Long Beach State (10-8, 5-0) was the league best. UC Davis (6-11, 1-5) was league least. The ESPN-U cameras were focused and the 49er fandom, minus students still on break and some TV-watching silver haired supporters, expected another double digit drubbing. Instead the 2,633 in the Pyramid crowd got a frantic forty minutes with seven ties, six lead changes and a nervous 60-56 Beach win.
Knotted up a 24-24 in the first twenty minutes, Long Beach State used a suffocating defense including two time-expired calls in a 14-0 run, built a 15-point margin and then needed almost all of it to deny the Davis upset bid.
The current five-game win streak matches the same run that the 2008-2009 team posted but this time the hero wasn’t Larry Anderson, T.J. Robinson or Casper Ware but the bearded enforcer in the paint, Eugene Phelps who led the way for the 49ers, with his double-double of 15 points and 15 rebounds. Anderson and Ware added 12 points apiece and Greg Plater had 11 points while UCD’s Joe Harden collected 20 points for UC Davis to lead all scorers.
The Aggies last gasp was a 21-10 run in the final 6:29 of a game that was in doubt until almost the end. That doubt came when the Aggie full court on Casper Ware created a foul by 6-4 Ryan Sypken which irritated the 5-10 Ware who threw an elbow while clearing the ball. The referees went to the television replay and ruled that Ware committed an intentional foul for swinging his elbows, a new rule instituted in college basketball this year.
Ware took his foul shots first and made them both but Harden missed the Aggies’ first free throw effectively ending the Aggie hopes and letting LB Coach Dan Monson exhale. “Big games like this have to be won even when you are out of sync. We had some good defense there in that run 14-0… I think we had seven stops in a row.” And did he think that having an extra day to get ready for Saturday night’s visit from Pacific will help? “Well we had better be ready to play three games in three nights because that’s what we will have to do to win the Big West tournament.”
Phelps on the other hand claimed his team, “…knows how to get out of trouble. We’ll get T.J. (Robinson, four points in 35 minutes) going again on Saturday. Somebody will come through for us.” Pacific (10-7, 2-2) comes in Saturday night in another 8:00pm start dictated by TV, this time Fox Sports West/Prime Ticket. Sam Willard, tied for third in the nation with 12 double doubles, leads the Tigers offensively.
Game Notes—With last year’s MVP Mark Payne (ankle) still out for the Aggies, the Davis coaching staff hoped that their “rebounding by committee” would work but in the end it was the UCD three-point offense that kept the Aggies in the game. Long Beach won the rebounding edge (38-25 good) but also the turnover stat (21-18 bad). Davis made 7 of 24 three-point field goals while Long Beach ended up with just 3 of 15.
LBSU’s golf program had some an interested observers in Hawaii. Season ticket holder and former 49er golfer Paul Goydos used his Twitter account to remind his pals and competitors (John Merrick and Peter Tomasulo along with Goydos play in the Sony Open this weekend) of the basketball games.