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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Grip on sports:

Friday: Eastern Washington’s second trip to the dance party was a short one, lasting just about as long as it took Georgetown’s Jabril Trawick to slap Tyler Harvey across the chest and knock him to the floor.

When Trawick celebrated Harvey’s late first-half turnover by doing a chest thump, albeit with Harvey between Trawick’s hand and chest, then shimmied his hips enough to knock Harvey to the court, the game was still in doubt. After the play was reviewed and no foul was called, it wasn’t anymore.

As one of the truTV announcers said, by not making that call, the game was opened to all types of physical play. And physical play favored one team. In case you were wondering, it was not the team from Cheney.

From Harvey’s turnover until the middle of the second half, the Hoyas dominated. Dominated the paint, dominated the perimeter and, most important, dominated the scoreboard. The Eagles never really picked themselves up off the floor where Trawick had sent them.

John Adams, the director of basketball officiating for the NCAA, was on truTV this morning for the pregame show. The Harvey play mentioned above was discussed. It was the only play Adams admitted the officials screwed up Thursday.

He said it should have been a dead-ball technical foul, which would have resulted in free throws and Eastern having possession of the basketball. He also said, because Hayford asked for a review, Eastern was charged a timeout.

When Buzz Williams, Virginia Tech’s coach, expressed amazement about that, Adams said, quietly, “It wasn’t our finest hour.”

No, it wasn’t. 

Wednesday: Saw this on Twitter last night: “Hi, I’m Rob Lowe. … And I’m BYU-in-the-second-half Rob Lowe.” Yeah, that’s just about perfect.

When a team builds a 17-point halftime lead, you don’t really expect a second-half collapse. But  that’s what happened. Mississippi  turned up the pressure and BYU folded. Too bad for the Cougars, too bad for the West Coast Conference.

It seems as if every NCAA tournament game is a referendum on a) the selection committee’s work; and b) the conference each school belongs to.

In last night’s case, it was a chance for the WCC to build its reputation at the expense of one of the power six conferences, the SEC. Instead, a huge lead was thrown away and the chance was wasted.

The only other team out there that can polish the WCC’s reputation? That would be Gonzaga.

No matter what the Zags do, failing an NCAA title of course, is enough for the national media. Most level-headed Spokanites would just love to see the Bulldogs play on the second weekend.

But when you win 30-plus games, rank only behind Kentucky in the polls at times this season and are a No. 2 seed, that won’t be enough to deflect the to-be-expected overrated talk on ESPN or Yahoo. Only a Final Four berth, or maybe a loss to Duke, will do that.

It doesn’t matter that first-half BYU from last night was the team that showed up in the Kennel a couple of weeks ago. And second-half BYU was nowhere to be found in any of the three meetings between the schools this season. Nope, drawing a line from the team that built a 17-point lead – and looked unbeatable – to the Zags being pretty good is too hard for most. So we’ll do it for them.

BYU played 40 minutes of that type of basketball here. Actually, BYU played 40 minutes of better basketball here. And still barely got past Gonzaga. On senior night. So don’t worry about GU’s bona fides. It has them.

Now all it has to do is show the rest of the country. Why?

Well, we don’t want anyone tweeting out: “Hi, I’m Rob Lowe. … And I’m Gonzaga-in-the-NCAAs Rob Lowe,” do we?