Little mountain town vs. big mountain town; Aggies vs. Pioneers

Tonight's game against Denver looks on paper like a bit of a blast from the past. And I mean that in the sense that Denver's team seems to resemble USU teams of the past in many ways. They've got decent size and decent athleticism, but are very talented at playing basketball, and that's what carries them. They shoot the ball well, keep turnovers low and play solid defense.

What to really make of them is tough at this point seeing as how they thoroughly handled Saint Mary's (who beat Weber State) last week and beat Southern Miss (who beat New Mexico State) the week before that. Then in their last game they got pounded by Cal.

Mid-Monday links: 11/28

This is easily going to be the deepest collection of links thus far in the one month history of The Sagebrush Spot, and why wouldn't it be? This was an incredible weekend for Utah State University. For basketball, things looked maybe as good as they have all season on Saturday night, but the real headliner was football, looking as good as it has in a generation Saturday afternoon. I'd be lying if I said I haven't had some Remember the Titans music playing on my Itunes all weekend with that feeling of "we did it!!!"

Let's get right into the links.

• A slew of football post game stories coming from all my media homies and then some. Kraig Williams at The Deseret News, Tim Olsen at Cache Sports Media, Tavin Stucki at The Utah Statesman, Tony Jones at The Salt Lake Tribune, Wade Denniston at The Herald Journal, and Matt Harris at KSL.com.
• Kraig Williams pulls double-duty, heading straight to Pocatello to cover basketball's 75-62 win over Idaho State. Nate Laursen, Shawn Harrison, and our good friends over at USUstats.com all threw down recaps as well.
• Brad Rock at the D-news and Kurt Kragthorpe at the Trib each had their own pieces on just how huge of a step the Utah State football program took Saturday. Wade Denniston comes up again with another piece on the USU seniors and their legacy they're leaving.
• Tony Jones lays out some details on the chatter going on between Utah State and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, including some excellent props for the USU students from the bowl's executive director.
  
  And now for the Bobby Wagner portion of the links....
• In essentially a no-brainer, Bobby Wagner gets tagged with WAC Defensive Player of the Week by both the WAC and College Sports Madness.
• ESPN.com gives B-Wagz a helmet sticker.
• Sportsbeat Sunday features Bobby's love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 Again, if anything was missed, let me know.

Sunday Shorties: 11/27

USU is bowl eligible, the basketball team rebounds strong and The Sagebrush Spot reaches a milestone.


1) Bobby Wagner

Holy lord this guy is unreal! 15 total tackles and the fumble recovery that thwarted Nevada's attempt at scoring. One hell of a finish for a once-in-a-generation player.


2) Robert Turbin

Threw down a little foreshadowing in the postgame press conferences that he has NFL dreams for next season, and who could blame him? He said that he came here partly because he wanted to be a key in turning around a program, and he's definitely done it. Regardless of what he does, this website supports him, and chances are some long tribute post will be in order if he indeed goes to the league.


3) Second half defense

The performance against Hawaii was pretty impressive, allowing only three points in that second half. They only allowed 10 in the second half against San Jose State and seven points against Nevada. Including the Idaho game, USU has allowed only 17 combined points in the 4th quarter during this four-game win streak. That kind of performance is sure to carry this team to bowl eligibility before not too long.... oh wait!



4) The young guns

Preston Medlin, Adam Thoseby and Ben Clifford combine to score 52 points on 18-of-25 shooting, 13 rebounds and nine assists. Medlin is the oldest of those guys... only a sophomore... So if you weren't sure before about why you should still be excited about Aggie basketball, there's three good reasons right there.


5) 10,000 hits

This weekend The Sagebrush Spot got its 10,000th hit. For a site that is only a month old, can't say I'm feeling bad about that at all! Thanks to everyone who has been here, and hope you like what you read and want to keep coming back!

From growing pains to growing up; 75-62, good guys win.

