Well, Cowboy basketball fans, the hope of an NCAA Tournament bid is over, as the UW men lost 59-46 to the top seeded New Mexico Lobos Wednesday night.
Some may say that the chances of making a run in the Mountain West tournament are slim to none, and I am one of those people. Others might say that our chance at an NCAA tournament bid ended a long time ago. They are probably right as well.
But it is not all bad for the Cowboys. The future is still bright, though it might not seem that way.
In the immediate future, the Cowboys will still be playing in a post-season tournament. It looks likely that UW will get a bid to the College Basketball Invitational tournament and may even receive a high seed because of their 20-win season (though I hope the CBI selection committee overlooks the Cowboys’ atrocious conference record).
A CBI bid may feel like a failure for a team that was one of the last remaining undefeated teams in Division I basketball as late as January, but with the way the season ended any post-season ball must be taken as a bonus.
The Cowboys could even be favorites to win the tournament, with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and San Francisco University the only other projected CBI teams with 20 wins, according to recent tournament projections from The Bracket Project.
Granted, regular season records are thrown out the window come tournament time, but the experience of playing in the MWC that is getting stronger year after year should bode well for the Cowboys.
With the short term aside, the long-term future looks bright for two reasons. The first is Larry Shyatt.
The Cowboys’ head coach has been nothing short of spectacular this season. He has coached a disciplined, defensive team that can keep itself in games through hard work, which is necessary when you have to face the likes of New Mexico and San Diego State twice each season. He led the team to two upsets over top-25 opponents and should be commended for that.
Shyatt also handled himself with grace and poise when faced with a team that was falling apart both on and off the court, and that is not an easy thing to do for someone under the constant pressure from media and fans. Simply put, Shyatt is a class act, and the university is lucky to have him back.
The other positive for the long-term is that the performance of the team over the season as a whole has brought national recognition back to the program. The Cowboys earned a top-25 ranking for the first time since 1988, and, as I said earlier, was one of four teams without a loss in early January. The other teams on that list included the University of Michigan, University of Arizona and Duke University, which makes the feat all the more impressive. Strong coaching, a tough conference and national attention lead to better recruits taking interest in coming to play at the university, so the outlook is fairly bright for the Cowboys.
In a season of extreme highs and lows, stability will be the order of the day for next season. That can be hard to achieve in the always-unstable world of NCAA basketball, but UW set a strong foundation to build upon for the coming years.
