March 15, 2005

GW Has Eyes on the Big Dance

Colonials Basketball Teams Look to Join the NCAA Tournament

GW Women’s Basketball
The women’s basketball team rallied from 16 points down in the second half, but could not overtake No. 16 Temple as the Owls clinched their third Atlantic 10 title in four years with a 70–62 victory over the Colonials at the Smith Center on March 7.

Trailing 49–33 with 10:25 remaining, GW went on a 19–7 scoring spree to pull within four, 56–52, at the 2:43 mark. However, the Owls hit 12 of their 14 free throw attempts in the final 1:24 to seal the win.

The victory extended Temple’s winning streak to 24 games, the longest in the country, and the Owls secured the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. It was GW’s first loss at the Smith Center since losing to Saint Joseph’s, 64–62, on Jan. 10, 2004, ending a 22-game home winning streak.
Joe McKeown’s squad finished the season 22–8, with hopes of NCAA play unknown at press time.

Men’s Basketball
The GW men’s basketball team clinched the Atlantic 10 West regular season championship with a 68–39 win over Rhode Island March 5. The victory gave the Colonials a first round bye, along with Saint Joseph’s, Temple, and Xavier, in the 2005 Atlantic 10 Men’s Basketball Championship, which began March 9 at the US Bank Arena in Cincinnati, OH.

GW earned the top seed in the West with an 11–5 conference record and a 19–7 record overall. Tournament host Xavier took the West’s second seed. Saint Joseph’s entered the A-10 Tournament as the overall top seed for the second-year in a row after earning its fifth straight East division title, tying UMass (1992–96) for the most consecutive regular season titles in A-10 history. The Hawks were 14–2 in the conference and 17–10 overall. Temple received the second seed in the East division.

If the Colonials fail to win the conference tournament and receive the coveted automatic NCAA Tournament bid, the team hopes its 80 Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) rating — a strength-of-schedule index used by the NCAA to help select at-large teams and determine seeds for the NCAA Tournament — as well as key wins over nationally ranked teams during the non-conference schedule will be enough to propel the team into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1999.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu

Related Link

GW Sports.com