Big West Conference
March 10-12. All games at Anaheim.
kPOY: Michael Bryson, UC Santa Barbara.

The Big West tournament begins Thursday with quarterfinal action at the Honda Center.

The Big West did it – the conference’s teams lost more often at home than they won during conference play, finishing with a 34-38 home record. That is irrelevant for the purposes of this neutral site event, but I thought you should know.

What is relevant is that Hawaii won the top seed under first-year head coach Eran Ganot, who spent the previous five seasons working under Randy Bennett at Saint Mary’s. It’s not as easy to be successful in your first season as coach as most people think, but Hawaii overachieved a bit this season.

It’s a very clear four-team race for the title in Anaheim with four teams ranked 102 or better and the other four ranked 209 or worse.

                     Semis Final Champ
 1 Hawaii             87.7  60.1  34.1
 4 UC Santa Barbara   82.1  41.8  21.8
 2 UC Irvine          77.2  44.0  21.8
 3 Long Beach St.     79.2  39.9  18.9
 7 Cal Poly           22.8   4.8   1.4
 6 UC Riverside       20.8   4.1   0.9
 5 UC Davis           17.9   3.5   0.7
 8 Cal St. Fullerton  12.3   1.8   0.4

Big West tourney records (since 1999)

UC Santa Barbara  17-14
Long Beach St.    15-13
UC Irvine         15-13
Cal Poly          10-11
Cal St. Northridge 9-11
Hawaii             2- 3
Cal St. Fullerton  8-13
UC Davis           3- 5
UC Riverside       3- 9