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Thursday, November 21, 2024
For one night at least, it felt like the 1990s or even the early 2000s in Winston-Salem. Plus the Spartans rally to take over second, the Aztecs and Sooners bounce back, and the Titans won’t be in any postseason play this year despite their best efforts.
Road wins were hard to come by in the Big Ten until Friday night, when it suddenly became a good night to be a road team, especially one surging team in particular. Plus two teams go in different directions in the Big East, a stunning rally ends with a buzzer-beater in the MAAC, and better news out of Miami concerning a coach.
The Horizon League through some rocky times has seen a pair of programs emerge as its best, and Northern Kentucky and Wright State engaged in a good league race in 2018-19 with the Norse making their second NCAA trip in three years.
Conference play is here in earnest now, and it couldn’t come soon enough. The ACC, Southern Conference and WCC offered some glimpses of where we’ll see it at its best over the next two months.
Continuing our look at every conference before the season, this Sunday we check in on the Patriot League, SEC, Southern, Southland and SWAC. Plus, more exhibition results including close shaves for Colorado, Detroit Mercy, Illinois State and Rider.
For a host of reasons, these are dark times right now for the Horizon League. And the 2017-18 season may have been rock bottom.
Happy Thanksgiving. While the Battle 4 Atlantis has been one of the premier early season tourneys in recent years, this year’s event looked very top-loaded. Thursday proved otherwise.
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.
The 2016-17 season continued a run of a bumpy couple of years for the Horizon League, with more than its share of changes and challenges.
We’re well past the turn of the new year now, settled firmly into conference play, and around-the-clock talk of bracketology and Joe Lunardi on ESPN 25 hours a day is just around the corner (in the rare case with that network, this is not a bad thing-there’s never enough of affable Joe in February and March). Here are some notes from around college basketball:
