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Sunday, December 22, 2024
As conference tournaments get into full swing, the Mountain West takes center stage with its share of drama, including a shocker to end the day. Plus the Huskies get a big win to affect the top of their conference race, the Pac-12 is down to two for its regular season crown, and the Eagles soar above their competitors to control their own destiny in the Big Sky.
The Pac-12 has much to be settled, but two relative surprises among the top three after Thursday night. Plus a big rally shakes up the top in one mid-major, the Hawkeyes take care of business at home, and a coach gets a show-cause penalty.
Cincinnati won a big road game that by all rights, they should have lost, including what happened before the game. Plus the tight race continues out west, a new leader in the CAA, and now there’s no mystery in a couple of recent Big Ten stories.
It was a special year for the Ohio Valley Conference, which put two teams in the NCAA Tournament and had a rare crop of individual talent led by a superlative performer who even got ESPN’s attention.
Nick Mayo went from a place that is decidedly not a hotbed of basketball to carve out a clear place in Ohio Valley Conference history. It was an unlikely result for a young man from an unlikely place to produce a historic basketball player.
On what will be one of the lightest Saturdays of the season, a buzzer-beating shocker in Charlotte stands out. Plus a couple of Mountain West teams lose openers at home, some big individual performances, and wild fires cause one game to be postponed.
The program that has dominated the Ohio Valley for so long returned to prominence – and the NCAA Tournament – in a nice 2017-18 season.
We may not be in March just yet, but there’s no better notice that it’s just around the corner than the first college hoops conference tournament tipping off. The Atlantic Sun sat in the pole position for this season, the first of 32 tournaments to get underway Monday night already, nearly two weeks before Selection Sunday.
The first three days of the college basketball season have been largely uneventful, not surprising when schedules are littered with endless guarantee games and schools seemingly have little interest in even playing at all so early in November. Here are some quick-hit notes looking around the country after the first weekend of regular season hoops:
Belmont again proved why it’s one of the model programs in the country, while Jacksonville State made a surprising rise in the postseason in the Ohio Valley Conference in 2016-17.
