Your Home For College Hoops
Sunday, December 22, 2024
With the NCAA Tournament now on recess for a few days, the coaching merry-go-round is starting to spin again. Monday saw several vacancies filled, more created and rumors of still more to possibly come. The biggest moves both came in the Big 12, where TCU hired former Pittsburgh coach Jamie Dixon and Oklahoma State landed Stephen F. Austin’s Brad Underwood.
The improbable continues to happen as the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is in the books. Plus the ACC dominates the Sweet 16, some more coaching news, and no surprise at an early NBA Draft entrant.
It turns out people do appreciate the National Invitation Tournament after all, far more than universally assumed. All it took was a little postseason saturation-the same thing that college football somehow seems immune to.
The new-look Selection Show wasn’t exactly a hit with viewers on top of the selections themselves. Plus three other tournament fields come out, one conference commissioner isn’t happy, and coaching changes continue.
In an ultracompetitive league where four teams finished tied for fourth place, third through eighth were separated by three games and no less than six teams had winning streaks of at least five games in conference play, it’s the team that went 0-9 on the road in conference play and finished ninth overall that is the tournament champion.
Merry Christmas! The holidays once belonged to college basketball, and in particular tournament play. Here’s hoping what has gone around comes back around again.
Light nights during the college basketball season offer the opportunity to check in on games and matchups that might slip through the cracks on busier days of the week, such as the series between North Dakota and North Dakota State that has been played nearly 300 times.
The unbeaten toppled over one-by-one on Saturday. About all you can say about this is: welcome to conference play.
In a long-running rivalry that has been lopsided of late, San Francisco and St. Mary’s provided a little bit of a stir at the finish of their game Monday night.
On Christmas Eve, we share some weekly thoughts from following the nation in college basketball:
