C-USA Championship Notebook | C-USA Rd 1 Pairings/Tee Times | C-USA Rd 1 Pairings/Tee Times (HTML)

RUSTON, La. - When Louisiana Tech opens the Conference USA Golf Championship Sunday at the Texarkana Country Club, it will need to both defy and live up to expectations to have a chance to bring home any sort of hardware.

As a team the Bulldogs will need to defy the expectations in order to reach the four-team match play portion that begins Wednesday as Tech enters the tournament ranked sixth out of the league's 13 teams (FIU does not field a men's golf program).

But to do that, it must have the league's top-ranked individual in Bulldog junior Victor Lange play as he has most the season. Lange has carded an average round of 71.27 this year and has spent the majority of the season ranked approximately 20 spots ahead of any other C-USA golfer in the national rankings released weekly by GolfStat.com.

Conference USA will become the first Division I league to institute a match play format to determine its team champion, which comes with an automatic bid to the NCAA Regionals. Following 54 holes of stroke play over three days beginning on Sunday, the top four teams will enter a match play format Wednesday with the semifinal round in the morning followed by the finals in the afternoon in a manner that mimics the NCAA Championship format (although the NCAA format involves eight teams in match play).

A top four finish and place in the match play format would mark LA Tech's best conference finish since 2011 but despite a trio of top-three finishes throughout the regular season including a team win at the Memphis Intercollegiate last September, the Bulldogs will need to jump at least two teams ranked above them to reach the top four. Ranked sixth in the league, Louisiana Tech has an 0-6 record this season against three of the five the C-USA teams ahead of the Bulldogs (Tech has not faced Charlotte or UTEP this season).

The Bulldogs will be paired with Southern Miss when play begins Sunday, a team Tech is very familiar with. Through 10 tournaments this season, Louisiana Tech has faced Southern Miss more than any other team and has compiled a 5-1 record against the Golden Eagles. The two teams will tee off the No. 1 hole at 8 a.m. CT.

Lange leads LA Tech and Conference USA with a 71.27 average this season, a mark that has helped him to a No. 76 national ranking and in strong contention for an NCAA Regional bid as an individual should the team not be selected. The Johannesburg, South Africa native has had a strong season in a league of talented golfers as C-USA has six individuals ranked in the top 250 in the nation.

Last season Lange finished tied for fourth at the Conference USA Championship with a 3-over-par performance at Oak Tree Country Club. He enters this week's competition having never finished outside the top five at a conference championship event after placing fifth at the 2013 WAC Championship his freshman season. He was honored by the Conference USA office earlier this week, named as one of five golfers to the league's All-Academic Team.

A strong performance by Lange could also make the junior Louisiana Tech's first individual conference champion since John Dowdall was the Southland Conference individual champion in 1980. Dowdall won the Southland title by carding a 218 (77-69-72=218) in the 54-hole event.

Ben Robinson's 74.0 average on the year is the next best on a young team that only has two players competing this week with conference postseason experience. The other three Bulldogs making the trip - Mitchell Haddox, Jake Pritchard and John Lewis Sams - are all making their first conference championship appearance. A strong performance by any or all of those three could not only mean good things for this year's tournament but also for the next few years of C-USA Championship play.

Robinson enters with a 2-over-par average while Haddox and Sams have a 3-over-par average on the year. Pritchard is averaging 7-over-par this season but has improved his score relative to par by at least four strokes with each succeeding tournament this season.

The par-72, 6,869-yard Texarkana Country Club, located a little over a two hour drive from Louisiana Tech's Ruston campus, is the closest the Bulldogs have played in a conference championship event since hosting the Western Athletic Conference Championship at Squire Creek Country Club in 2005. WAC Championships held in 2006 to 2013 were held in the Mountain or Pacific Time Zones while the 2014 C-USA Championship was in Edmond, Okla.

Live scoring for the entire Conference USA Championship will be available at GolfStat.com.

For complete coverage of Bulldog Golf, please follow @LATechGolf on Twitter or visit the official home of Louisiana Tech Athletics at LATechSports.com.