The Wildcats are officially contenders once again.
During the first 10 seasons of Randy Rahe’s tenure as the head coach at Weber State, the Wildcats won five regular-season Big Sky Conference championships and advanced to the NCAA Tournament three times.
But the program has not been as dominant the last five seasons, bottoming out last season during an injury-riddled campaign that saw WSU finish with a 12-20 record, just the second losing season in Rahe’s 15-year tenure.
Weber State graduated the talented backcourt duo of Jerrick Harding and Cody John. During the off-season, Rahe decided to totally remake Weber State’s roster.
“I just decided we were going to go out and jump into the transfer market and bring in some older kids,” Rahe said in an interview on Tuesday on Nuanez Now on 102.9 FM ESPN Missoula. “We brought in some older kids and I like these guys. We are older and more mature. We are bigger, we are longer and we have more guys that are all-around better basketball players than we had.”
“We had nine new guys this year so we had to get them on the same page playing together and playing for each other.”
Now that Weber State has been able to play a few weekends in a row, the talented Wildcats absolutely look like a contender to win the Big Sky. A roster that includes five new starters, all of them transfers, asserted themselves as a front-runner by sweeping Montana State, capping the two-game home stand against the Bobcats with an 82-74 in Ogden on Saturday afternoon.
The victory vaults Weber into a four-way tie for first place in the Big Sky standings. The pair of losses are the first in conference play for a Bobcat team that entered the weekend as the last undefeated squad left in the league.
WSU and MSU are now tied with Southern Utah and Eastern Washington in a four-way logjam atop the Big Sky standings.
“It’s been such a weird year. Everything has been weird. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t really even checked the standings,” Rahe said after the game. “We just hope to get to play another game, then when we go play it, we hope to play the best we can, hope to win it and get to the next one.
“I just keep telling our team, let’s just keep getting better and try to win our next game and we will see how it pans out in the end. But these are important ones. We did know that Montana State was undefeated and we needed to come out and play well. Now we put ourselves in the mix so hopefully we get to play next weekend to stay in the mix.”
Thursday, Weber State raced past Montana State for a 96-88 win in one of the most exciting offensive performances by both teams in the Big Sky this season. The Wildcats shot 67 percent after halftime and 62 percent overall as six players reached double figures in scoring.
But Seikou Sisoho Jawara, a transfer from Loyola Marymount, picked up the slack. He buried five 3-pointers in six attempts and hit seven of his nine shots overall on the way to a career-high 25 points. Dontay Bassett, an athletic and energetic former transfer from Florida, added a career-high 17 points as four Wildcats finished in double figures scoring.
Saturday, Montana State clamped down Isiah Brown, a smooth-shooting combo guard who transferred from Northwestern before the season. Brown scored 17 points pretty effortlessly on Thursday. Saturday, he had to work for all 11 of his points, finishing 4-of-11 from the floor and 1-of-5 from beyond the 3-point line.
Montana State saw four players score in double figures — Amin Adamu had 19 points, Xavier Bishop scored 18 while Mike Hood and Jubrile Belo each chipped in 12 — but could not contain the league’s top scoring attack for the second game in a row.
“We had quite a few defensive adjustments,” Rahe said. “We didn’t change a thing offensively. But we needed to go down and double their big guy (Belo), which we didn’t do the first night. We needed to change our positioning on defense. And we changed our ball screen coverage. We had three big adjustments and I thought we did well with them.”
Belo’s dunk with 5:56 left gave Montana State a 62-59 lead. But Jawara hit a pair of triples and scored eight points during a spurt that helped WSU built a 72-64 advantage with 13-2 run over the next three minutes. Bassett hit four free throws in the final minute, including a pair with 17 seconds left that made the WSU advantage 80-71. Hood answered with a corner 3-pointer to cut it to six before Jawara sealed Weber State’s fourth straight win.
“We couldn’t get stops when we they mattered and they made big plays,” MSU head coach Danny Sprinkel told Zach Mackay of the Bobcat Radio Network after the game. “They made bit 3s at big times. No. 5 (Jawara) took the game over. It seems like he didn’t miss a shot. That’s been the last two weekends for him. He played great at Idaho and I thought he played great tonight.”
Montana State’s seven-game winning streak was its longest in almost 20 years before it came to an end on Thursday. Now the Bobcats are in a mini skid with a pair of games against Eastern Washington, the preseason league favorites and last year’s regular-season league champions, coming up in Bozeman next weekend.
“We were just too sloppy,” Sprinkle said. “We have to clean some stuff up. The good thing is we will see this team again in the tournament. They are a really good team. We will learn from this.”
The Wildcats return to the road for two games against Montana on Feb. 11 and 13 in Missoula.
