Mountain West tacks two games onto Pokes’ schedule
LARAMIE -- Wyoming's men's basketball team lost four games from its original schedule this season because of COVID-19 concerns.
Tuesday, they got two of them back.
The Mountain West Conference announced that the Cowboys will travel to Logan, Utah to take on the Aggies on March 4 and host UNLV inside the Arena-Auditorium two nights later.
Wyoming and Utah State were supposed to play a two-game series beginning Feb. 10. The Rebels and Pokes were slated to open league play against each other in late December.
"It's great for us because the more games that our guys can play, the better off we're going to be in the long run," UW head coach Jeff Linder said Tuesday during his weekly press conference. "So, we welcome those games, but we need to take care of business first here against San Jose State."
The Cowboys and Spartans are scheduled to open a two-game series Thursday night in Laramie.
“The Conference office was charged by the membership with determining the optimal plan for rescheduling games which had been postponed during the course of the regular season,” MW Commissioner Craig Thompson said in a press release. “This presented a very complex equation which included contemplating several variables, but this approach provides each institution the opportunity to control its own destiny over the final two weeks of the regular season and through the course of the Mountain West tournament.”
Linder joked that it' "above his pay grade" when asked if he advocated to have the UNLV and Utah State games rescheduled. Because of injuries and the ongoing pandemic, Linder's young roster of just eight healthy scholarship players hasn't been able to practice 5-on-5. It's the actual games, Linder said, is where the Cowboys are learning and getting in shape.
"With our guys, they still enjoy coming to practice," he said. "You know, they still want to get better. That's all we can do is just try to continue to find a way to get better."
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