Great year had hard finish

LOGAN — Utah State basketball coach Stew Morrill said there were too many positives in the Aggies' 25-4 season to let the sting of not making the NCAA tournament classify the year as a disappointment.

The Aggies, at 17-1, were co-champions of the Big West Conference with Pacific, ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 for the first time in 33 years and posted the highest winning percentage (84 percent) in school history.

"This year we had a great year and a hard finish," Morrill said. "That's athletics. That's sports. Sometimes you have to remember that part of the equation when you compete is that you have to deal with disappointment just like you have to deal with the fun things."

Utah State, however, will be remembered as the only team ranked in the Top 25 and the team with the fewest losses that failed to make the NCAA tournament since the field expanded to 64.

"I did everything I could not to whine when we didn't get selected into the NCAA tournament," Morrill said. "But I'll always feel like this team should have been selected."

The Aggies, who finished the year ranked 25th in the AP poll and 22nd in the ESPN/USA Today Top 25, entered the Big West Conference tournament as the No. 1 seed but fell to Northridge in the semifinals, which led to their NCAA snubbing.

"I'm the first to acknowledge that it was a hard finish, but any time you win a league championship and 25 games you'd better be able to say it was a great year," Morrill said.

The Aggies earned their sixth postseason appearance (four NCAAs and two NITs) in seven years but lost to Hawaii — whom USU will soon join in the Western Athletic Conference — 85-74 in the first round of the NIT.

"The disappointment of them not making it (to the NCAAs) made it very difficult to play in the NIT. . . . There was no question we were ailing a bit in that game," Morrill said.

The coach said if he'd been promised a year like this before the season began, he would have accepted it — good and bad.

"I probably would have said, 'That's OK. I can live with that. I'll be glad to take all those good things with a couple of disappointments.' "

Along with winning the regular-season title, the Aggies landed seniors Cardell Butler and Mark Brown and sophomore Nate Harris on the all-Big West Conference first team.