GARRETT WAIT
Sports Editor
Many of us thought that the men’s basketball team would have a better record than 12-7 at this point in the season. All indications were that this team could be good. Really good. So good that some students were already planning how to get out of classes to attend Pepperdine’s NCAA tournament games in March.
Alas, the only way this team makes the Big Dance is if they win the West Coast Conference Tournament. So now Pepperdine will play the role of spoiler for the rest of the regular season.
So we have to shift our focus as fans. We have to stop acting like we’re going to be the favorites in every game we play the rest of the season. In fact, we should take the complete opposite stance. We should be the underdogs.
We’ve got a fast, athletic, streaky team on our hands. This is the kind of team that gives opponents fits, especially on our home floor. We’ve got so many mismatch opportunities at every position that we can be extremely dangerous for a team with tournament aspirations (such as tonight’s opponent Saint Mary’s).
No, we aren’t going to get any love from the polls like we did earlier this season when we garnered a few votes after beating Wisconsin. The team that showed up that day is the team that we need to show up from here on out.
The Waves won’t play any more meaningful games until March, at least not from our perspective. Sure, we get Gonzaga here, which is always a good atmosphere. But honestly, it doesn’t matter if we do beat them; we just don’t have the resumé to gain an at-large bid.
The only meaning any of our remaining games have is the meaning for the other team. Saint Mary’s is trying to rack up wins to put together a good argument for letting it into the NCAA tourney even without a WCC tourney victory.
Yes, this team probably should have been better. We’ve got four seniors, and three all-conference-caliber players in McGowan, Acker and Diawara. But we couldn’t put everything together early in the season. Now, though, we get to have the mindset of the predator rather than the prey.
We have to bask in ruining other teams’ seasons rather than fixing our own. Maybe a miracle run in the WCC tournament will happen, but more likely than not, this team will be absent in the postseason for a third year in a row.
We get to be the school that kills the dreams of all the alumni from Saint Mary’s or Santa Clara. We could be the team they curse as they think of what their season could have been if they just didn’t have to play Pepperdine in Malibu.
We have to get used to this idea. No, we have to embrace this idea, it’s our destiny as Pepperdine fans to revel in other schools’ misery rather than our own victory. We have to take the same mindset as Tony Montana in “Scarface.” It’s nice to be the bad guy every once in a while.
01-20-2005
