As the old proverb states, “no good deed goes unpunished.”
And somehow, after Utah State won the outright conference title to secure the No. 1 seed in the Mountain West tournament, the Aggies have found themselves “rewarded” with a matchup against the only team to sweep them during the 2025-26 season.
On that team’s home court.
Utah State (25-6 overall) will face No. 8 seed UNLV (17-15, 11-9) at 1 p.m. MT Thursday in the quarterfinals at the Thomas & Mack Center. The Rebels managed to hold off a determined effort from Wyoming down the stretch Wednesday afternoon, edging out the Cowboys 73-70 in the first game of the postseason tourney.
“(Utah State head coach) Jerrod Calhoun does a great job; He’s an outstanding coach, and they’re a great basketball team,” UNLV head coach Josh Pastner said of facing the Aggies for a third team this season. “They’re really a high-level group. I mean, any job that opens for anywhere in the country, Jerrod Calhoun is going to have his pick of which job that he wants. I think he does a great job.
“They’ve got a lot of great players. They play hard. They’re well-coached and we’re going to have to play our best game of the season if we want to have an opportunity to win the game.”
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Unfortunately for the Aggies, the Rebels arguably already did that last week when they handed Utah State its worst loss of the season. After taking a 32-24 lead into halftime, UNLV blistered the nets for 60 points on their way to a 92-65 rout at the Thomas & Mack Center.
The Rebels were also the only visiting team to win at the Spectrum this season, coming back from 14 points down with 13 minutes left to win 86-76 on Jan. 20.
“Those were two totally different games,” Calhoun said. “In the first one, we were up 14 late in the game and we just didn’t get the stops. And certainly, the last game was not good at all. But there’s just points in games where there are momentum swings, and I feel like every time we’ve played them, they’ve had those.
“I think it’s going to start and end with our defense. We have to have the ability to keep guys in front and keep them out of the paint. And they’re big and long and athletic, and they switch all the ball screens. So, we’ll have a better attack with that. And, you know, we’ve just got to get back to playing championship-level defense.”
The Aggies last took the court for a game Saturday night when they managed to outscore New Mexico 94-90 at the Spectrum to win the Mountain West regular-season championship outright for the second time in three years.
Afterwards, Calhoun gave his team Sunday and Monday off before resuming practices on Tuesday.
“We had a very good practice on Tuesday and a really solid practice on Wednesday — not a lot of contact,” Calhoun said. “We went low, low on our workloads. So, that means it’s about an hour and five minutes, and I would say about 20 of those minutes today was contact. Yesterday was full contact after two off days.”
Tuesday also ended up being a good day for the Aggies as far as postseason accolades go. Junior guard Mason Falslev was named the Mountain West Player of the Year, while Calhoun was tabbed as the MW Steve Fisher Coach of the Year.
Falslev was also placed on the MW All-Defensive Team, and junior forward Karson Templin selected as the Sixth Man of the Year. Senior guard MJ Collins Jr. (second team) and graduate guard Drake Allen (honorable mention) also received honors for their play during Utah State’s final season as a member of the Mountain West Conference.
A Cache Valley native, Falslev is currently second on the Aggies in scoring (15.9 ppg), first in rebounding (5.7 rpg), first in minutes played (31.9 mpg), third in assists (2.9) and tied for first in steals with Allen (1.9 spg). He joins Sam Merrill (2019) and Great Osobor (2024) as Aggies to win the Mountain West Player of the Year award, while Calhoun is the third USU coach to be so honored, following in the footsteps of Craig Smith (2019) and Danny Sprinkle (2024).
“I’m very, very happy for the guys that received the awards,” Calhoun noted. “You know, you’re only as good as your teammates in basketball, right? So, I think all these awards are team awards. We were on the bus heading down to Salt Lake to get on the plane, and the players were very energetic and started chanting everybody’s name as the awards were being posted on Twitter and Instagram.
“I think we have a team that’s a true team. Everybody’s happy for each other’s individual success. But now, I think everybody knows we’ve got two tournaments left, and we all need each other.”
