Huskies, Lobos not feeling love
Teams feel they have something to prove
SAN JOSE, Calif. –Those chips should be gone by now.
Those oversized, spine-numbing chips that the men’s basketball teams at University of Washington and New Mexico have carried for most of this season should have been lifted off their shoulders, now that they’ve won a combined 55 games and advanced to tonight’s second-round game of the NCAA tournament.
And yet they’re still there.
The Huskies and Lobos can’t help but to think that they’re underappreciated on the college basketball scene, despite what they’ve already accomplished.
“It’s that East Coast bias,” UW sophomore Isaiah Thomas said Friday afternoon. “Everything you do out on the East Coast is better than what you do out here. That ticks you off a little bit.”
The New Mexico-UW matchup includes teams with two of the biggest inferiority complexes in the country.
“Every time we step on the floor,” UNM star Darington Hobson said, “we have something to prove. … (Today) is another day we get to prove ourselves nationally – and just to ourselves as a team – that we’re a very good team and we belong in this tournament.”
New Mexico (30-4) emerged as the best team in the West. The eighth-ranked Lobos, No. 17 BYU and No. 22 Gonzaga were the only teams west of Kansas to be included in the final Associated Press Top 25 rankings.
And yet New Mexico players still felt like an underdog heading into this week’s tournament play.
“We’ve been proving it all year that we can beat good teams (and) that we are a good team,” Lobos junior Dairese Gary said earlier this week, after a regular season that saw the Lobos go 6-0 against Top 25 teams.
If the perceived belittling of West Coast teams wasn’t enough, the Lobos have an extended inferiority complex in terms of conference superiority. The Pac-10 got just two teams in the NCAA tournament, two fewer than the Mountain West, and yet it’s still seen as a power conference while the MWC has the dreaded midmajor label.
UW’s Quincy Pondexter didn’t do much to squelch that perceived slight when he was asked Friday by a New Mexico reporter about the budding rivalry between the two conferences.
“That’s the first I’ve ever heard of that,” he said. “… I wouldn’t say it’s much of a rivalry.”
New Mexico coach Steve Alford said the Mountain West was supposed to be in a rebuilding year but that teams like New Mexico, BYU, UNLV and San Diego State got unexpected contributions from underclassmen on the way to NCAA berths.
“What that means in reference to other leagues, that’s hard,” he said. “I don’t know how to rank that. I just think our league is getting better, year in and year out.”
Whichever team moves on to the Sweet 16, it will finally give the national media a reason to respect the West Coast.
Just don’t tell that to UW’s Thomas – he of the “East Coast bias” perspective.
As Thomas said Friday, “They probably still won’t show us any love.”