Your Home For College Hoops
Monday, November 4, 2024
With the ancient Great Alaska Shootout at its end with its 40th and final edition later this week, the Maui Invitational soon will move to a role in college basketball as not just the sport’s best in-season tournament, but also its oldest among eight-team tourneys.
By now there should be no surprise to it anymore, but that doesn’t make it any less notable just what a job Texas-Arlington has done in becoming one of college basketball’s most impressive road teams.
The Mid-American Conference in 2016-17 looked a lot like the Mid-American Conference in 2015-16, with big men, Akron, and a conference tourney upset among the storylines.
Depending on how one wants to look at it, the Mid-American Conference in 2015-16 again fit into its seemingly perpetual niche as a good-but-not-great league, or is teetering on a breakthrough. Take your pick.
Going into the 2015-16 season, we wanted to highlight what we see as the best game of the day, for every day of the regular season. The games we would go to every day, if we could.
Brad Stevens and Shaka Smart once seemed they might be long-tenured at their schools when both were consistently spurning numerous job offers despite repeated opportunities to move on to bigger (paying) things. A couple years later, though, both are gone now to new challenges.
Doubleheaders at Madison Square Garden are as much a part of the fabric of college basketball as the ball itself or Bill Raftery. There is nothing better, and only a few things that even compare.
No more are the days when, in projecting the best teams in the Mid-American Conference, one could eliminate half the deck before even starting their breakdown.
