The Beavers (1-9, 9-14) travel across town today to Pauley Pavilion to play the #3 team in the nation: The UCLA Bruins. The Bruins are fresh off a win over the Ducks, and show no signs of slowing down. Search any UCLA site you can find, and you're hardly going to find anything negative written about this team. Ben Howland has them playing competitive and aggressive every night, and they've only come up short of a win on two occasions: the Ducks on Jan. 6, and Stanford last Sunday. The Bruins have 8 conference games left on their plate, and they still have a non-conference matchup with West Virginia next Saturday in Morgantown.
In searching for a ray of hope, some petty statistic that gave the Beavers the edge, I thought Ken Pomeroy's site would be a good start. However, I didn't find what I was looking for. What I did find out however, is by Ken's insanely complicated RPI-Pythagorean-Whatevertheheckelseheuses formula, the Beavers have a 1% chance of winning this game.
Now, although most of you would lose your train of thought and click to some other link if you saw the Beavers had a 1% chance of winning, let's talk about this for a minute. 1%, although not much, is still better than 0%. Take a look at the chances of Oregon State pulling out a win on this graph:
Maybe we should get some patches like this for our uniforms, just to remind our players that we do, indeed, have a chance.
At any rate, The Beavers and Bruins will tip off at 2:30 p.m. PDT. You can catch it on FSN if you're in the Northwest. If you're not, come back here after the game. I'm sure we'll have something to say. Nonetheless, this is going to be a tough one for the Beavers. Just. Don't. Get. Beat. By. 45.
Go Beavers!
--JB--