Welcome to the latest edition of Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. We’re about to turn the calendar over to 2019, and along with that will come the start of conference play in earnest. But first, some big non-conference games and notes.
We start by talking about Arizona State’s win over Kansas nearly a week earlier. Kansas led for most of the game, but couldn’t close the deal, so Arizona State got a big win and continued to carry the flag for the struggling Pac-12. How bad has the Pac-12 been thus far? In the NCAA’s new NET rankings, as of Friday morning the Pac-12 has just one team in the top 50 – Arizona State at No. 31. The Big Ten has 10 teams in the top 50, the ACC and SEC each have seven, the Big 12 has six and Big East has five. For good measure, the American Athletic Conference and Mountain West each have three, and even the West Coast Conference has two teams – Gonzaga and San Francisco – in the top 25.
From there, we talk about two seats that have heated up out west: UCLA and UNLV. While Steve Alford seems to be perpetually on the hot seat because it’s UCLA, while UNLV is another school where the standard is a bit higher. Marvin Menzies has a multi-year contract and is in just his third season there, but the Runnin’ Rebels are just 6-6 and as mediocre as that record suggests, though they sure didn’t look very mediocre in getting blown out by 25 by Bucknell in the third-place game in the Diamond Head Classic earlier in the week.
Speaking of the Diamond Head Classic, we talk about TCU winning the tournament and the job Jamie Dixon has done at his alma mater. It was also a good few days for Bucknell and Indiana State, with the latter being the runner-up.
The last big topic is about individual stars. In many years, the race for national Player of the Year might be a two- or three-horse race at this point, but that is not nearly the case this year. If you think more broadly about first team All-America candidates, it’s a big list, and we talk about some of those candidates.
Finally, we look ahead to some matchups, including Kentucky-Louisville and how that grabs all the attention in the state of Kentucky for one day.
We hope you enjoy the podcast and share it with your fellow college basketball fans. Be sure to tune in soon for our next one as we continue to talk about college basketball.
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