'BYU Basketball with Dave Rose'

(Mark Philbrick, BYU Photo)


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The BYU men's basketball team is currently riding a three-game West Coast Conference winning streak after dropping its first two conference games in late December.

A four-game road stretch, which starts this week with games at San Francisco and Santa Clara, will provide the Cougars with a difficult test. If all goes well it would set them up nicely for the second half of WCC play.

"This group has played a lot of road games with not a lot of road success," head coach Dave Rose told Greg Wrubell during his weekly radio show Tuesday at Malawi's Pizza in Provo.

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Last season, BYU split the season series with San Francisco with each team losing a game at home. "This is basically the same team that came in here last year and in the last eight minutes outplayed us by twenty points. Hopefully our guys remember that," said Rose.

As BYU enters a crucial span of games on the road, many are wondering about Eric Mika's status after missing the last two games due to a hip contusion suffered against San Diego back on January 4th. The freshman forward participated in some drills on Monday and completed a full practice Tuesday.

"Hopefully he'll be able to get better and better each day, said Rose. "You can tell that it's still an issue at times but hopefully he'll be able to get back to 100% soon."

With Mika's absence several players have stepped up and filled in nicely. Josh Sharp logged a career high in minutes played against Loyola Marymuont last week and Nate Austin moved smoothly over to the center position.

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Instead of a player-guest for this week's show, listeners were introduced to Cody Fueger, BYU's recently-named Director of Basketball Operations.

Cody is a native of suburban Milwaukee, and grew up attending basketball camps hosted by Rick Majerus. He later graduated from the University of Utah while working for Majerus. Since then Cody has been the Director of Basketball operations for Louisiana Tech, UC Riverside and most recently Utah State University.

"I've always been a big fan of BYU and of coach Rose and how he has done things," said Fueger. "I'm really excited to be here."

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During the question-and-answer section of the show Rose opened up on the communication he has with BYU players that are currently serving missions.

"I do get most of their letters," Rose explained. "I'll respond every once in a while. I remember when I served my mission and getting letters from a couple coaches. It was a big distraction. I more just like to follow how they're doing."

Rose noted that during BYU's December road trip to play UMass in Springfield, he and the team spent some time with Cory Calvert, who played for the Cougars last season, before embarking on two years of church service in the Massachusetts Boston Mission.

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