Your Home For College Hoops
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
A prevailing theme over the last week or so of college basketball games has been resilience. Just when some may have thought they were down and maybe even wanted to count them out on various levels, a number of teams have made some real statements in the past week in their next games following poor performances. We saw it again Monday night as Florida played easily its best game of the year to rout Yale 85-47.
Dunk City appears to be more than just a passing phenomenon, and that’s not all that’s happening in the Atlantic Sun. Plus a few ranked teams breeze, and the MAAC has some surprise leaders early on.
We look back at quite a day of basketball, highlighted by early upsets and then some good matchups, plus a few sneaky-good wins for some teams on a busy day.
The independents are dead. Long live the independents. NJIT’s 72-70 win at Michigan will go down as the biggest upset of this season and one of the biggest in a long time. This one is going to remembered for a long, long time.
Boston College scored a nice win over Providence in a well-contested battle. It’s the kind of win that should boost the Eagles not only from a quality win standpoint, but also confidence and in terms of playing how they have to play to win.
The SEC/Big 12 Challenge takes over, with one matchup getting a lot of attention, while tough times continue for the American Athletic Conference and a MAAC favorite. And we’ve got some rivalry games ahead.
St. John’s got to the championship game in the NIT Season Tip-Off and battled back to have a chance at the end, but came up short. It was nonetheless a positive experience for them.
What looked like it should’ve been the game of the night wasn’t much of a game at all. Iowa State sometimes gets on those offensive runs at home when it looks like one of the top five teams in the country, and the Cyclones did it Thursday night in a 95-77 win over Arkansas. A game that looked to have a ton of promise coming in was never really close, and the Razorbacks were tagged with their first loss in seven games.
This introduction was going to be about one of the most anticipated games of the year so far, as Duke and Wisconsin squared off in a battle between top 5 teams, Final Four contenders and legendary coaches. That changed after midnight here in the Central time zone after watching Wichita State face Utah in what was maybe the second-most anticipated game of at least the night, anyway.
Ah, it’s started already. We’re still a couple weeks away from final exams for most schools, a time when especially it seems like highly favored schools need to pay a little extra attention in games that they should win easily. But we saw several teams have more trouble than expected in games Tuesday night that all expected to be blowouts.
