College Basketball could not have scripted a more suitable start to march with a Saturday that contained a top-10 matchup-summer-beat, a Big Ten bubble that possibly burst at the horn and lots of exciting finishes to get the audience’s appetite for madness.
Of all the results in a day filled with nail pieces, perhaps the most interesting with the permit of an exhaust of 100-55 at the expense of a six-victory’s opponent. That was the result of UC San Diego’s Rout of Cal State Fullerton, which also marked Triton’s 11th straight victory overall.
UC San Diego’s Streak, tied with High Point for the longest in college basketball, has the program at the tip of a Big West Conference season championship. A split in Triton’s last week, with its home final on Thursday against Long Beach State and a visit to UC Davis on Saturday, UCSD guarantees not worse than part of the league title.
Two wins deliver a direct Big West crown to La Jolla -not bad for a program in just its fifth year of Division I membership. UCSD is prepared to keep the No. 1 seed in its first Big West tournament ever, and has previously not been able to participate due to NCAA rules that limit programs that pass between divisions from the NCAA tournament until a test period.
Triton’s immediate success is impressive enough on the face, but there are additional contexts that make this story develop in southern California all the more remarkable.
UCSD began its move to Division I with positive speed, after winning three championships with regular season and four in succession California Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament Titles from 2017 to 2020.
Although the UCSD moved from the NCAA Division III level from the non-school in 2000, school only began to offer athletic scholarships in 2014 thanks to the efforts from Alumnner David Schink and his son, Skip. An athletic scholarship program made the university’s move to division in possible.
At about the same time, UCSD basketball made another move that may have seemed a little then but has since proven to be monumental: the promotion of the long assistant Eric Olen to the head coach in 2013.
Olen spent a decade as an assistant before replacing Chris Carlson. At Olive’s third season as head coach, the UCSD NCAA Division II tournamed reached the first of four straight performances-which would have been five if not for Covid-19 2020.
And at 30-1, Tritons 2019-20 may well have been a national championship challenger in Division II. Instead, the program began its transition to College Basketball’s highest level while navigating the challenges with a pandemic once in a century.
UCSD initially took their lumps when they joined Division I, but at last season Tritons settled in their new home. At the end of the regular season, UCSD without doubt played the best basketball in any team in Big West and won six out of eight along the route, including a 92-88 overtime thriller against the conference’s long-standing standard carrier, UC Irvine.
The late February defeat of last season’s Big West championship champion, and the team 2024-25 Triton strives to keep on the last week, best showed UCSD’s potential. When Bryce Pope met a 3-pointer to force the extra frame, which connects on a runner just a few steps inside the Midcourt line, it was obvious that Tritons would not be denied.
It was also obvious that the Pope was perhaps the best player in Big West. And after having an average more than 18 points per match for a second straight season, the pope chose the road that so many breakout stars in the middle of the major conference programs follow in the current landscape: he transferred to a power conference destination. In this case, that destination was Southern California.
However, the Pope of the Pope only contributes to the intrigue in UCSD’s story. Olen’s guard list was not without established pieces that came into this season, with the versatile Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones which had an average of 13.8 points and 5.8 returns per match 2023-24.
But Tritons lost its biggest paragraph on the Pope and has actually been better than last season’s 21-win squad. In fact, UCSD has been better than last season’s national champion by some metrics-through March 1, Tritons No 35 is ranked in Kenpom.com rating, one place before twice the reigning final Four winner Uconn.
The Kenpom ranking, along with a net trophy of 35, suggests that UCSD may not even have to win its first Big West tournament to move on to Triton’s first NCAA tournament. Behind the probable Big West player of the year Tait-Jones and the Backcourt Dandem by Hayden Gray and Tyler McGhie, UCSD has built a CV that is very worthwhile to consider.
Among the current top with 25 ranked teams, only No. 1 Auburn and Saint Mary’s have more than UCSD’s 26 total victories. Tritons’ Dockey contains road gains over other potential in large teams Utah State and UC Irvine, both ranked in the top 70 in Kenpom.
In addition, the victory over UC Irvine at Bren Events Center with 18 points was one of 10 in UCSD’s current winning line of 11 matches, which was determined by a two-digit margin. Tritons not only strike opponents – they crush them.
If it continues in Henderson, Nevada, at the Big West tournament, UCSD’s great dignity becomes irrelevant. The prospects for a power conference team that has its March’s madness ended early from this program that was a non-school a little more than a decade ago and Division II, however, half a decade ago becomes a clear opportunity.
