San Diego State 65, Boise State 62 [62 possessions]

In the first meeting between these teams, the Broncos actually had the ball with a chance to win on the final possession, and nearly did. Thomas Bropleh missed an open look from three and it didn’t miss by much. This time around, the Aztecs had the ball on the final possession of a tie game and Jamaal Franklin’s decidedly less open look went down.

Franklin was the obvious hero, but Chase Tapley hitting all three of his open shots from long range in the second half is what allowed the Aztecs to open up enough of a cushion that they could withstand a 10-2 Bronco run late and still win. By the way, Boise State is in the discussion for best last-place team in the country. Mind you, that’s a more attainable goal in an eight-team league than bigger conferences, but still, it speaks to the relative parity that exists in the Mountain West this season.

Colorado State 81, TCU 60 [68]

The Rams are short (#339 in effective height) when healthy, but they got shorter when 6-6 Greg Smith tweaked an ankle in practice yesterday. A thin Rams rotation got thinner, but the seven-man rotation than Tim Miles put on the floor turned in CSU’s best effort away from Moby Arena this season.

It helped that TCU would miss 18 of their 20 three-point attempts, giving the defensively-challenged Rams some help on that end of the floor. It also helped that 6-5 Pierce Hornung is an offensive-rebounding machine. The dimunitive Rams had 11 offensive boards as a team, and Hornung had nine of them. The other two were team rebounds for which Hornung’s activity was directly responsible. When Hornung was on the floor, CSU rebounded 54% of its own misses. During the ten minutes he was on the bench, CSU rebounded zero of its misses.