Cal’s Women’s Basketball Team has earned a 3-seed in this year’s NCAA tournament.  They’ll face San Diego in the first round at Maples Pavilion, with a potential matchup with either 6-seed George Washington or 11-seed Auburn in the second round.  Cal’s first-round game will be sometime on Saturday the 22nd.

If they make it as far as the Sweet 16, they may get a rematch with second-seeded Rutgers, who defeated them 56-51 on December 10th.

<UPDATE> The game vs. San Diego is scheduled for 1:30 pm on Saturday, and will be televised on ESPN2. 

Ah, March Madness is here, and for only the second time in the last 5 years, the Bears are playing in the postseason.  GO BEARS!

Oh…wait…you say the Bears didn’t make the NCAA tournament?  And they’re only playing in the NIT?  And that this isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s been watching this team?  Yeah…

Still, it IS the postseason, and whatever else it may be, a single-elimination national tournament is a good experience for our younger Bears, most of whom have exactly no tournament experience whatsoever (the rest having a single game against NC State in the opening round of the 2006 tournament).  In fact, here’s the sum total of the postseason experience for the Bears currently on the roster, cobbled together from the box score of the NC State game:

DeVon Hardin (starter) : 7 minutes, 0-1 shooting, 0 points, 3 rebounds, 2 turnovers, 4 fouls.
Nikola Knezevic : 10 minutes, 1-2 shooting, 3 points, 2 fouls.
Eric Vierneisel : 6 minutes, 0 points, 1 assist, 1 turnover.
Jordan Wilkes : 3 minutes.

Oh, and Theo, who is blueshirting this season and won’t be available.

Theo Robertson (starter) : 34 minutes, 1-2 shooting, 3 points, 1 assist, 3 turnovers, 2 steals, 2 fouls.

So, one could see how a little postseason experience could be valuable, even if it is in the NIT.

Anyway, if you care at all about the NIT, you’re probably more interested in the New Mexico Lobos, who come to Berkeley on Wednesday.  If you’re like me, you don’t pay any attention to Mountain West basketball, and so know nothing about who these guys are and what they’re all about.  Fortunately, I’ve done some internet research for you.

The New Mexico Lobos are led by Head Coach Steve Alford, who was an All-American at Indiana, leading the Hoosiers to the 1987 NCAA Championship, which, unlike the NIT, is generally considered an actual national championship.  Up until last year, he coached at Iowa, where he twice won the Big 10 tournament, but only won 1 game in 3 trips to the NCAA, as well as only 1 game in three trips to the NIT.  I was unable to find out why Alford resigned at the end of last year to take the same job at New Mexico, but from all accounts, Iowa was only too happy to let him leave.

New Mexico’s leading scorer and rebounder is senior guard J.R. Giddens.  A transfer from Kansas, he was part of the same recruiting class as Omar Wilkes, one that signed up to play for Roy Williams, but instead got Bill Self after Williams took his dream job at North Carolina.  Wilkes and Giddens were teammates for only a year, but if Braun still has Omar’s number, I’d imagine he’ll be giving him a call.

Giddens, as you’d guess from being a former Kansas recruit, is quite talented (former New Mexico coach Ritchie McKay predicted he’d be a lottery pick), but had an up-and-down time at Kansas, bothered by inconsistency, poor defense, and being stabbed in a bar fight.  By all accounts, he’s gotten himself together in Albuquerque, however, and will definitely be a focus of the Bear’s defense.

The second-leading scorer for the Lobos is junior guard Chad Toppert, the only other player on the roster averaging more than 10 points a game or more than 25 minutes per game.  Though he doesn’t shoot a ton, he can definitely score from beyond the arc, averaging over 48% from 3-point land this year.  I guarantee the Bears will lose him on defense a couple times and he’ll knock down some big shots.  Also, according to this blog, Utah fans started referring to him as "Footloose", due to his resemblance to Kevin Bacon.

I suppose there are worse celebrities to resemble than Kevin Bacon.  Carrot Top, for instance.  Or Trent Johnson.

The Lobos, while stacked with guards, aren’t nearly as deep as the Bears in the frontcourt.  6-9 forward Daniel Faris is your main worry, a junior who averages almost 10 points per game, but less than 5 rebounds per game.  6-8 Johnnie Harris and 6-10 Monquel Pegues will provide depth, but neither junior transfer plays more than about 12 minutes per game.  This guard-heavy team can score, however, averaging almost 74.4 ppg, less than 3 off of the Bears’ average, 77.3 ppg.

In general, the Lobos will run a bunch of guys out there, with 10 guys averaging more than 10 minutes per game (the Bears really only rotate 8 guys in).  Is that a sign of depth, or a lack of star players?  Probably a bit of both, but taking a team lightly just because they lack star power would be a foolish thing to do, especially in light of the Lobos 24-8 record.

So how impressive is that 24-8 record?  Well, their non-conference record is even less accomplished than the Bears, if that’s possible, with a win over a middling Texas Tech team being their best OOC scalp, and an 8-point loss at tournament-bound Mississippi being their only test against quality competition.  They finished third in the Mountain West, a league Jeff Sagarin rates as the 9th-best in the country (he has the Pac-10 as the #1 conference, BTW).  League champ BYU and tourney champ UNLV are the only two teams in the NCAAs, and New Mexico only went 1-3 against those two teams.  The Lobos split their season series with SDSU, a team Cal beat by 8 at home, while they took two of three against Utah (with two of those games going to overtime), a team Cal lost to by 2 at home.

New Mexico’s final RPI was 60, 32 spots higher than Cal, but Sagarin only has them rated 13 spots ahead of the Bears, 43 to 56, and would actually have Cal as a three-point favorite at home.

I expect a tight game on Wednesday, as one would expect from a 4-5 matchup.  In fact, this story seems to suggest that the Lobos would have been hosting this game except for prior obligations to host the Women’s NCAA Tournament.  Would that have made them a 4 seed, and Cal a 5?  I couldn’t say, and wouldn’t have argued it if that were the case.

If I had to pick a key to watch in this game (televised on ESPN2), it would be Randle and Christopher’s defense of the Lobos perimeter players.  Perimeter defense has been a weakness for the Bears this year, and Cal needs to force New Mexico to try and go inside, where Hardin and Boykin will have a distinct advantage.  Do that, and the Bears should be fine.