BYU receives 0 votes in initial coaches poll

Hopefully we can change that with a positive showing, but with a cream puff schedule this year we will not be able to point to many good victories.

hawkwing wrote:
Hopefully we can change that with a positive showing, but with a cream puff schedule this year we will not be able to point to many good victories.

Gotta beat Utah. Please Coach Rose, circle this game NOW!

byufan4ever wrote:

Hopefully we can change that with a positive showing, but with a cream puff schedule this year we will not be able to point to many good victories.

Gotta beat Utah. Please Coach Rose, circle this game NOW!

Yeah, this appears to be our best game right now. Tough to say it's a must win, but in preason it's about as close to a must win if we want to make national noise as you can get.

BYU hasn't earned any votes...



BUT, this is an easy problem to solve. Just win. WCC has enough legitimacy that if BYU runs the table (as Gonzaga does all the time) they'll have a decent ranking at the end of the year.

If we beat Utah and Gonzaga I don't care if the rest of the schedule is perceived as cream puff. If some of our games are easy that will give the young kids a chance to gel so that by season's end BYU will be a team to be reckoned with.

I'm not sure how many really pay that much attention to the polls in college basketball. Maybe it's more than I thought, but over the last several years as we get into December and January it seems to me that most of the talk centers around who the top seeds are going to be and then about bracket projections and which conferences are looking the strongest, etc.



With BYU's schedule I figured they were having trouble looking for more meat to add to it just by the fact that it took them forever to release it. I think it didn't come out until late August this year when usually it's out a couple of months earlier than that. The fact is that good teams from power conferences just don't want to play anyone good before conference play unless it's in a popular tournament that gets a lot of ESPN hype, like Maui or some of the other made for espn events. And they sure as heck don't want to ever play anyone good on the road. I don't think Duke has played a true road non-conference game in over 10 years, or something like that.



That said, BYU's window of opportunity is smaller this year but it's still doable. It does make the Utah game extremely important though. But I guarantee BYU's coaches are well aware of that. It's all about getting to the NCAA tournament and getting there with the best seeding possible. The other thing to consider is that despite this smaller margin for error, this team is simply going to be better and deeper than any we've had since Jimmer was here. I don't think this team is going to drop silly games like we've seen the last 2-3 years. Rose's teams never used to do that in the MWC. Some of it is the different style of play in the WCC, but most of it I think was simply that we just haven't been as good or as deep -- until this year.



Also, the committee doesn't only look at good wins. They also look at losses, and even if we don't have a big number of big wins, if we have a very good record with very few losses, a win over Utah and a couple of decent wins in Hawaii, as well as at least one over Gonzaga, it should still be enough to earn a pretty good seeding in the Tournament. Teams like Wichita State and N. Iowa have done that in recent years following that formula. I think we have the talent this year to avoid any questionable losses. If we don't, our non-conference SOS isn't enough to save us like it has the last couple of years. But so be it. I don't think we'll need it anyway. I really think we're going to be legitimately good and won't need a way this year to just "sneak" into the tournament.