Deja Vu?

[Minnesota Ute]

When I’m looking at the .Net rankings I’m starting to get PTSD flashbacks to the old WAC/MWC days. How do we get any traction when our conference sucks so bad??

Avg .net Big12 57 Pac 12 102
Losses 42 vs 32

I’m not pumping the Zoo’s tires but I was just surprised that they are 10-1 and are hanging around at 17 while our win and an 8-2 record with a loss to Houston doesn’t even have us cracking the top 25. Then I look at who we have coming up to play and it doesn’t look good. What happened to the Pac?? 8 Q3 losses and 9 Q2 losses?? Big 12 has 12 combined, and 11 of those are among the bottom 4 teams.

What’s going on??

[Tony (admin)]

You’re not pumping their tires, but are you pumping their gas?

[Ute2]

Well done…

[FountainofUte]

There have been a lot of surprises in our time as a Pac 12 team. But one of the surprises that is up there has been the decline of the conference as a basketball conference in general.

I remember how stoked I was when we got into a P5 conference, thinking that it would be nice to finally be in one of those conferences that gets 4-6 invites annually rather than 2 or 3.

And the P12 decided to holistically underperform for most of the next 12 years. In fact, am I remembering correctly that our first or second year in the conference we only got one team in – Washington?

I expected to get in a lot more regularly as long as Utah stayed in the top half of the league. How many times have we been a top half team and NOT gotten an at-large? I didn’t see that coming as a member of the Pac.

There are a lot of reasons we’ve missed the Dance since 2016. I didn’t think conference strength would be one of those reasons.

[Minnesota Ute]

Yup that is exactly right, it seemed like a fairly precipitous decline from a 4 to 6 bid league to a 1 to 3 bid league, and it has been shades of sucky ever since. I’m less of an aficionado on FB so I’ll leave that to others, but I for one am excited about the change for Bball and I’m glad that the program seems like it’s on the upswing for that transition. If our program was where it’s been since Delon and Jakob left, or before them when we had Ray or Jim B at the helm, we’d have been bottom feeders in the B12. But I’m pretty hopeful about where we are now and where we are going with Craig in the driver’s seat.