Your Home For College Hoops
Sunday, December 22, 2024
A battle for second place was easily the best of the big TV games on the night, with the winning team getting a big boost from an emerging role player. Plus a mismatch in the Big 12, a clear leader in the Patriot League, and a Cyclone is done for the season and perhaps his college career.
At first, the results were concerning, but the bottom is falling out of a Pac-12 favorite’s season. Plus home teams win again in the Big Ten, a very tight race in one mid-major almost got even tighter, and a Buckeye will be out to deal with an important matter off the court.
Experienced but very small, Montana and its terrific backcourt played through a key injury to own the Big Sky for the second straight year
So much for any talk about one team possibly going undefeated, and given that their conference is better than some think despite its downward trend, there are teams capable of beating them anyway. Plus no surprises in one big conference, while it was a good day to be a road team in another, and a mild surprise in an academic league opener.
It’s been an eventful season for Texas A&M. Too eventful, in some ways. And yet, the Aggies keep on winning.
Notes from around college basketball as we close out November and enter the season’s quiet stretch in December:
The PK80 Invitational was all we could have hoped for, especially at the very end. Plus more tournaments end, including others with late runs by the winners, and might we see the return of a player we thought we would only see a few minutes of?
If Friday’s open of the college basketball season was a celebration (even if an unsatisfying one, with its smorgasbord of lousy guarantee games and non-Division I opponents), then Saturday must’ve been the hangover. At the least, the second day of the season is a reality check. It’s a reminder of not only how poorly college hoops starts its year, but also how a current attempt to address it gets it all wrong.
Returning all five starters, North Dakota leaped from fifth in the Big Sky to first, winning conference regular season and tourney championships that culminated with a first-ever NCAA Division I Tournament appearance.
In our latest podcast, we look at a marathon game from Tuesday night, which came just days after a wild Saturday. Then we have more on the SEC and Big 12, before one of Saturday’s big games leads us into talk about smaller conferences and television coverage.
