2017-18 Big West Post-Mortem

After a decidedly down season before, the Big West Conference followed up with a much-needed bounce-back year in 2017-18. Perhaps surprisingly so.

Coming into the season, the prognosis was not great for the Big West. It may have been easy to forget that just over a year earlier this had been a league on the upswing, with consecutive top-15 finishes in the conference RPI and a team (Hawaii) that made the round of 32 in the 2016 NCAA Tournament. The conference tumbled all the way to 29th in the conference ranking in 2016-17, though, and the prognosis for immediate improvement did not seem good with a mere seven of the 21 players on the all-conference teams returning.

Despite a mass exodus of talent after what was already a dour season, though, the Big West was a much better league this year. The conference improved seven spots in the RPI rankings, featured a superb six-team race for the title that went down to the final day of the regular season, and it also lacked nothing for individual talent or storylines, either. The bottom three teams struggled mightily, weighing down the overall rating some. It still was much more like 2016 than 2017, and happily so for this sometimes-overlooked conference on the Pacific Coast.

Coming off a trip to the NCAA Tournament in 2017, UC Davis was a surprising regular season champion. The Aggies epitomized the league’s collective making the best of turnover, as a team with four new starters didn’t miss a beat, led primarily by junior college transfer T.J. Shorts. The 5-foot-9 guard was outstanding and earned not just the conference’s Newcomer of the Year award but also its Player of the Year honor.

UC Santa Barbara also was nothing less than the most improved team in the country. It had seemed the Gauchos’ dive to 6-22 the year before was something of an anomaly, but the first year under Joe Pasternack was still a smashing success with a 23-9 record and UCSB right in the thick of the league race. While a couple transfers (Leland King, Marcus Jackson) played a significant part in that improvement, the holdovers also stepped up, and in particular sophomore Max Heidegger became a shameless scoring machine from outside.

UC Irvine also showed once again that it is the Big West’s most consistent program, as a young team weathered a tough non-conference schedule and just missed its fourth regular season title in six years. Long Beach State was also again capable, even as it faded in the second half of the year. In the end, though, it was Cal State Fullerton that emerged as best in the conference tourney and clinched its first bid to the NCAA Tournament in 10 years.

Led by a pair of dynamic scorers in Khalil Ahmad and Kyle Allman, a growing low-post presence in Jackson Rowe and all-around strong team defense-something that has become a staple of the Big West as a whole-the Titans were another contender all season. Fullerton showed its capability in the regular season by beating UC Davis twice, and it took care of the Aggies a third time in the postseason on the way to becoming-incredibly-the eighth different school in eight years to win the league tourney.

Coach Dedrique Taylor took over a tough spot in 2013 after the firing of successful coach Bob Burton and a year with an interim coach, but after three tough years he now has the Titan program cranking. His name belongs near the top of any list of best building jobs in college hoops over the past couple years. Cal State Fullerton’s rise has also raised the bar for past regular contenders like Cal Poly, Hawaii and Long Beach State, making it tougher for them to keep up in what has become a very competitive circuit.

Final Standings:

Conference Tournament
The Honda Center in Anaheim continues to be a good home for the Big West Tournament. In eight years at the venue, the tourney has also had incredible balance with eight different winners, and recent tourneys also have included a buffet of close games. This year’s delivered again with five of the seven games decided by four points or less, four of them by a single possession.

It started at the top in the quarterfinals, as No. 1 seed UC Davis held off UC Riverside 70-66, only after the Highlanders absolutely refused to go away after falling behind by 14 early in the second half. It took two free throws by T.J. Shorts with a second left to finally clinch it, and the Aggies might not have won without 15 points off the bench from Joe Mooney. Fourth-seeded Cal State Fullerton then followed with a 76-74 win over Long Beach State, the Titans withstanding two 49er shots at the rim in the final seconds that would’ve sent the game to overtime. No. 3 seed UC Irvine then came back from 10 points down with four minutes to play and defeated No. 6 Hawaii 68-67 on Max Hazzard’s jumper with seven seconds left. The only quarterfinal that wasn’t close was the final one, as 2 seed UC Santa Barbara took a 27-point halftime lead and cruised to a 75-53 blowout of No. 7 Cal Poly, holding the Mustangs to 27.5% shooting.

The semifinals provided a pair of upsets by seed, though anyone who followed the conference all season knew there was little separating the top four teams. Cal State Fullerton had already defeated regular season champion UC Davis twice in the regular season, and the Titans did it again in the semis, 55-52 victors after battling back from 13 down in the second half. Fullerton held Davis to just 12 points in the final 17 minutes, the Aggies paying for slowing down to a crawl late. The second semi went to UC Irvine, which squeezed past UCSB 61-58 in a game that included 13 ties and neither team leading by more than six throughout.

