Aggies To Face BYU In The 1st Round

The Aggies enter the 2009 NCAA Tournament as a 9 seed in the West region (game played in Philadelphia) where they will face BYU (for the 2nd straight year) in their first round game on Thursday. The game time will be announced Sunday night / Monday morning. If they can manage to beat BYU they will likely play UConn as they are the 1 seed on the same side of the bracket.

BYU finished the year with a 25-7 record overall and 12-4 in the Mountain West conference. BYU's worst losses were to UNLV (twice) and San Diego State. Their best win was over Utah. Their resume is fairly strong, but their best non-conference win was over either Utah State or Tulsa. My initial thought is that I like the round 1 matchup, but I hate being on the same side as UConn. Let's hope that they can get past BYU and facing UConn would be a nice problem to have.

I do find it very odd that the committee put A&M and BYU head-to-head in consecutive years.

We will have a full preview of the game for you this week and we'll breakdown each of the individual matchups.

The Aggies are only one of just eight schools (Georgetown / Memphis / North Carolina / Pittsburgh / Tennessee / Texas / Texas A&M / UCLA) that have advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament in each of the last three seasons, and they will look to keep that string alive this year if they can get past BYU.

Other teams from the Big 12 that were awarded bids today were:
Oklahoma State (8) vs. Tennessee (9)
Texas (7) vs. Minnesota (10)
Missouri (3) vs. Cornell (14)
Oklahoma (2) vs. Morgan State (15)
Kansas (3) vs. North Dakota State (14)
Can you believe that the Aggies are playing in their 4th consecutive NCAA tournament?

Crazy.

OK - We'll have much more for you before Thursday.

Carry on.
-sb