Welcome to the latest edition of Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. The calendar has turned over into 2018 and conference play is upon us. We have some early thoughts on that and much more.
We begin with the big game of the night and one of the best individual performances in Big East history. Marquette traveled to Providence and came away with a 95-90 overtime victory behind a record-tying scoring game by sophomore Markus Howard. We talk more about the game in detail here as well.
We then talk about last Saturday, where the final three teams that had not yet lost a game all went down on the same day. It left no undefeated teams as the calendar flipped over to 2018. Villanova lost to a hot-shooting Butler team, TCU lost a close one to Trae Young and Oklahoma, and Arizona State lost to arch-rival Arizona.
The next subject is the big loss that Notre Dame suffered recently, as Bonzie Colson went down with a left foot fracture that will keep him out of action for about eight weeks. That means they will be without a national Player of the Year candidate for most of ACC play, and given their questions up front, it’s a big test. They likely need to play smaller, while also having someone emerge among their other frontcourt players.
Staying in the ACC, we look at Florida State, who had two great efforts in a row against the bluebloods of the conference. They gave Duke all they could handle at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday in a very entertaining game, but lost a close one. They repeated the effort on Wednesday night and picked up a win over North Carolina despite missing several free throws in the final minute. The Seminoles are once again a force despite having to replace some key players off last season’s team, as Leonard Hamilton continues to do a great job.
We talk a little more about the ACC, including the job Brad Brownell is doing at Clemson, before moving on to the stacked Big 12. Once again, the conference looks terrific from top to bottom, but the bigger story is that Kansas looks very vulnerable, especially after losing at home to Texas Tech. The Jayhawks have done the unthinkable this year: they have lost three games at Allen Fieldhouse, something that often doesn’t happen over two or three seasons.
In closing, we look ahead to this weekend, which has some good matchups to check out all across the board but especially in the SEC.
We hope you share this with your fellow college basketball fans, and stay tuned for our next one coming soon.
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