Tourney Time

End of the season basketball tournaments are fascinating. If you are team thats had a really really good year, you are in the NCAA Tournament and all you are playing for is a good seed. So the end of the year conference tournament has some importance for you. If you have been an up and down squad you hope for 3-4 days you play the best basketball of the year and get to the title game with an upset in mind. For a team like Air Force, who has struggled the last month, this is not about making a token appearence Wednesday in the Mountain West Tournament and bowing out. Call me crazy, and maybe I am, but I still feel this team has a run left in them, and unfinished business. I look at how they went through the first half of the Mountain West Schedule, and its easy to see more than flashes. You see consistent minutes from a young team playing hard. The second half of the season has been rough, no question. The Falcons are having a tough time making shots, teams are really drilling down on leading scorer Tre Coggins, and the Falcons are facing a lot of zone defense, and can't seem to shoot teams out of it. But The Thomas & Mack Center in Vegas has been an interesting place for Air Force. They beat UNLV there earlier this year. They tend to play well on that floor. And in my mind, it all boils down to a simple solution-make shots. If the Falcons start hitting shots just watch their confidence zoom. No one is expecting Air Force to go far based on the 2nd half of the season. But if Air Force regains their shooting touch they will not be an easy out.