St. Mary's extra game

[TheLink]

Does anyone know what is up with non conference game St. Mary's is playing tonight against Eastern Washington? Since when did they start letting teams schedule games after the conference tournament?

[Double Trouble]

To the extent that Randy Bennett can figure out what the NCAA basketball committee is looking for tonight when St. Mary's faces Eastern Washington, he knows this: The Gaels had better win, and Patty Mills had better look good in that pursuit
"Fortunately for us, Patty's a smart kid, so he understands that he needs to be aggressive like he always is," Bennett said Thursday while preparing for this hastily constructed NCAA play-in game of sorts. "I mean, last week (in the WCC tournament) I kind of expected him to be more tentative than anything, not going as hard to the basket or not being as forceful on defense. But he wasn't."

He also wasn't impressive at a time when the tournament committee needed to see that he was over his broken hand and that St. Mary's was a mid-major school worth banking on in the meeting room this weekend. He shot poorly in the two games against Portland and Gonzaga (5-for-28, 2-for-16 from beyond the arc) and had more turnovers (six) than assists (five). Worse yet, the TV cameras repeatedly honed in on the scar across the top of his right hand, giving every impression that his hand still wasn't right, thus clouding St. Mary's profile with the committee.

Mills says his hand is fine, and Bennett does too, saying, "It's pretty hard to miss five weeks and then come back and play back-to-back nights," but they both know that their views might not be taken as seriously as the bigger question, which is:

Can Mills become NCAA Tournament-ready in one night, tonight, against a team that just happened to have a free night because it missed the Big Sky Conference playoffs?

That was the impetus behind Bennett and his staff arranging the game before the WCC tournament. "We knew there were three Big Sky teams that hadn't made their playoffs," Bennett said, looking at Eastern Washington, Northern Arizona and Sacramento State, "but Eastern still had a game to use. I think we looked at Harvard, too, because they were in the same boat, but we were more interested in a West Coast team, obviously."

So the Gaels hastily reached out to EWU coach Kirk Earlywine, who agreed in exchange for a guaranteed game some time in the future. Thus, they created not only the biggest WCC-Big Sky intersectional game in history, but a bizarre audition for Mills with the committee, which will presumably catch the Comcast feed and determine long-distance whether Mills can create sufficient impact next week.

After all, beating Eastern Washington at home does not help St. Mary's tournament profile (their current RPI, for what that might be worth, is a tolerable 46), though losing would surely harm it. It is Mills that makes the difference here - if the committee hasn't already made up its mind about St. Mary's, Eastern Washington or no Eastern Washington.

That irks Bennett a bit, because he pleads, "We're a team, not a one-man circus." He cites the Gaels' 7-4 record since the Mills injury, the 25-6 record overall, and the notion that "If we can't get in with our body of work, that's kind of sad for the mid-majors."