It’s a segment of a highlight reel that 10 years later seems to have originated shortly after the advent of moving pictures and well after San Diego State men’s basketball had been pronounced clinically dead.

Displayed on the video screen at Cox Arena before every Aztecs home game, it shows a coach whose hair is still equal parts salt and pepper, whose résumé is rife with deeds well done and whose vision is either daring or downright delusional when he issues the following forecast:

“We’re going to win.”

While no one checked to see if pigs were taxiing along the tarmac at Lindbergh Field on March 26, 1999, it would have been no less preposterous than the proclamation made by newly hired coach Steve Fisher.

SDSU had endured 13 losing seasons in the previous 14 years, seasons that were less topsy-turvy than mostly terrible. Players who were part of the program’s last appearance in a postseason tournament were fast nearing the age of 40. Fisher’s predecessor, Fred Trenkle, had won four games in 1998-99, the fewest number of victories in the program’s 88-year history.

If Fisher was going to win, some argued, the first order of business in filling out his staff would be placing phone calls to Moses and Mother Teresa.

“This was not an attractive job when I got it,” Fisher said. “This was the kind of job where if somebody couldn’t find a job they may have considered this one. Along with Air Force, we were considered the whipping boys and the laughingstock of the Mountain West Conference; everybody beat up on us.

“Ten years ago, to say that we wanted to win a conference championship or win the conference tournament would have been considered a lot of talk. Today, that’s not just wishful thinking, that’s reality. It’s something I believe we’ll be good enough to do next year and five years from now.”

Fisher, whose team will meet Baylor in the semifinals of the NIT Tournament tomorrow at New York’s Madison Square Garden, has taken a program that finished 0-14 in league play his first season and sewn a label of legitimacy into the hide of its high-tops.

Only four times in the past 10 years has SDSU failed to garner a postseason tournament bid. In his first four seasons, Fisher’s teams earned more postseason berths (two) than the program had in the previous 20 years. The Aztecs’ 26 wins this season represent the highest single-season total in school history.

And if being 35 games into the season is uncharted water for SDSU, it certainly isn’t for Fisher, who in eight-plus seasons at Michigan never failed to reach the postseason. His appearance at the NIT semifinals will be his third. The Wolverines won the tournament with Fisher as an assistant in 1984 and again in his final season as head coach in ’97. In four appearances in national semifinal games, he is 4-0.

Though reluctant to draw parallels between his successes at Michigan and propping up a program once scarred as much by humiliation as the floor burns on its knees, Fisher, on Friday, will mark the 20th anniversary of the Wolverines beating Seton Hall to win the NCAA title.

“What happened to me 20 years ago will probably never happen again to anybody,” said Fisher, who won a national title over the course of six games after the dismissal of coach Bill Frieder. “Nonetheless, we’re going to play on a national stage in a very prestigious building. And if we win two games, I think it’s going to be a major, major accomplishment for this program.

“But I’ve never given a thought about 20 years ago, and how this season might compare to that one. Having been part of (the NIT) before, I do regard it as a tournament with great significance and one that has provided me with memories that will last a lifetime.”

If the NIT is viewed as college basketball’s Marshalls and the Final Four its Macy’s, it nonetheless looks good on the marquee. The only MWC team still standing among the six earning postseason bids, SDSU’s run to the NIT semifinals has, if nothing else, provided a substantial publicity boost for a program whose league remains handcuffed by a dubious television contract.

Regardless of what happens in New York, the Aztecs, according to the Web site Hoop Scoop Online, will return next season with the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation among non-BCS schools and the No. 15 class overall. The Web site said that if it were to include transfers Tyrone Shelley (Pepperdine), Malcolm Thomas (Pepperdine, San Diego City College) and Brian Carlwell (Illinois), SDSU’s class would rank among the top five in the country.

“Winning begets winning,” Fisher said. “It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in. If you have success, everybody benefits. This gives us exposure in terms of what really counts, and that’s recruiting. We’ve already had players who have contacted us or had their families or their coaches contact us, saying how impressed they were with what we did (in the quarterfinals) against Saint Mary’s.

