Junior Eric Franson, frontrunner for player of the year honors to be announced Wednesday, has officially won Big West Conference scoring (18.7 average, 27 games) and field-goal percentage (.568) titles and was second in rebound average (9.8).
Also, Franson, with a 3.27 GPA in civil environmental engineering, Monday was named to the GTE Academic All-America second team with BYU's Russell Larson (3.25 GPA in statistics), and Franson made the 10-man U.S. Basketball Writers' Association District 7 team with Utah's Keith Van Horn and BYU's Larson and Kenneth Roberts.In other Big West final stats, Aggie senior Corwin Woodard had the BWC's high-point game (35 vs. New Mexico State Feb. 13), in which he got a league-high 24 shots. Franson made the most field goals (13 vs. San Jose State Jan. 5) of any BWC player in a game this season. Also, USU's 41 field goals vs. Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo is a BWC superlative.
USU won six Big West team statistical titles: scoring defense (67.7), field-goal percentage (.512), three-point field goal percentage defense (.283), opponents' rebounds (29.9), rebound margin (10.7) and scoring margin (10.9). The Ags were second in scoring (New Mexico State 85.7, USU 78.7), field goal percentage defense (Santa Barbara .414, USU .421) and rebounds (NMSU 40.8, USU 40.7). They were last in three-pointers per game (4.2).
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
- USU's secret to winning the Big West title? The 14-4, 21-6 Ags are road warriors. Two teams had better home marks (8-1 Long Beach, Nevada) and two (7-2 NMSU, UCSB) tied with USU in home records. But the Ags were also 7-2 on the road. NMSU was 6-3, Long Beach 5-4; all others had losing road records.
- USU's the only team to win both games on the league's toughest road trip - UNLV/NMSU. Nevada won at UNLV and lost by one at Las Cruces. Pacific and Fullerton also split on that trip. Everybody else lost both.
- No team swept USU. The only opponent the Aggies didn't beat at least once was nonleague Utah, and they only played once. USU split with Boise State (nonleague), NMSU, Long Beach, UNLV and Nevada and swept Pacific, UCSB, Irvine, Fullerton and San Jose State.
- USU and NMSU are the only Big West teams to not lose back-to-back games. If it remains that way, this will be the first USU team since 1960 to not lose consecutive games.