The BYU basketball team plays two road games this week, beginning tonight in San Diego. Saturday, the Cougars will return to California to take on Pepperdine in Malibu. In between, BYU will play host to Loyola Marymount at the Marriott Center on Thursday.
In other words, this will be a busy week -- one the players love because they get to play games more than practice for them.
"We will take playing over practicing any day of the week," said guard Brock Zylstra.
The Cougars are heavy favorites -- 14 points, last time I checked -- tonight against the Toreros, after having swamped San Diego on New Year's Eve in Provo.
Still, coach Dave Rose said USD is playing better lately -- it smoked Santa Clara last Thursday at Santa Clara -- and has some talented freshmen who are improving every game.
Here's my advance looking at tonight's game, which begins at 8 p.m. MST and will be televised by BYUtv and a local station in the San Diego area.
BYU's big guys -- Noah Hartscok and Brandon Davies -- combined for 44 points on Saturday and should flourish again tonight if they can stay out of foul trouble.
Rose said after the game that staying out of foul trouble has been stressed in every practice this season, but it is still a problem that plagues the Cougars.
"It seems like night in and night out that we are making a lot of substitutions based on the foul situations, which you would kind of not want to do that as a coach," Rose said. "You want to go through the whole game and just substitute as far as strategy is concerned.
It seems like we are picking up that second foul early in the first half, we are picking up that third foul early in the second half, and those are all things you kind of have to manage.
But this was really an aggressive team. Probably the biggest fouls we were most concerned about were the fouls on jump shooters. You don't want to foul jump shooters, and we did that three or four times tonight. We will have to take a look from it and hopefully learn from it."