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Sunday, December 22, 2024
Even acknowledging that it took some time for the Badgers to find their way under him (remember, the team was 2-4 in his first six games), what Greg Gard has done righting a previously middling team at Wisconsin deserves serious notice, to the point where it’s hard to imagine many others could’ve done it better this year.
February can be over any day now. After all that happened on a deliciously eventful Wednesday night, we’re sufficiently primed and ready for March, and the best month on the sports calendar can’t get here soon enough.
Looking around the country with our weekly notebook, checking in on the Atlantic 10, Wisconsin, Siena, Louisiana-Lafayette and others.
Has a relatively new conference already seen its best days? Plus a dramatic win for the Bonnies, an overtime thriller in the CAA, and the only real surprise comes from another mid-major conference.
Among all the oddities of this college basketball season, when all is said and done there will be few harder to explain than this: a game between Illinois and Rutgers may go down as one of the best and most entertaining games of the entire year.
It’s not just the big games a team wins; it’s how they play in the games immediately after, as well as in games throughout the season that they aren’t expected to lose. In that regard, Saturday was not a good day for a few teams who have had some big moments this year.
Clemson has a good coach in Brad Brownell, has had him for six years in fact. Brownell won big at previous jobs at UNC-Wilmington and Wright State and has won nearly 62% of games in his career. Still, the sad truth is many might consider Brownell lucky to still be the coach at Clemson.
We continue our look at our favorite games for every day of the season, our ultimate dream road trip through an entire college basketball season. We started on Monday with November, continued with December on Tuesday, and today we move into January:
The Atlantic 10 couldn’t match the success of the prior season, but there’s no shame in that considering it was a tough act to follow. Going forward, it appears to be a bit of a mixed bag.
A busy Friday included two conference tournaments at two sites for Ray Floriani, and he takes us through it all from start to finish.
