With four games left in the regular season, the Cal Poly men’s basketball team needs one more win to secure a spot in the 2026 Big West Championship. The Mustangs will host Long Beach State on Thursday, Feb. 26, followed by an away game at UC San Diego on Saturday, Feb. 28. Both games are scheduled for 7 p.m.
Cal Poly (12-16 overall, 8-8 conference) can clinch its place in the March 11-14 Big West Championship and eliminate Long Beach State (8-20, 4-12) from postseason contention with a victory on Thursday. The Mustangs currently sit eighth in the conference standings but are only three games behind first-place teams Hawai’i, CSUN, and UC Irvine.
A win would give Cal Poly its highest number of Big West victories since going 12-6 during the 2012-13 season. The team is averaging 81.5 points per game—third among conference programs—and has scored over 90 points seven times this year.
Long Beach State comes into Thursday’s matchup having lost nine consecutive games after starting conference play at 4-3. Defending champion UC San Diego (19-9, 9-7) is just ahead of Cal Poly in the standings and will host last-place Cal State Bakersfield before facing the Mustangs.
Cal Poly seeks back-to-back home wins against Long Beach State for the first time since the mid-2010s. While Long Beach State leads both all-time and Division I series records between these programs, Cal Poly swept last year’s matchups before losing this season’s opener to them.
The Mustangs also recently broke a five-game losing streak against UC San Diego with a narrow home victory on New Year’s Day. They hold an overall lead in their series history with UC San Diego.
Cal Poly has established itself as one of the top three-point shooting teams nationally this season. The squad ranks sixth among NCAA Division I programs for three-point attempts per game and is also among national leaders for makes and total threes converted. Sophomore guard Hamad Mousa is individually ranked for his three-point accuracy and total made shots from beyond the arc.
At the free throw line, Cal Poly has been efficient lately—shooting nearly 86 percent over their last seven contests and ranking among national leaders for free throw percentage this season. Mousa is third among Big West players at almost 87 percent from the line; Peter Bandelj ranks fifth at just over 86 percent.
Mousa has scored double digits in all but one appearance this year and leads both Cal Poly and the Big West Conference at just over 20 points per game—27th nationally in scoring average. He recently scored a career-high of 34 points at CSUN and could soon become only the second Mustang ever to record a single-season total of at least 600 points.
Sophomore guard Cayden Ward is third on Cal Poly’s roster with an average of more than fourteen points per game; he was named Big West Player of the Week after a standout performance earlier this season against Utah.
Peter Bandelj, another sophomore guard, enters Thursday averaging nearly fourteen points per contest with several notable performances—including setting a new program record for most three-pointers made in a single game.
The current roster includes players from nine countries across six continents—making it unique among Division I programs this year.
Cal Poly did not lose any players to transfers during last offseason—a distinction shared by only four other Division I schools: Duke, Tennessee, American University, and Boston University.
In professional news related to alumni: Kobe Sanders became only the second former Mustang to appear in an NBA game when he debuted for Los Angeles after being drafted by New York then traded to the Clippers earlier this year; David Nwaba was previously active across multiple NBA teams between 2017–2022.
Other recent milestones include achieving several new or near-record marks for free throws both individually (Bandelj) and as a team throughout various matchups during this campaign.