I am Medlin... Hear me roar!!!

This is why you never quit on your Aggies! As if the 2011 football hadn't already taught a stern lesson to any and all people willing to give up on a team, the basketball team had a nice little reminder for all the doubters on Saturday night as well.

As if losing Brady Jardine wasn't tough enough (and it showed on Tuesday), subtract Kyisean Reed from the picture for a bit while you're at it. That puts the team down two super-athletic forwards, one of whom is the most experienced player on the roster.

So with a tough loss to a sub-par team in its pocket from Tuesday and the injury bug seemingly nipping at the team's heels, it seemed like Preston Medlin took a good look around Holt Arena and basically said, "Screw you guys," to everyone and everything not wearing Aggie blue. Medlin promptly played his best game in an Aggie uniform, working as the backbone to a stellar team effort to essentially control the entire game and dominate the 2nd half.

With the inside game severely shorthanded, Medlin and his new P.I.C. from behind the 3 (Adam Thoseby) basically grabbed the USU offense by the horns, combining to hit 7-of-12 shots from behind the arc and scoring 25 of the team's 32 points. And things didn't slow down in the second half for them either, as the two of them, along with Brockeith Pane, shot a perfect 6-for-6 from 3-point land.

BOWLieve it!!! Aggies 21, Wolfpack 17

With this 12-yard run on 3rd down, Adam Kennedy brought
USU to bowl eligibility for the first time in 14 years.

Think of where we were just 21 days ago... It was Nov. 5, Chuckie Keeton was on his way to the hospital, the Aggies were trailing 28-7 at one of the hardest road games to play in the country and all hope for bowl eligibility looked to be slipping away right before everyone's eyes.

Then something happened... Something happened with this team to which their play since that fateful halftime could only be described as epic. Something happened that changed this team from the kind of team that couldn't win and let 4th quarter leads slip away, into a team that couldn't lose and was automatic with the game on the line in the 4th quarter.

Excellence should never owe an apology

This was one of many signs at the game that showed off the
collective creativity of USU students

If you haven't seen it yet, an apology was issued for the behavior of the USU students at the Nov. 11 home game against BYU. The reasons for which were this apology was issued was because of the chants that USU students came up with and the signs they brought to the game.

My take on this is that it sucks. I understand it from a PR perspective, but that doesn't make me dislike this move any less. First it was BYU issuing an apology for that little scoreboard message they had last year. Now it's USU apologizing for the fans getting into a rivalry game in a big way. Neither of which I thought should have deserved an apology, because this is college athletics. More importantly, this is major in-state rivalries. People are going to smack on rival schools, things are going to get heated, but at the end of the day if everyone makes it home safely, no real harm is done.

Taking their lumps; Aggies go down 58-55 in OT

Out with a bad back is where our boy Grim is going to be if he
keeps having to carry this team like he did tonight.

We've seen production and performance so far this year in the season opener versus BYU, we've seen a decently impressive attempt at a comeback in the second half against Weber State and we've seen the team rally when they fell a man down early in the game against Southern Utah.

Outside of that, we've mostly just seen potential.

This team is still very young, very inexperienced and very capable of putting things together to make for a solid basketball team. But they're not there yet, and until they get there, they're going to take some lumps. Tonight, was one of those lumps.

After tonight, I'm starting to rethink my comparison of this team to the 2006-07 squad might have been the wrong comparison. Things are, at least as of right now, looking much more like that 2008 season than 2007. But really it seems like a mixture of the two more than anything else. There's the underdog status of 2007, and the wealth of youth filling out the roster that 2008 had with the likes of then-freshmen Tai Wesley, Tyler Newbold and Pooh Williams. Really the similarities in personnel are intriguing across the board. If there's two standout aspects that differ from 2008 and 2012 I'd say that the 2008 team could score much better than this 2012 team has shown to be able to so far, but this year's team seems much stronger in both the defense and rebounding departments.