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By Chris Umpierre
Daily Bruin Staff
At this time of the year there are a lot of people who are going
mad.
A strong case of March Madness is going around and has stricken
people across the country. Just a week before NCAA tournament play
tips off, many people already have their tournament office pools in
front of them in hopes of predicting where the NCAA committee will
place teams.
But the bug hasn’t hit UCLA Head Coach Steve Lavin, whose
team is on the verge of getting a high seed in the tournament.
Lavin says he wants no part of an
office pool now.
Lavin, whose No. 13 Bruins (21-7, 14-3 Pac-10) will play
Washington (9-20, 3-14) on Saturday in both teams’ last
regular season game, has given up on the tricky business of
predicting what seed his team will get in what region.
With a win over the hapless Huskies, UCLA ““ which has a
robust RPI rating of 5 and notable wins over Stanford, Kentucky,
and Arizona ““ will likely be a No. 2 or No. 3 seed in the
Midwest, South, or East region. Since the committee doesn’t
like to have two top schools stay in their home region, the
consensus is Pac-10 champion Stanford will be seeded No. 1 in the
West, which will force the Bruins to pack their bags.
To Lavin, there’s no difference between a No. 2 or a No. 3
seed.
“As we’ve seen with the Gonzagas, the Valpos, the
Miami of Ohios … teams come out of nowhere,” Lavin said.
“You’re thinking this is a good matchup and then the
team you are playing is a Cinderella team.”
“As a coach you don’t want your team to get worried
about brackets, seedings and regions because after that first
night, all of a sudden (the tournament) is all whacked out,”
he added.
As an assistant under former UCLA Head Coach Jim Harrick, Lavin
used to worry about where the team would be sent. But after the
committee decided to send then-Pac 10 champion UCLA out of the West
region to Indianapolis for the first round in 1996, Lavin gave up
on the idea.
“What I learned from that experience is to not even worry
about anything other than playing good basketball,” he
said.”
But before the tournament’s first round, UCLA must deal
with Washington, a program the Bruins have had considerable
difficulty against in Seattle. UCLA has lost its last three games
to the Huskies in Seattle, including last year’s stunning
63-62 upset.
“Last year we played awful,” Lavin said. “The
previous two years they were good; they went to the Sweet Sixteen
one of those years.”
The word “good” is nowhere in the vocabulary when
describing the current Huskies, however. Washington is currently in
the midst of a vicious eight-game losing streak, and the team
hasn’t won a game in more than a month, when it beat lowly
Washington State 78-72 on Feb. 3.
But don’t tell that to the Bruin players who hope to roll
into the tournament with a 9-1 record in their last 10 games. When
considering where to place teams, the committee usually pays
particular attention to how well teams perform in their last 10
games.
“It’s not hard to stay focused,” UCLA guard
Earl Watson said after the Washington State game. “We have a
veteran team and we’ve been down this road many a
time.”
A loss to the last-place Pac-10 Huskies would not only devastate
UCLA’s chances for a No. 2 or No. 3 seed, but would cause
their head coach to really go mad.