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It has been a season of overcoming challenges for the BYU basketball team, and coach Dave Rose says the next one might be the biggest of them all.
Rose said the Cougars have to come back down to earth, put the big 73-70 win over then-No. 2/3 Gonzaga behind them, and be ready for a tough, physical test on Saturday night in a WCC Tournament quarterfinal against either LMU or Santa Clara.
"The biggest challenge for us is to make sure that [the win over GU] is not the highlight of our season," Rose said. "It was a good one, but that's not the end-all. We have a lot more to do. We have to play a certain way in order to be successful. It seems like we found it at times, and then it went away, and we find it again and then for various reasons the challenges that we had [came back].
But we have been consistent with it right now, and hopefully we can keep that going. So I feel a little bit anxious about our ability to continue to be consistent in a season where we've seen ourselves kinda play well, and then things get away from us.
Hopefully we can play our very best when we are down there [in Las Vegas]. We need to."
Not knowing yet who they will play at 9 p.m. MST on Saturday night, the Cougars' practices have been different this week, Rose said.
"Yesterday was kinda Santa Clara. Today was LMU. Monday was all about ourselves. We just got in the gym and got a lot of shots up and got a good workout in," he said. "I think tomorrow we will practice here, and Friday morning we have got an hour in the Orleans, and so that will be the only time we get in there before we play on Saturday night, so it will be interesting to see how this game plays out as far as LMU and Santa Clara.
Both of them are different. LMU has had a season full of incomplete rosters. Very few games have they had their entire team together.
Evan Payne has been out for the last 3-4 games. See if he plays; that will make a big difference.
Hopefully, we are ready for either one. We will see how it plays out."
The Cougars made it to the finals of the conference tournament last year before losing to Gonzaga in a runaway, but generally Rose's teams have not fared well in the postseason affairs, dating back to BYU's time in the Mountain West Conference. Rose said the conference tourneys are all he knows, declining to answer whether he likes them or not.
"It started way back when I was playing and we went to the Southwest Conference Tournament. We were a lower seed and actually got an NCAA Tournament berth by winning the SWC Tournament one year.
It seems like most of the conference tournaments I have been in, the first round,, second rounds, are pretty nerve-wracking because you are the higher seed and someone is taking a shot at you. But I think that it is really good for college basketball, so I kind of go with them."
As far as the Orleans Arena being the venue for the WCC Tournament, Rose said the place has grown on him.
"I think it is a good place to play. It has a good feel to it for kind of a hockey arena. We haven't played in a lot of hockey arenas, but the way they put it together for the conference tournament, it has got a good feel to it, and I think that the fan support that we get is tremendous, and hopefully they will all come out for this one.
It kinda looked like at one time that the two big teams, teams with big crowd followings, Gonzaga and BYU, would play in different sessions. But they are in the same session. It will be interesting how everybody fights for tickets for that late session."
More will follow in the days leading up to the tourney opener for BYU, but here's Rose's response when he was asked what he is preaching to his team right now as it sits squarely atop the NCAA Tournament bubble:
"Very similar to what we said before the game, which is, we have been here a lot of times going into this tournament with a chance to win the tournament and qualify for the NCAA Tournament .The only way it works is if you win, and going down the last three or four weeks, six games ago, we were in a really tough spot, but the only way to get yourself out of that is to win. And then the team has done a great job … I think the urgency, the energy, the execution of our team the last couple of weeks has been way better.
Why that is, and why I think their focus is better, and why they are [peeking] that's a good question. But hopefully we will be able to keep it going."