“If this helps us get in the door and land a recruit, that could be significant. What it does for the players you already have is make them think about how they can get better. It raises the bar. We want more than to just get into a tournament. We want to get in and win. We’re not going to New York with the idea of playing just one game.”

Particularly the team’s six seniors, who credit Fisher not only with steering them through some narrow straits, but never wavering when the wind threatened to shred the sails.

“More than anything, this is for Coach Fisher,” said senior forward Lorrenzo Wade, who transferred from Louisville in 2005 after making a Final Four appearance with the Cardinals. “He’s the one that brought this program back from where it was, to where it couldn’t even win a conference game to now playing at Madison Square Garden.

“I may be more excited for Coach Fisher about this opportunity than I am for myself. He’s been through the trenches here at San Diego State. There are people who have turned their back on him from time to time and didn’t believe he could get the job done. But Coach Fisher has turned this program around, brought in good players and made San Diego State into something that the city of San Diego can be proud of.”

SDSU verse Baylor: NIT Semi Finals

Posted by Mike Trogan March 12, 2009 23:01PM

I may get flak for this not being directly MSU related, but with the latest Bracketology having three Big East teams as one seeds, I think it is relevant.

On top of that this is the conference Dick Vitale recently called one of the best he has covered in 30 years of broadcasting. Watch ESPN for thirty seconds and you are bound to run across a slurpfest, err segment, praising the Big East.

Here is my case why the conference is a fraud (side note: I am using the word “fraud” once again, not solely due to a painfully limited vocabulary but also because it seems to illicit strong reactions from people):

Real RPI has them not first, not second, not even third but fourth as a conference.

Their bottom tier of Depaul, USF, Rutgers and St. Johns is by far the most pathetic of any of the power conferences. These guaranteed victories fluffed the record of many a conference foe.

The next tier of ND, Georgetown, Cinci and Seton Hall spent all year overhyped and have finally settled into where they belong, as borderline NIT teams. The second tier of a power conference should all be bubble teams. On top of that, one of these “bubble” teams just lost in the first round of the conference tournament to a winless team.

The following tier of Villanova, Syracuse, West Virginia, Providence and Marquette is full of middling seeds and bubble teams. Just like any other power conference, so what here makes the Big East exceptional?

The top tier is UConn, Pitt and Louisville. UConn is a solid No. 1 barring they also don’t lose tonight. Pitt just lost to a bubble team. Louisville lost by 30 to an NIT bound team two weeks ago. Plus, their regular season “championship’ was won by only playing the top five conference teams once. Oh, and they lost to Western Kentucky at home.

In an earlier blog I pointed out that the Big East needs to have eight tournament teams just to equal six from the other top conferences. Yes, they have three very good teams, but the conference is huge. With 16 teams a few are bound to be good just by the law of averages. The ACC also has three very good teams, but those teams represent a far greater percentage of their conference than three in the Big East do.

I did not set out to trash the Big East, but the amount of attention the conference is receiving from the media is a joke. Bottom line is that this is not a once-in-a-generation collection of talent. In fact, it is debatable if it is the top conference in college basketball this season.

Source: http://blog.mlive.com/ganggreen/2009/03/is_this_years_big_east_the_mos.html

By David Coulson, Contributing College Basketball Editor

Philadelphia, PA (Sports Network) – Sunday wasn’t a very good day for the little guys. If you weren’t a member of one of the traditional power conferences, the message from the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee was clear: you don’t belong in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament unless you win your conference tournament.

The committee has never shown how important conference affiliation is than it did with the selection of this year’s field. The committee is controlled by the major conferences, and they have tightened the noose around the collective necks of the smaller leagues.

The regular season apparently didn’t matter a great deal for these teams, and any effort to play a competitive schedule was not deemed to be overly significant either.

St. Mary’s went 26-6, finishing behind only Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference. The Gaels were 18-1 at one point this season before guard Patrick Mills missed more than a month with two broken metacarpal bones in his right hand. The team still managed to win 26 games, but the NCAA committee would seemingly rather carve out a little more money for their individual conferences than make sure a deserving team got into the field.

The presence in the field of an Arizona team that went 19-13, and was 2-8 on the road, says all you need to know.