The championship game became the Kyle Allman and Khalil Ahmad Show. Cal State Fullerton’s two prolific scorers took over in the second half and finished with 26 and 23 points respectively in a 71-55 win over UC Irvine. The Titans shot 56.7% in the second half, while the Anteaters shot 31.1% for the game and lost in the tourney final for the second straight year.

Postseason Awards
Player of the Year: T.J. Shorts, G, Jr., UC Davis
Freshman of the Year: Terrell Gomez, G, Cal State Northridge
Newcomer of the Year: T.J. Shorts, G, Jr., UC Davis
Coach of the Year: Jim Les, UC Davis

All-Conference Team
Kyle Allman, G, Jr., Cal State Fullerton
Max Heidegger, G, So., UC Santa Barbara
Leland King, F, Sr., UC Santa Barbara
Gabe Levin, F, Sr., Long Beach State
Tommy Rutherford, F, So., UC Irvine
T.J. Shorts, G, Jr., UC Davis

Season Highlights

• Cal State Fullerton became the eighth different Big West school in eight years to win the conference tournament and advance to the NCAA Tournament.
• UC Santa Barbara was the most improved team in the country, soaring from six wins to 23 in Joe Pasternack’s first year.
• The conference moved up seven spots in the conference RPI, from 29th a year ago to No. 22 this year.
• UC Irvine ranked fourth in NCAA Division I in field-goal percentage defense, allowing opponents to shoot just 38.9%. The Anteaters also were fifth in total rebounds and 10th nationally in rebound margin (+7.5).
• UC Riverside had a miserable season that included the firing of its coach over the holidays, but the Highlanders did score three of the biggest-name non-conference wins in the league by toppling California, Air Force and Valparaiso, the latter two by a combined 32 points.

What we expected, and it happened: Most seemed to be counting out UC Irvine before last season, but it was little surprise here that the Anteaters were once again near the top of the league in a hotly contested race. Also, we actually did note that UC Santa Barbara was a candidate for biggest turnaround in the country, and the Gauchos performed exactly that.

What we expected, and it didn’t happen: Not a ton, if only because there was so much uncertainty entering the year. But our putting Long Beach State in the category of a team in even modest decline was wrong. The 49ers led the Big West at the midway point of conference play and were very competitive yet again.

What we didn’t expect, and it happened: It was assumed by just about all that UC Davis lost too much from its 2017 NCAA Tournament team, but the Aggies picked up right where they left off and took a hard-earned regular season title. Jim Les has built a program that capably reloads after major personnel losses.

Team on the rise: UC Irvine. It’s hard to tab a program with three regular season titles and finishes of second or better each of the last five straight years as on the rise. The Anteaters, though, showed improvement the second half of last season, though, winning 12 of their last 16 after a 6-13 start and just missing a sixth straight 20-win season, and just about everyone is back.

Team on the decline: Cal Poly. The rise of programs like Cal State Fullerton and UC Davis has curtailed the progress made by Joe Callero’s Mustangs earlier in the decade, when they posted three straight .500 or better seasons and then made a surprising Big West tourney run to the NCAAs in 2014. Once one of the better defensive squads on the West Coast, Cal Poly has slipped in that area the last three years, and this past year also was one of the worst shooting teams in NCAA Division I.

2018-19 Big West Outlook
First things first: eight different schools have won the last eight Big West tourneys (one was Pacific, now in the WCC). The two current members that have gone dry in that stretch are Cal State Northridge and UC Riverside. If you like trends, then one of those two is your pick, but Northridge and Riverside were two of the three bottom teams in the conference last year and are both rebuilding under new coaches. The odds of them ascending to the top are slim.

That aside, the Big West is set up for another outstanding conference race. Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine should enter as favorites, with the Titans returning the high-scoring Ahmad and Allman and the Anteaters bringing back almost every key piece from a team that has size, guard play, and also should be better with a year of experience.

UC Santa Barbara also will provide stiff competition, as Pasternack has proven he can reload quickly through recruiting. UC Davis won’t go away, either, not with Shorts and Siler Schneider providing plenty of aggressiveness scoring. Also watch for A.J. John to emerge as an even more important piece in place of Chima Moneke. Just like this past year, any of these four could easily emerge as the best of the bunch at the end of the regular season and in March. True hoopheads should love this league race.

Long Beach State will also be a tough out, even as the 49ers will miss Gabe Levin. Deishaun Booker has all-conference potential. Hawaii also will continue to be no slouch, though it will need frontcourt reinforcements with the loss of Mike Thomas and Gibson Johnson. The remaining three will again have some work to do, though, to catch up to the pack.

The conference also has some changes on the way, though they won’t be fully implemented for a couple years. Cal State Bakersfield announced in November that it will join the Big West starting July 1, 2018. The Roadrunners won’t actually become a full member of the conference until July 2020, the same year that UC San Diego also starts playing a full conference schedule as part of its transition to Division I.

Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam