Welcome to the latest edition of Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. In this podcast, we cover a lot of ground.
The first subject is a big win by SMU, as they go to Wichita State and beat the Shockers. It’s another quality win for a Mustangs team that earlier in the day is probably not an NCAA Tournament team, but their profile gets a nice boost.
We continue on the theme of big road wins by going back two nights. On Monday night, both Duke and Kansas were on the ropes; both were well on their way to a road loss. Then the second half happened. Both teams rallied, with Duke knocking off Miami and Kansas finding a way to beat West Virginia not unlike how they did last year in Lawrence.
From there, we transition into the very unsettled Big Ten. At this point, we know Purdue is the class of the conference, with Ohio State also being undefeated in conference play buy the jury still out on just how good this Buckeye team is, Michigan State and Michigan following them. Beyond them is an unclear picture overall, but Purdue is the team to beat based on current play. The Boilermakers are a rarity nowadays – a high-major team full of seniors, including Vincent Edwards, who might be as valuable as any player in the country.
After that, the SEC is the subject, and there is one basic message from games thus far: don’t follow bracketologists. The SEC is so even, so competitive from top to bottom, we are likely to see bracketologists project one team or another to be in or out, or moving from one seed to another, almost daily. We saw examples of it the last couple of nights: Georgia pulls one out at surprising LSU, South Carolina beats Kentucky, Arkansas falls to 2-4 but is still a pretty good team, Alabama beats Auburn without Collin Sexton, and Missouri edged Tennessee in a matchup of good teams.
Finally, we touch on news that the NCAA seems poised to move the season-opening games up by three days. It’s a move that is really questionable at best given that the sport struggles for much of the first month or so to grab attention away from college football; right now, Saturdays are basically dead days for college basketball in November for that reason. Moving the start of the season up by a few days just seems to add to the time it has to compete with football.
We hope you enjoy this episode and share it with your fellow college basketball fans. We’ll talk again next week.
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