Three thoughts on San Diego State’s 67-66 loss at Boise State on Saturday:

1. The standings

The Mountain West standings list all 11 teams based on their conference records through the first third of an 18-game schedule.

They’re deceiving.

SDSU already has two losses and is tied for third place. But the Aztecs really should be in a five-way tie for second. UNLV and Nevada are both 2-3, but UNLV should be higher and Nevada lower.

Given that everyone has played everyone else yet, here’s an alternative way to approach what could be the tightest race in the 25-year history of the conference.

First, there’s a clear delineation between the top seven and bottom four. SDSU, Boise State, Colorado State, Nevada, New Mexico, UNLV and Utah State — all in the top 80 of the Kenpom.com metric — comprise the upper tier. Air Force, Fresno State, San Jose State and Wyoming are all 170 or worse.

The formula for contending for the conference title, then, is not losing to anyone in the lower tier home or away, winning at home against the upper tier and then stealing one or two on the road.

“You’re going to lose games in this league,” Aztecs coach Brian Dutcher said of Boise State, which was coming off a home loss against UNLV. “The key is hopefully not losing a home game, and I’d knew we’d see a great effort. They didn’t want to lose back-to-back home games.”

The new standings methodology: You get a point for every road win against the upper tier, and subtract a point for a home loss against the upper tier or a loss, no matter the venue, against the lower tier.

Plus-1: Utah State, thanks to an officiating gift of a five-point play in the final seconds to win 87-86 at UNLV. And because of the Mountain West’s unbalanced schedule, they don’t play UNLV at home or Nevada away — by far the most advantageous skipped games among the top teams. Advantage, Aggies.

Even: SDSU, Boise State, Colorado State, New Mexico and UNLV. Both the Aztecs’ losses are on the road at Boise State and New Mexico, so no blood there, but their skipped games are both against the bottom tier (at Wyoming, home against Air Force), meaning they have a harder schedule. Boise State and UNLV each have home losses but compensated with road wins against the upper tier. Colorado State needed late comebacks this week to avoid a pair of home losses against Air Force and UNLV.

Minus-2: Nevada, which lost at home to Boise State and then 98-93 at Wyoming on Saturday. Not good when you’re one of six teams fighting for what might be four NCAA Tournament berths.

“There’s always talk about the NCAA Tournament,” Boise State coach Leon Rice said. “We’re all competing to win the league, too. I’m old school that way. That means something This is a lot of fun for everybody, when you’ve got this many teams that are this good.”

2. The droughts

Dutcher kept bemoaning his team’s defense down the stretch in his post-game comments, “not getting the critical stop when we needed it.”

But the bigger issue, again, might have been on the other side of the floor.

Look at SDSU’s three worst games in terms of offensive efficiency when they’ve had Jaedon LeDee (so you throw out the 63-62 win against UC Irvine). In all three, the Aztecs scored less than one point per possession. And all three were losses: BYU, New Mexico and Boise State.

New Mexico: 89.0 points per possession.

BYU: 92.3.

Boise State: 99.6.

Now drill down further and look at what happened in those games. It wasn’t an overall flat performance, 40 minutes of blah. There were flashes of offensive productivity, and the Aztecs had leads in all three … and were inevitably doomed by a long drought.

At BYU, it was 6½ minutes without a basket in the second half. At New Mexico, it was a 17-0 Lobos run when the Aztecs went five minutes without a hoop. On Saturday, from 6:31 to 20 seconds left — no baskets.

Their overall offensive numbers were better in the loss at Grand Canyon, but there also was a 6½-minute stretch with one basket in the second half that turned a two-point game into 13.

It’s something CBS analyst Clark Kellogg, who called their games against UNLV and Boise State, has noted. The Aztecs are really, really good … except they have the nasty habit of disappearing at inopportune times.

Some of that is just basketball. There are going to be swings.

It’s just hard to absorb them against good teams on the road, when the margin of error shrinks.

“We have to work to get better at everything we do,” Dutcher said. “But to win, you have to make timely shots. That’s part of it. I was happy with how our offense functioned. I think we can get better, that’s the encouraging thing. Some of the plays we made, we can learn from and clean up.

“We know what our faults are, we’re not afraid to admit them and then we work to try to improve them.”

3. The new nemesis

When Boise State joined the Mountain West in 2011-12, the Broncos lost their first four games against SDSU and seven of the first eight.

Since then: 11-10.

In the last six games: 5-1.

In the last six at ExtraMile Arena: 6-1.

No team in the Mountain West has that imposed kind of dominance over the Aztecs, not in the past decade. Compare that to their recent record against UNLV: 21-2.

Rice unapologetically admits that when Boise State moved from the WAC, the first thing he did was look at the best team in their new conference and try to look like them. At the time, it was SDSU, coming off a 34-3 season and trip to the Sweet 16 with a long, athletic front line, a deep bench and an unglamorous commitment to defense.

“You need some athleticism out there,” he said.

They started recruiting similar players with a similar mindset, and they’ve been better in Kenpom defensive than offensive efficiency for five straight seasons now. In the last three, they’ve ranked 20^th, 28^th and 24^th.

Sound familiar?

The other similarity: A veteran coaching staff with continuity. Rice is the longest tenured head coach in the Mountain West, and he has three members of his staff with Division I head coaching experience: assistants in Tim Duryea (Utah State) and Mike Burns (Eastern Washington), and special adviser Larry Eustachy (Colorado State and three other programs).

The Broncos finally broke through against the Aztecs with a 69-63 home win in 2013. The first win at Viejas Arena came two years later.

SDSU regained the upper hand starting in 2019, winning six straight. But it’s been all Broncos since, except for a 72-52 Aztecs win at Viejas last year when Boise State was without its starting point guard.

“All those milestones are important, and they mean a lot,” Rice said Saturday. “It means a lot because we have so much respect for that program and what they’ve done and who they are and how they compete. That took every bit of competitive toughness that we’ve had.”