The regular season is quickly coming to an end. After multiple months of chaos and competition levels within the conference that have not been seen in years, we are now close to finding out if the six-bid Mountain West will really come to fruition.
With a little less than three weeks until Selection Sunday, the league has six teams positioned in the top 45 of NET rankings. UNLV is quickly climbing, too. The Rebels sit at 81st in NET and now have five Quad 1 victories after winning seven of their last eight games overall. Quietly they only trail Utah State in first place by a game. And they definitely are a group that can make things interesting for the selection committee if they find a way to win the regular season title or the Mountain West Tournament.
Along with NET rankings, KenPom also ranks six MW teams in the top 45 and seven in the top 75. Bart Torvik has the league’s top seven in his top 75 as well. So essentially anywhere that you look, the league is well respected; much more so than in previous seasons. If the MW was considered a mid-major before, the results this season are more on par with leagues like the Big East.
While it’s been cool to see the conference elevated from a competitive standpoint, for Colorado State fans that came into the new year with high hopes after such a dominant start to the season, the process has definitely been bittersweet.
After nearly cracking the top 10 earlier this season, potentially not even finishing in the top 5 of the conference is not exactly how Ram Nation envisioned things playing out. But sometimes that’s what the experience in a highly competitive conference is.
As I’ve said before and will say here again — UCONN lost seven total games last season and all of them were to Big East teams. The level of familiarity between opponents in the same league can result in some highly frustrating stretches. All bets are off, though, when it comes to the NCAA Tournament. Sometimes you just have to survive the gauntlet that is your own league before anything is possible in a single-elimination format against teams that likely know less about you.
With three games remaining until the postseason, CSU may no longer be in the race for the Mountain West title. After dropping both road games last week, it’s simply too much ground to make up and not enough time to do it. But that’s not to say that the standings don’t matter.
Unlike a couple of the other teams in the conference that are closer to the bubble right now, the Rams have a little more flexibility with the standings thanks to a really impressive non-conference resume. Even as the seventh-place team in the MW, according to an average of 105 projections on bracket matrix, the Rams would be a 7-seed in the NCAA Tournament, the same as Utah State.
Now, obviously if the Rams were to lose out or something drastic like that, the conversation could change quickly. The point of all this, though, is to say that the Rams are not exactly playing for their lives at the moment. It’s more like they are playing to keep a single-digit seed.
The benefit for CSU is that even after dropping a few tight ones here down the stretch, the Rams still have a chance to add multiple Q1/Q2 victories in Las Vegas at the MW Tournament. If CSU even reaches the semifinals of the event, they are pretty much guaranteed to have added another quality win. If they can get to the title game, whether they win it all or not, it could be enough to raise the Rams a full seed line or two.
If the Rams are going to make a run at the Thomas and Mack Center next month, finishing top 5 in the league would definitely help their chances.
In the current format of the tournament, nobody has ever reached the championship game after playing on Wednesday. And unfortunately, if the tournament were to be seeded today, the Rams would be playing on Wednesday.
The silver lining of the situation is while there is still pressure to perform, if the Rams can win out and take these final three, they should be able to sneak back into 4th or 5th place before the end of the regular season and secure a first-round bye. The caveat is that the offense will need to be much more consistent if that’s going to happen.
In the losses at New Mexico and UNLV, the Rams shot below 42 percent from the floor as a team, which brings their record to 0-6 in games where that’s the case. CSU has done a pretty good job of attacking the paint and finding ways to create 2-point offense. 3-point shooting has been a struggle throughout league play though.
After shooting 40 percent or better from deep six times in November and December, the Rams have done it only twice against league competition. With the way that CSU is defending right now, the Rams don’t need to be the vintage Warriors raining threes out there like Steph Curry. They just need to knock down the open looks more consistently than they have over the last six weeks or so.
Nique Clifford and Patrick Cartier are both guys that can really light it up when they’re on from deep. It would be nice to see them find a little groove here as we close out the regular season.
