SAN DIEGO _ On paper, it might have been the biggest mismatch in college basketball this season, or any season.
You had San Diego State, which on Wednesday morning moved up two spots to No. 1 in the NET metric that is the primary analytical tool of the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
And you had San Diego Christian College, an NAIA school with a campus in a Santee business park behind a Target store that has a 3-6 record, lost to Division II Cal State San Marcos by 32, had a guy jumping center listed in the program at 6-foot-11 who was a good four inches shorter than 6-10 Nathan Mensah, doesn't have a sneaker contract (one guy was wearing Pumas shoes with Nike socks) and showed up at Viejas Arena in three vans, one of which didn't have a hub cap.
On the scoreboard? Not at first.
Here's what it said with 7:45 left in the first half: SDSU 19, SDCC 16.
The Aztecs (11-0) finally found their mojo and avoided a rerun of their last appearance at Viejas Arena, when they needed a fall-away 3 with 0.9 seconds left to beat a San Jose State team that is 270 spots worse in the NET.
Final score: Team with a shoe contract 92, Team wearing Puma, Nike and Adidas 48.
The 44-point margin of victory is the 13th largest in school history, but coach Brian Dutcher told his team all week that the score was less important than how they achieved it, that they would be compared to themselves and their own lofty expectations.
"I wrote on the board (before the game): San Diego State is playing San Diego State," Dutcher said. "That's not disrespect to San Diego Christian, but we're playing up to whatever our standard is for ourselves. And I thought we came close to that."
To that end, assistants charted the score between media timeouts, which are roughly four minutes apart. The goal was to win all 10 segments.
The Aztecs won eight, most notably losing the third segment by a staggering (and embarrassing) 11-2 when SDCC's Marc Combs, a junior guard from Southwestern College, started draining contested 3-pointers despite being all of 5-11.
Combs initially was credited with 15 points at halftime before officials reviewed a 3 and determined his foot was on the line. That reduced SDCC's total from 28 to 27 on stat sheets, but not on the scoreboard because operators were unable to subtract a point (each time they tried, it showed 127).
Instead, they left 28 up there in hopes that the Hawks would score quickly in the second half and they could properly adjust their total.
What happened? The Hawks went nearly five minutes without a point. They finally got a layup to drop, and the scoreboard went from 28 to 29.
For the most part, the Aztecs _ still one of four remaining undefeated teams in Division I _ accomplished what Dutcher hoped with a neutral-court showdown looming Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles against a Utah team that is 9-2 after upsetting No. 6 Kentucky 69-66 in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
They knocked off the rust from a 10-day break for finals ("and there will be rust," Dutcher correctly predicted). They got fifth-year senior Nolan Narain his first minutes of the season in the absence of injured forward Joel Mensah and Aguek Arop. They got extended minutes for freshman Keshad Johnson (who had a thunderous flying dunk). Walk-on Caleb Giordano scored the first points of his two-year SDSU career. They worked on various iterations of their full-court trap. And they unveiled a 2-3 zone defense they have been practicing intermittently since early October.
Yanni Wetzell led the Aztecs with 17 points and six rebounds in 19 minutes. Seven others had at least seven points as the hosts shot 52.4% overall and 43.5% behind the arc while amassing an impressive 24 assists on 33 baskets.
"We kept sharing the ball and playing as a team," senior guard KJ Feagin said. "Everybody was being unselfish, so I was pretty satisfied with the performance."
Less impressive for the Aztecs were the 13 offensive rebounds by the significantly smaller Hawks, no matter what the roster said.
SDCC shot 33.3% and had 18 turnovers, many coming against the suffocating SDSU press in the first half. Combs was the leading scorer, despite being shutout in the second half.
Still ... 19-16.
"I didn't get worried at all," Feagin said. "As a collective group, we were just mad that we were allowing them to score that many points. As soon as me, Malachi (Flynn) and Yanni checked back in, we brought everybody together and said, 'Let's open this up.' And that's what we did and ran away it.
"It was early in the game. We knew they'd make a run. You know, they're basketball players and they can make shots. It happens. We just kept at it and things fell in line."
