After four straight wins to close the regular season, the men's basketball team earned a first round bye in the Big Sky Tournament and will not open the tournament until the semifinals next Tuesday night. If the chalk holds out, and its a safe assumption, you can bet that PSU will likely take on Montana in that semifinal game. My feelings about the squad not playing until nine days from now are mixed.
Another home game and you obviously have the chance to keep improving and continue perfecting the offensive scheme of working inside-out. But of course there is always the possibility that the Vikings could lose that game and given the fact that they got beat by Montana State (who would have been their opponent) in Bozeman earlier in the year, it might be a good thing.
Anyhow, we will definitely have a more thorough breakdown of the Big Sky Tournament later this week. As for now, on to other things...
Last week our guest commentator, a Portland State student and fan, made known his feelings about the fans that made their presence known in front of the ESPN cameras... This week he is ranting about another itch: the possible renovation of the Stott Center.
Feelings around campus are mixed. As any observer could tell you, the student section is hardly full and rarely boisterous. Why should we quadruple the seating capacity of the gym when it does not sellout currently?
Well our man Marnix has a solid take on it.
There are many who feel that the Stott Center Renovation is a pointless and wasteful project that Portland State shouldn’t waste there time with. To those “nay sayers” I would like you to think about the following…
As the men’s team wraps up their 2008-2009 season with a 12-1 home record and the women’s team going 13-2, I don’t see any reason why the athletes that represent the PSU colors on the hard-court don't deserve to play in a legitimate gymnasium.
If money is the issue maybe we should take some money from “high-profile” but under-performing coaches (Glanville) or programs (football).
If your complaint is that Portland State should focus on academics, I would propose the notion that investing and building a national athletics program is the road to such an idea. Think about it, outside of the Ivy League schools, all the national powerhouses in either football or basketball are considered to have highly reputable academic institutions.
For example, USC with Football, Duke or North Carolina with Basketball, or Texas that dominates in just about every athletic event are all highly regarded academically in addition to being powerhouses in sports.
Whether or not they are good at academics because they are good at sports is not a concrete correlation, but the fact that its works more times than not is a compelling idea.
With that said, I guess I look forward to coming back to campus in a couple of years and seeing the new beautiful stadium the athletic department is working so diligently to build.
Then again, actually filling the new, larger stadium will be a different story (see my posting from Tuesday, Feb. 24).
A decent effort from Marnix in his second such posting of the year... We'll leave you today with a pretty solid youtube video of Northern Idaho Junior College point guard Melvin Jones hitting an impressive shot to help his current squad defeat CSI, which I believe stands for College of Southern Idaho and not something else.
Who is Melvin Jones? Possibly the man who will replace Jeremiah Dominguez as the Vikings starting point guard next season.
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