by Michael Duca and Morris Phillips

TUCSON AZ–The Arizona Wild Cats are going to be looking to stay ahead of UCLA in their meeting with the Cal Bears tonight Arizona University in the conference race. That situation is still open to possible outcomes there so we’ll see how it goes. Arizona lost to Cal in their last meeting at Haas Pavilion that’s the only team that’s beaten them in the Pac 12 or anywhere for that matter.

The Wild Cats will have to reasert and reestablish for this game in Arizona tonight in order to get that number one seed. Meanwhile for Cal the goal is very simple between now and the end of the season they need to finish somewhere in the top four. The Bears really want to avoid adding two extra games in the conference tournament.

Arizona just doesn’t lose at home and let’s be honest about that, the last time Cal won a game at Arizona Hubert Hoover was in the White House 1929-1933 and it feels like that long ago anyway. The Wild Cats don’t lose at home, this is a very good team and they were missing a key player when they were in Berkeley.

The Bears came within one Justin Cobbs step back shot at the buzzer of winning that game. The Wild Cats aren’t terribly worried about their chances in this game, they feel their in pretty good shape. As far as Justin Cobbs is concerned he’s one of those rare people in college basketball we call them “seniors.”

You don’t get a lot of guys who stay and play for four years and the majority of the experience show at crunch time. If it weren’t for the fact that Cal had the top player in the conference in the last four years you would think that you could end the discussion for that so is Richard Solomon.

The truth is politics gets involved, your just not going to see having player of the year four out of five years it’s not going to happen. Arizona State is coming up next for Saturday night and ASU is a real interesting team they’ve spent most the time above or around Cal in the standings.

They were we’re very spotty and Cal was a very up and down team, they’ve lost to Stanford and Utah so Cal has a chance to do alright on the road and they have a chance of splitting these two games tonight and Saturday.

Morris Phillips and Michael Duca cover the Cal Bears for Sportstalk radio each week