids, unless a team that is not supposed to get an at-large bid makes a run to the tourney final beating a couple of NCAA teams along the way.

Why would we say that? We are a west-coast-bias blog after all. Because unlike conference with unbalanced schedules, where at-large teams can keep on wining over non-tourney teams, Pac-10 plays a true round robin, which means there are not enough wins for seven at-large teams. The only "guaranteed" win is Oregon State. Nothing else is guaranteed. And you don't have to be a math major to realize that there's only 9 wins per week in the conference. That's all! Not enough room for seven at-large bids!

But the Pac-10 tourney could save the day for teams like Cal 420, Arizona State, Washington, Oregon, Wise-less Arizona and Hacketless-USC, especially if they don't finish strong.