There are some games where records just don’t matter. Tournament seeding, March Madness implications, momentum swings—you name it, but none of it matters. These are rivalry games, and when the Stanford Cardinal rolls into Berkeley to take on the California Golden Bears, all bets are off.
Dwight Powell’s game-tying dunk attempt came a split-second too late as Stanford men’s basketball dropped a close Pac-12 matchup at home against Colorado, 63-65.
After dropping a pair of close home games to UCLA and USC, the Stanford Cardinal men’s basketball team desperately needs to finish conference play on a high note. With March Madness just around the corner and the possibility of earning an at-large bid appearing increasingly unrealistic, Stanford must focus on picking up a couple of conference wins on the road this week in order to improve its seed for the Pac-12 tournament.
As a superfan of the double, double toil and trouble that Stanford’s Pac-12 opponents get themselves into, few things have pleased me more in life than the Trojan turmoil of 2006 and the to-be-resolved Oregon “oops!” of 2011. But there’s nothing like the good ‘ol Cal chuckle: that warm, giggly feeling I get in my heart when I find out that the Golden Bears have done something else wrong.
On a night made for two, Stanford begins its second run through Pac-12 opponents when it hosts USC tonight.
Two is actually a fitting number to sum up the Card’s and Trojan’s second date of the season.
For just over 35 minutes, Stanford was the best men’s basketball team in the Pac-12. But No.7 Arizona put the Cardinal in its place by closing out a 73-66 battle at a packed McKale Memorial Center—one of the toughest arenas to visit in college basketball—on Wednesday night.
Stanford heads to Arizona this week with a chance to prove how good—or not—it really is.
Fresh off a rejuvenating victory over Bay Area rival California, the men’s basketball team heads out onto the road to face another Pac-12 foe: Colorado.