Davidson was the darling of the tournament a year ago, coming within a final- second shot of beating eventual national champion Kansas in the Elite Eight. Stephen Curry came back this season and led the nation in scoring, despite playing against some of the most ridiculous defenses ever designed to stop a player, and helped his team to a 26-7 record and a Southern Conference regular-season crown.

But the Wildcats lost to a College of Charleston club in the Southern Conference semifinals that won 26 games in its own right (but also failed to win the SoCon tourney), and the tournament committee decided that their big shindig doesn’t need a player like Curry.

Instead, the committee rewarded a Wisconsin club that went a mediocre 19-12 and did little to distinguish itself in the rather lackluster Big 10 this season. Plus, the Badgers are one of the most boring teams you would care to watch, with a style about as exciting as watching mold grow.

Meanwhile, San Diego State came within one shot of beating Utah in the Mountain West Conference tournament. The Aztecs were a sparkling 23-9 during the season and finished just a game back of Utah, Brigham Young and New Mexico for the league regular-season title.

Coached by Steve Fisher, who already has an NCAA ring from his days at Michigan, San Diego State would have arguably been a more interesting pick for the tournament than another Big 10 team like 22-10 Minnesota, or Atlantic Coast Conference representatives Boston College (22-11) or Maryland (20-13).

You would think that the committee could have also found a place for someone like a 26-7 Creighton team rather than one of those big-conference also-rans. All the Blue Jays did was share the Missouri Valley Conference regular season title with Northern Iowa.

But then, I guess the folks on the committee were too busy watching another Big East game than to notice what a tough league the Missouri Valley Conference was.

For me, one of the most compelling things about the NCAA tournament is watching the Davids knock off the big conference Goliaths. But those are precisely the type of challenges the big boys want to avoid.

The fact of the matter is that the big conferences avoid the small guys like the plague in the regular season, particularly when it comes to traveling to one of those team’s home courts. How are these teams suppose to schedule games that will impress the committee when the big conferences won’t play them?

An example of the idiocy of the selection process is the case of Utah State. Out of principal, veteran Aggie coach Stew Morrell refuses to schedule teams unless they will play home-and-home with Utah State. Considering that the Aggies have won 93% of their games at the Spectrum in recent years, you know Morrell doesn’t get many takers.

Utah State went out and won 30 games this season and rolled to the title in the Western Athletic Conference. The Aggies had an RPI of 25, but if they hadn’t won their conference tournament on Saturday night against league- runner-up Nevada on the Wolfpack’s home floor, Utah State would have likely been in the ranks of St. Mary’s, Davidson, San Diego State and Creighton, on the outside looking in.

As it was, Utah State only received a No. 11 seed in the West Regional, where the Aggies will meet a stumbling sixth-seeded Marquette club. I bet Morrell and the Aggies are licking their chops over that matchup.

I’ll be rooting for Utah State along with other potential small-school giant killers like Cleveland State, Siena, North Dakota State, Portland State, Butler, Gonzaga and Stephen F. Austin this week.

And I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the committee will wake up and give some of the little guys a little more respect next season.

Source: http://www.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsnform.aspx?c=sportsnetwork&page=cbask/news/news.aspx?id=4220235

Well,

Even though I will not get over the fact that the NCAA screwed my team over and once again showed that they are incapable of shedding their bias towards the Big East and other BCS jokes; i will now provide a team breakdown for Game One of the “here is your door prize” NIT.

Weber State is from the Big Sky confernece. They finished number 1 with a 21-9 record. They have an RPI of 107 and an SOS of 224. This will be the first meeting ever between the two schools. Weber did play BYU and Utah; they lost 92-62 and 74-64 respectively. Watch Kellen McCoy: 14.1 PPG and Damian Lillard 11.5 PPG for Weber. Kellen has a decent 3 pt FG% at 41%. The team averages 70.9 points per game and holds teams to 66.3 avg.

Bottomline: Round 1 to SDSU with ease; SDSU wins game by 10 or more. There is simply too much talent and too much defense for Weber St. to overcome. This shoud be nothing more than a anger release for SDSU for getting screwed. SDSU to Round 2.

What say you?