Currently sitting 29th in the NET rankings and 36th in the KenPom.com ratings, the Aggies appear to be a lock to hear their name on Selection Sunday, regardless of what happens in Las Vegas. But they’d clearly also love to improve their seeding situation and exorcise their Rebel demons Thursday afternoon with a win on UNLV’s home floor.
And while Utah State lost by 27 points there a little more than a week ago, the Aggies should have increased hope of a victory after watching Wyoming (18-14) very nearly pull of a mild upset of the host school. The Cowboys trailed by as many as 16 points in the first half and were down 44-31 at halftime before making a run at the Rebels in the latter part of the second half.
A 10-0 spurt and a putback by Dennis Damarion with 8:26 remaining helped Wyoming take its first lead since the opening minute of the game, and the Cowboys managed to pull away by as many as three points late in the contest. But a 3-point play and a pair of free throws by senior forward Kimani Hamilton — as well as a key block by Tyrin Jones — in the final 19 seconds of the game was enough to give UNLV the win.
And a significant win, at that.
Prior to Wednesday, UNLV hadn’t beaten a non-Air Force opponent in the Mountain West tournament in more than a decade, despite hosting the event every year.
“I believe, in life, that everything is deeper than it looks on the surface. And while I wanted to beat San Diego State in our last game so darn bad, if we had, we would have been the fifth seed and our first game would have been against Air Force,” Pastner pointed out. “By the loss — which I would have rather have won, obviously — it gives you the opportunity in the first game to play Wyoming, that if you are fortunate enough to win the game, you’ve broken the streak, for crying out loud, of not beating anyone in this tournament other than Air Force over the last decade.
“That was really great to be able to do that, and I’m proud of our guys to do that.”
Hamilton led the Rebels with 23 points, helping offset a relatively quiet night from Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn. The conference’s leading scorer this season, Gibbs-Lawhorn was 0 for 6 from the floor and didn’t score in the second half after putting up 15 points in the opening stanza.
But then, Gibbs-Lawhorn also struggled against the Aggies last week, scoring just 10 points and playing only 28 minutes due to foul trouble. But thanks to Hamilton knocking down 10 of his 14 shots on his way to scoring 24 points, the Rebels didn’t really need him to beat Utah State that night.
“I think we’ve got to push him off the block,” Calhoun said of defending Hamilton Thursday afternoon. “We’ve got to play more physical. … We can’t let him get the ball so low because every time he gets the ball low on the block, it’s either a foul or a basket.”
“… But he’s playing at a high level. I thought he put the team on his back today and played really, really well. But then, he’s been playing well. And this is a team that has great spurt ability in scoring the basketball, so we’ve got to limit those big spurts and just stay the course throughout a 40-minute game and understand he’s a big part of our scout, that’s for sure.”
Falslev fared the best of all the Aggies against the Rebels this season, scoring 20 points in the loss in Las Vegas and finishing with 21 points in the game at the Spectrum. But Utah State could definitely use more offensive output from Collins in the third matchup with the Rebels. The Aggies’ leading scorer this season at 17.6 points per game, Collins scored 14 points in Logan but finished just 4 for 13 from the floor, and he then had his worst outing of the year at UNLV, knocking down just two of his 10 field-goal attempts on his way to scoring four points.
But on the plus side, Collins exploded for 21 points in the second half of last Saturday’s win over New Mexico on his way to putting up a game-high 27 points in his Spectrum swan song.
“He’s going to be a critical piece; he has been all year,” Calhoun said of Collins. “He’s the one guy I felt like should have been first-team, all-league. He’s really talented. And I think his defensive activity in these next two tournaments are going to be critical when he’s active in the zone. It really, really helps us when he gets out and gets baskets off of his defense, or his teammates’ defense.
“Getting to the free-throw line will be critical for him, but he’s coming off a great game. You know, he carried us in the second half, and confidence and momentum for him in particular should be really high.”
The winner of Thursday’s game between Utah State and UNLV will face the winner of the later quarterfinal clash between No. 4 seed Grand Canyon (20-11) and No. 5 Nevada (21-11) at 7:30 p.m. MT Friday. The Wolf Pack crushed No. 12 Air Force 80-45 Wednesday afternoon to extend the Falcons’ losing streak to 25 in a row.