America, meet Marvelle Harris and Fresno State. On the strength of a 68-63 win over perennial Mountain West power San Diego State in the conference’s championship game on Saturday afternoon, the Bulldogs will be dancing for just the sixth time in program history and the first since 2001 (back when Jerry Tarkanian was still chewing towels on the sidelines). Harris poured in 18 confident points en route to the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award, backing up league coaches’ decision to name him the Mountain West Player of the Year. There is no doubt that Harris is the type of talent that can carry his team to some success in an NCAA Tournament game. He’s a versatile senior scorer (20.7 PPG) who can hit from deep (witness his 25-footer to end the first half on Saturday), score at the rim (62.9% FG on his 175 attempts at the rim this year), or draw defenders and create for his teammates (assists on 26.1% of his teammates’ field goals while on the floor). On a team with six upperclassmen among the eight players who saw significant minutes on Saturday, there’s enough experience joining Harris to making the Bulldogs’ NCAA Tournament stay extend beyond Friday.

Marvelle Harris And Fresno State Are Heading To The NCAA Tourney (AP Photo/David Becker)

It’s been a rough road for head coach Rodney Terry in his first head coaching job after nine seasons as an assistant at Texas. His first season at Fresno was the school’s final season in the WAC, a year in which the Bulldogs won just three conference games. His first full recruiting class (which led into the program’s first year in the Mountain West) was highlighted by the addition of prominent recruits like Robert Upshaw and Braeden Anderson, but it turned out that Harris was the only player in the class able to make a lasting positive contribution. From there, Terry mined his Big 12 roots and pulled in players like Cezar Guerrero (transfer from Oklahoma State), Julien Lewis (transfer from Texas) and Karachi Edo (a high school recruit from Texas). The Bulldogs have improved in each of Terry’s five years at the helm: five wins in the first year in the Mountain West; a .500 record in 2013-14; an additional conference win last year; and now this season a surprising 13 league wins, a second place regular season finish, and the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

On the other side of Saturday’s result in the Mountain West is San Diego State, a program that has now lost four of the last five Mountain West title games after winning it in back-to-back seasons during the Kawhi Leonard era. This year’s Aztecs’ dominant regular season conference performance — winning the league race by three games — now feels like ages ago, as Steve Fisher’s group will pray the Selection Committee deems their resume sufficient for an invitation. KenPom rates them as the 42nd best team in the country, while the RPI says 32nd. There’s a quality neutral-site win over California (RPI #15), a bad neutral site loss to San Diego (RPI #302) and a whole lot of blah between those two extremes. No matter how you look at it, the Aztecs are squarely on the bubble. If the NCAA doesn’t come calling, it will be San Diego State’s first March since 2009 — the season before Leonard arrived on campus — without an NCAA Tournament appearance.

AMurawa (999 Posts)

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2016 at 12:31 pm by Andrew Murawa and is filed under feature, microsites, other 26. Tagged: cezar guerrero, fresno state, Julien Lewis, karachi edo, Marvelle Harris, rodney terry, san diego state. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.