Fresno Bee Sports Writer John Branch: The Future is Here

[MrMustang1965]

RENO, Nev. -- This is what the future feels like.

A record crowd. Hard fouls and trash-talking players. Coaches sweating like players. Fans rising and falling like synchronized yo-yos. A last-second shot from 80 feet bouncing off the rim.

One team looking as if it had one wish in the world and just got it. The other looking as if it had both its heart and its lunch money taken away.

Nevada against Fresno State. It's about a half-season away from being the Western Athletic Conference's biggest men's basketball rivalry.

But you could get a pretty good sense of it Saturday night, when Fresno State beat WAC-leading Nevada 66-63. These two programs will be the class of the WAC next year. That's not saying much, of course, given how bad the WAC is now -- you say parity, I say parody -- and how much worse it's about to get. But it looks to be where things are headed.

Nevada is the best team now -- this season, if not this night. Fresno State is the second-best team that's not leaving the conference.

And come next year, these two will be playing games like this, and they'll probably be the most important WAC games of the season.

"I think it's a good possibility," Fresno State coach Ray Lopes said.

The Bulldogs, as unpredictable as a crime spree, somehow managed the near-impossible feat of losing to last-place Tulsa one game and beating first-place Nevada the next. Midway through the conference schedule, they are only a game out of first place and have beaten the two teams they trail.

The Wolf Pack, with a chance to take sole possession of first place in the WAC, played as if it meant something, then somberly walked away to demonstrate how much it did.

The biggest crowd in the history of Lawlor Events Center wedged itself into the circular arena. Players who never had met -- Fresno State's Ja'Vance Coleman and Nevada's Jermaine Washington, for example -- took great pleasure in describing to one another what they just had done or what they were about to do to the other.

And in the end, most all of the 11,784 fans were on their feet, willing their team to beat the Bulldogs, groaning in chorus when it didn't, then shuffling quietly into the chilly night.

Yep. This is how a conference's biggest games are supposed to feel. And this is how they'll probably feel the next few years when these teams get together.

It might not be Duke-North Carolina, but it'll beat the baloney out of anything else a revised WAC provides.

Next year, there will be no Texas-El Paso or Rice, two of the top four teams in the WAC. There will be no Tulsa, a program with strong tradition, and no Southern Methodist.

In their places come three basketball programs, the aggregate more sorry than scintillating.

Utah State is, by far, the best of them. The Aggies have made the NCAA Tournament three times in the past four years. They are 15-5, in third place in the Big West Conference.

But they lost this season to something called IPFW. That's Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, which is 3-16 in all its other games. That loss is uglier than casino carpet.

Utah State managed to lose to WAC-inductee Idaho, too, which began the season 0-7, needing a victory against Great Falls to break the string. Ugh.

New Mexico State will arrive from the Sun Belt and probably take over the spot at the bottom of the WAC standings.

That leaves Nevada and Fresno State as the likely candidates for WAC supremacy, whatever that's worth.

When these two get together, maybe in front of a national television audience on ESPN's Big Monday, they'll be big games. And they'll feel like big games.

Just as this one did.