Daunting nonconference schedule gives Eagles edge before Big Sky play
Playing a difficult nonconference schedule has become a tradition for the Eastern Washington men’s basketball team, which is off to a 1-7 start this season.
A handful of those losses have come against power conference programs – teams like Colorado, Missouri, Utah and Washington State – plus losses to more regional opponents UC Santa Barbara, Cal Baptist and Cal Poly. Their lone win came Nov. 6 at home against Seattle University.
“This is truly a preseason for us,” EWU head coach Dan Monson said Tuesday. “The Big Sky is going to be our measuring stick for what kind of year we have.”
The Eagles have five more games until that portion of the schedule begins in January, including one at Washington and a pair at home against lower-division foes Lincoln (California) University and Eastern Oregon.
But this week’s Big Sky-Summit League Challenge games – Wednesday at home against North Dakota and Saturday at South Dakota State – should give the Eagles something they’ve had few of this season: opponents whose profiles look similar to their own.
“This Summit Challenge gives us a good barometer,” Monson said, “because these are teams very comparable to teams in our league.”
This is the second year these two midmajor conferences have faced off in a formal challenge, pitting the Big Sky’s 10 teams against the Summit’s nine. (The lack of true balance means that this year the Idaho men and women’s teams, as well as the Portland State men and Weber State women, will play just one game apiece as part of the challenge, rather than two.)
Like the men’s team, Eastern Washington’s women’s team will also play at South Dakota State (on Wednesday). The Eagles women will host North Dakota State on Saturday.
“By and large, this is really good for our league,” Big Sky Deputy Commissioner Dan Satter said Tuesday,” because we have difficulty scheduling home games (due to) geography and how relatively few schools there are in the West, especially as peer conferences.”
For an added bit of fun, the challenge has a point system attached to it in which home victories earn one point and road victories earn 1.5 points. Last year, the teams split the 36 games 18-18 and also won the same number of home games (11). The Summit League won on the first tiebreaker with a plus-91 point differential. Eastern’s two teams went 4-0.
That framework – including the second tiebreaker of an arm-wrestling match between Big Sky Commissioner Tom Wistrcill and Summit League Commissioner Josh Fenton, should it come to that – remains in place this year.
Satter said the conferences did their best, based on the data they had in April, to set what looked to be competitive matchups for this season.
They also want to ensure teams play a variety of opponents. Last season, the EWU men played South Dakota and North Dakota State, and the EWU women played Omaha and North Dakota.
Monson said during his 17 years at Long Beach State the Big West did not have any formal challenges such as this one, although they did occasionally take place in February nonconference games known as Bracket Busters. But he did have challenges during his eight years at Minnesota.
“When I was at Minnesota, we had the Big Ten-ACC Challenge, which I just loved,” Monson said of the conferences’ yearly matchups that ran from 1999 to 2022. “You’ve got a great preseason game every year.”
The Big Sky and Summit are contracted for one more season of the challenge.
Monson said he likes the challenge North Dakota (3-4) presents: The Fighting Hawks rank as the Summit’s best offensive rebounding team at 13.9 per game.
“I think we’ve been exposed pretty well defensively and in rebounding, and UND, that’s one of the best things they do,” Monson said. “We start four guards and don’t have a lot of inside players, and so we’re trying to compensate for that. Those are things that this game and this preseason will help us with. (Teams have) exposed it. Now we’ve got to fix it.”