Sports: Bracket Buster Saturday - Big West Busted

This past Saturday was the annual bracket buster weekend where teams from the mid-major conferences square off against each other to raise their profiles for the NCAA tournament. The Big West went 3-5 this past Saturday. My Anteaters got beat up by USF.

For Big West partisans, it was discouraging to see the top three teams (Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and UCSB) go down to defeat.

The Big West tournament champion will get the NCAA bid. If the tournament champion is also the regular season champion then that will be it for this year in terms of post-season play. If the Big West tournament champion is not the regular season champion, then the tournament champion goes to the NCAA and the regular season champion gets an automatic bid to the NIT.

If the Big West had done better in the bracket buster, then one at-large bid might have been offered to the NIT but as it stands they flopped when they had the chance to show their stuff.

UPDATE: Here is Whelliston's recap of some of the interesting match-ups from the Bracket Buster weekend.

As for the Pac-10, the other conference I follow, I'd say four teams are virtual locks (UCLA, WSU, USC, Stanford) for the NCAA. If the season ended now, I'd say Oregon and Arizona are in but they have been struggling of late and could play themselves out of the tournament. Washington and California look NIT-bound.