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The Pac-10 has been considered one of the deepest conferences -- if not the deepest -- this entire season, and the early conference season has supported that claim. Eight games into the slate, seven teams have anywhere from three to five wins, giving nine teams possible shots at NCAA Tournament bids. That sort of conference parity has been fairly common throughout the country this year -- just look at the Big East -- but the Pac-10 has been much less predictable overall.For an example of that craziness, just look at Thursday's schedule. In the night's biggest shocker, unranked Cal topped #9 Washington State in Pullman, giving the Bears a mighty impressive road win right after dropping three consecutive home games. In Los Angeles, suddenly resurgent Arizona beat USC handily with the Trojans coming off a three-game road winning streak that included victories over UCLA and Oregon. In less surprising news, #14 Stanford handled Washington in Seattle while #5 UCLA defeated Arizona State by a whopping 33 points in Westwood. Even those results, though, hold some oddities: ASU started the conference season with four wins, and U-Dub had dropped just one Pac-10 home game this year and rarely gets stomped at HecEd Pavilion.
Days like Thursday show just how little typical predictors have meant in this conference so far this year. Factors like homecourt advantage, hot and cold streaks, and holding strategic advantages have not accurately predicted games. Only three teams (UCLA, Stanford, and Arizona) have played with any measure of consistency lately, and even those teams have had issues. UCLA's home loss to USC proves that they do not hold complete conference dominance, Stanford often looks offensively dysfunctional when Brook Lopez sits with foul trouble, and Arizona suffered mightily when Jerryd Bayless missed the first three Pac-10 games with a knee sprain.
By the end of the season, it's entirely possible that the Pac-10 will have more than half of its teams make the Big Dance and only see one of those squads garner a Top 4 seed. Yet that in-conference parity could produce a number of teams that out-perform their seeds and advance to the second weekend.
For now, though, the Pac-10 will have to continue its cannibalistic diet. When Cal, the ninth-place team heading into Thursday's action, has two likely first-round draft picks (Ryan Anderson and DeVon Hardin) on its frontline, no team can go into a game feeling like the game's already been decided.
Unless, of course, that team is playing Oregon State. Thank heavens for Oregon State.
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