Washington State faces Utah State in the third-place game of the Diamond Head Classic in Honolulu on Sunday evening. That’s the last nonconference game for the Pac-12 basketball season before the full league schedule begins on Thursday, Dec. 29. As the Pac-12 enters the meat of its conference schedule, there’s an obvious flaw with a number of teams which is a big concern as the new year arrives.
The people who follow Pac-12 basketball will tell you that every year, it’s important for the conference to take care of business in the nonconference portion of its schedule. It’s not that Pac-12 games don’t matter; of course they do. The point of emphasis is simply that Pac-12 teams need to do enough work in November and December that the margin for error isn’t small entering January and February.
The problem is that Pac-12 teams too often stub their toes in the early weeks of the season. They have to then thread the needle in conference play, and they usually can’t. Pac-12 basketball road trips are tough.
Sure enough, Pac-12 teams have stumbled again. We’ll explain why in our look at the conference before the heart of the Pac-12 hoops season begins: