Your Home For College Hoops
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Notre Dame may have already lost any slim hope of an at-large bid, but a loss like Wednesday night’s is tough to stomach all the same. Plus the Flyers cruise on the road, the Wildcats can still win again, and some Tigers are going in the wrong direction as the regular season winds down.
It was another very solid year for the unsung WAC, which continued its comeback with seven teams going to the postseason. One member still loomed large over the rest, though: New Mexico State.
Quiet as it’s been kept amid constant questions of its future, the WAC has become a solid basketball conference, and that was especially the case this past season.
For those who couldn’t resist all the curling and skiing at the Winter Olympics and watched hoops, it was yet another evening of highly ranked teams going down and streaks getting busted, something that has become the norm this year. The TV window of games that started at 7 p.m. Eastern time alone was enough to wear out the remote control as they came to an end.
By now there should be no surprise to it anymore, but that doesn’t make it any less notable just what a job Texas-Arlington has done in becoming one of college basketball’s most impressive road teams.
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:
It doesn’t matter how realistic television sets get, or how much fun it might be to follow social media feeds during a sporting event. There is no substitution for being there. And never will be. With that, we present our ultimate road trip for the season if we could have one.
If ever there’s a league that deserves to gloat a little bit, it’s the Western Athletic Conference, the once-proud league that has struggled to survive in recent years but fought back with a very nice 2016-17 season.
You can collect the votes right now, and probably don’t even need to count them, the choice is so obvious. In a stunning upset, the winner for the breakout performance by a conference (non-NCAA Tournament edition) goes to the Western Athletic Conference.
Friday brought us a day full of drama and decisiveness, great games and important results all the way around. We also saw one team continue to remind us that they can make a big run later this month.
