Utah State is a tough place to play

Kansas's Allen Fieldhouse. Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium. The Kennel at Gonzaga. All great venues for college basketball, and all imposing places for visiting teams to play.

On Saturday night, No. 25 Nevada (21-5, 10-3) visits the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum to play Utah State (9-4) with a share of the Western Athletic Conference at stake, and the Spectrum, although not as well known, has proven to be a burial ground for visiting teams since Stew Morrill took over the reins of the Aggies seven-plus seasons ago.

With Morrill at the helm, Utah State has compiled a 110-10 record. Granted the Aggies aren't playing the likes of North Carolina, Duke or Oklahoma, but they have been dominant just the same. In college basketball, it's all about protecting your home court, and the Aggies have done exactly that.

Entering the 2005-06 season, the Aggies were 392-102 in the last 35 years, including 14-0 in 1973-74 and 15-0 in 1997-98 and 2000-01, and they've done that in front of an average of 7,000 fans per game.

Nobody with the Nevada program has ever been to Utah State, but Nevada has played at Allen Fieldhouse the last two years and at UTEP's Don Haskins Center, and both of those places are loud.

"We have very vocal fans, and lot of them are students," Morrill said during a recent Western Athletic Conference teleconference. "Students set the tone in the building with the noise level. Three thousand students is a great thing. They (the fans) are right on top of you."

And, as Morrill pointed out, the Aggies have been good in that span. In the previous seven years, the Aggies are 167-54, and the only time they didn't win 20 games was Morrill's first year in 1998 when they were 13-13. That kind of success deserves a good following.

Believe it or not, Idaho managed to hand the Aggies one of their 10 losses in the Morrill Era.

"My experience is to spend a lot of time in church praying prior to going over to the Spectrum," joked Idaho coach Leonard Perry. "It's a tough place to play. The environment I was fortunate to be a part of. The fans are terrific; the students are great. It's a fun place to play. The outcomes aren't so fun for opponents. You have to be able to execute in a hostile environment."

Nevada coach Mark Fox said three things are critical to winning on the road - mental toughness, rebounding and defense, and Perry agreed with that theory. The Pack have been a good road team under Fox, and one would expect Nevada to give the Aggies a good tussle.

"Tempo matters whether you play at home or on the road," Perry said. "It's ingrained. You have to have a good sense of tempo. You can absorb mistakes at home that you can't absorb on the road."

Louisiana Tech's Keith Richard made his first trip to Utah State this year, and was impressed with the experience, save for the fact that USU won the game.

"It was a great experience; a really great thing," Richard said. "There's 7,000 (or 8,000) there. It's a great for college basketball. It's as loud as any place I've heard in the WAC. It's a good place to play basketball."

Boise State's Greg Graham agreed.

"It's a tough environment; a good basketball environment, the type you want to play in," Graham said. "The only thing I'll tell you is that the coach at Pacific (Bob Thomason) told me he went there 17 times and won only once."