Or should I say, snow day… uugh. Sorry, but it’s hard for me to get excited about a snow day when it was a pain in the ass to get to campus, a pain in the ass to get home, and I only got home one hour earlier than I normally would have. But, I guess an hour is an hour, so I’ll take it.

So yea, officially, the word from WSU was “President Floyd has made the decision to close the WSU-Pullman Campus except for essential personnel at 10 AM this morning. Check this site for additional information as it becomes available.” However, the athletic website says that, “despite poor weather conditions and the closure of campus beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday, the Washington State University men’s basketball game against California schedule for tonight is still set to tipoff at 7:05 p.m. PT.”

So essentially, then the official policy is that Men’s Hoops is an “essential” service, and will remain on schedule. I tend to agree, and because of that, and in anticipation of tonight’s “essential” game, let’s take a quick preview of their next two games:

WSU vs California

Look, Cal at this point is a brand name. Without keeping up with college basketball, one might assume that this would be one of the games of the week. Well, not really. Cal has two wins in Pac-10 play: one against the sorrowful Beavers of Corvallis, and one more against USC - which looks impressive now, but that was their first game in the Pac-10 this year, and part of an 0-4 introduction to the Pac-10 for a very young and inexperienced team. Otherwise, I’d have to say that their best win was against either San Diego State, or Nevada.

The other thing to consider, is that WSU is 8-0 at home, while Cal is 2-2 on the road - with the two wins being OSU and Nevada.

So what it comes down to is this; this is still an athletic team, and although the Cougs won’t need to be at their best to win, they can’t have another night shooting the ball like they did last weekend, and they need to keep Ryan Anderson, the Pac-10’s leader in PPG, to a minimum.

WSU 64
Cal 52

WSU vs Stanford

Stanford is harder to predict. They have some good wins, some bad losses, and seem to play best at home, where they probably have their biggest win against Arizona State. Not surprisingly, Stanford scores fewer points and allows more points on the road than at home - this is the team who lost to the Siena Saints, the same team that dropped to Memphis in a 58-102 beat down earlier this month.

Last year, the two teams split the series. So I think that Stanford has slipped some, while WSU is really taking where they left off last year. With such wild mood swings, I have to make a wild conjecture here.

WSU 59
Stanford 47