Santa Clara at Santa Barbara

This won't be a big year for Santa Clara as they lost a lot of pieces, including all-conference center John Bryant. The evidence of that statement is mounting early with lopsided losses to average teams and struggles against teams they should be beating easily. The opposite can be said about UCSB as they have perhaps the greatest depth ever under the 12 years of coaching here by Bob Williams, and should be in a dog fight with Long Beach for top honors in the Big West. The Gauchos are getting contributions from a lot of places and all of the top five scorers can fill-it as the lowest shooting percentage amongst the five is 46.2%, and they already have proven they can drain the three-pointers with five players hitting over 47%. There is too much firepower here vs. a team searching for an identity. Santa Barbara gets the call here.