Part Deux
That whole Jacks-Yotes thing is going down again today. And this time it is Jacks at Yotes rather than the other way around, the SDSU men’s basketball team visiting Vermillion for the first time since the 2003-04 season.
The Jacks won the first meeting this season by 30. It was a no-contest. Still, coaches and players insist they’re expecting it to be different this time around. It’s stands to reason that they mean USD will come out swinging.
But SDSU can’t change … not that it has shown an indications that it will. It’s just that the team sort of breaks things into weeks, and it’s position going into this week is better than it was last week.
There’s less than a month left in the regular season and the Jacks are one win away from 20. They’ve risen to No. 58 in the NCAA Division I RPI and are getting more buzz as a potential automatic bid to the NCAA tournament or an at-large pick for the NIT. These are new things for the program. How will the players handle them?
Even with this being a road game, the Jacks are favored by a dozen based on the Sagarin Ratings. They sit at 68th in that metric, while USD is 281st. That’s a wide gap. Then again, USD is 285th and the Jacks didn’t just lose in Grand Forks earlier this season, they got clobbered - and just days after beating the formerly Fighting Sioux by 38 in Brookings.
The point: Just that SDSU could start thinking about all the things that are at stake and get sucked into protecting the lead, so to speak, instead of staying aggressive in this their last road trip of the regular season. Or the Jacks could keep taking care of business they have most of this increasingly special season, following the lead of their low-heart rate star, Nate Wolters.
The world, or at least the state, will find out tonight.
Terry Vandrovec also posts regular updates on his Twitter page.
