Your Home For College Hoops
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
A quick look at key results and/or top stories from the night before, as well as a look ahead to key games during the season, to lead a reader into the new day
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.
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.
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.
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.
With November turning to December, we’re on what is easily the quietest month of the college basketball season. There are good reasons for that, of course (final exams) and not so good ones (far, far too many guarantee games).
Texas caps off a great month, plus a key Husky is injured, two more tournaments crown a champion, and a couple of team remain undefeated.
As part of this weekend’s big kick off to the Christmas shopping season, yesterday was dubbed Small Business Saturday across the country. The basketball schedule for the day might have qualified under that designation, as few of the biggest names were in action, in part because the big holiday tourneys ended a few days ago. What the day may have lacked in big names, though, it did not lack for stories.
