MWC Basketball Tournament

My sister, presently living in Salt Lake City, is a graduate of The University of Utah. The men's basketball team of that school plays San Diego State University in the final of the Mountain West Tournament tonight. Prior to that, this afternoon, the Utah women's basketball team plays San Diego State University in the final of the Mountain West Tournament. I'm not all that big a fan of college basketball, but I may watch a couple of games today.

Update: Saturday, 10:00pm
Is there some rule in college basketball against offensive rebounding? If so, the refs weren't calling it, because each team broke it at least once without penalty. The deal seemed to be fling the ball in the general direction of the basket and run like hell to the other end.

Just as I was beginning to think this was a hocky game, with seven baskets in the first ten minutes, forsooth, when the announcer commented that the field goal percentages were "less than stellar." That would qualify as a masterpiece of understatement, since Utah was shooting 15% at the time and State was very little better. When you're shooting 15% from the field, you really ought to give some thought to rebounding.

And seldom have I seen one team pull as many utterly boneheaded dumb stunts in a single game as SDSU, such as Utah flings the ball out of bounds so State runs over and touches it so Utah can have it back. Or Utah scores on an alley-oop and shortly thereafter presents State with an alley-oop opportunity only to have State miss the dunk. Or State simply runs away from a dribble ("Oops, forgot the ball."), that was really cool. Given all of that, State did well to stay in the game.

The women's game was a better game, but Utah won that one too. My sister was utterly insuffferable. She called to "try not to gloat." I told her that effort had been unsuccessful and that I wasn't sure how hard she had tried.