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For the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Championship today, Stanford faces USC, which upset the nation’s number one squad, Pacific, yesterday in a semi-final rout. The winner gets an automatic bid and an almost certain number one seed after the NCAA makes its final selections for its Championship tournament Sunday night. Some thoughts on this weekend’s tournament action.
- Pacific’s semi-final loss, in which they gave up 18 goals to the Trojans and were never really competitive, puts them in a crucial third place match against UCLA, a team that sat atop national polls for several weeks this season. A loss by the Tigers would, at the very least, make for a difficult conversation among NCAA decision-makers and could conceivably leave Pacific out of the NCAA championships entirely, that after the Tigers ended the season as the undisputed number one team in the land.
- To ensure a spot in the Palo Alto-based NCAA Championships next weekend, Stanford must aim to win its final match versus the Trojans today. The Cardinal face the odd prospect of being left out of the final tournament even with a second place finish at MPSFs. If Pacific finishes fourth today the NCAA will still likely be under pressure to give the Tigers one of two at-large spots in the championship after their historic season; UCLA too, having earned the top spot for several weeks of the season, something the ascendant Cardinal never did during the regular season.
- Yesterday’s win over UCLA was, perhaps, a sign of peaking at the right time for the impressive Cardinal, whose regular season was relatively off-the-radar compared to the newsier ones from Stockton and Southern California. Ever-improving phenom Brett Bonani scored three, and the Cardinal defense, including freshman goalie Drew Holland, effectively shut down the Bruins’ attack to race ahead to a 6-1 lead that UCLA couldn’t overcome. More impressive in our minds was the overall excellence of Alex Bowen, who scored five yesterday and has had a stellar season on the heels of a notable summer with the men’s national team. He’s earned the notice of his European colleagues: UCLA’s Giacomo Cupido touted Bowen in an Italian blog when asked which American was most ready to play professionally on the continent.
- To state the obvious, good coaching matters. That’s our immediate observation upon watching the inspired Trojans thoroughly flummox Pacific yesterday. Given four weeks to avenge a November 2 loss at Stockton, Jovan Vavic and his staff exploited several defensive vulnerabilities among the Tigers (goalkeeper Alex Malkis, who was so good in the Nov. 2 match, nearly disappeared), while running a near-loopy pick-centric offense. The Tigers appeared unprepared for the physical, darting Trojans defense, forcing Pacific to resort to some static outside shooting. It could all be very different at a potential NCAA tournament matchup. But give the USC staff credit for some highly effective game planning yesterday.
- So, after all that, who gets those final bids to NCAAs? We say USC will win outright today to earn the automatic bid. Pacific will fight for its life and beat UCLA by very small margin. They too will head to Palo Alto with an at-large bid. So will Stanford, which ended the regular season impressively. The Bruins, with only four losses, will be forced to miss out.
- As with the rest of the MPSF tournament, today’s action will be streamed live courtesy of the University of Pacific. Check out TWp’s Live Streams for the link.
