College Hoops Wrap-up 12/13/2021
With college football season nearly in the rearview mirror (besides the bowl games), it was nice to be able to focus almost exclusively on basketballt his past weekend. There were a number of games on Saturday and Sunday. I feel like at one point there a couple of Friday games as well, but I am not seeing results from them now, so either they got pushed, or the teams playing in them fell out of the top 25.
At first glance, it looks like it was a pretty exciting weekend of basketball. Let's dig into it.
While most of the Big 10 started early conference play, there were a handful of teams who had games outside the conference. Unranked Nebraska was one of them and they took a pretty hard loss against #18 Auburn. It was a 31 point deficit, ouch! There were three upsets on Saturday, the first being unranked Creighton over #24 BYU. That one doesn't shock me too much, I feel like Creighton has played the spoiler in the past.
Not to be outdone, unranked Oklahoma took down #12 Arkansas by a pretty big margin (22 points). Finally, unranked Notre Dame beat #10 Kentucky in the biggest upset of the day (based on ranking) on Saturday.
Most of the other games on Saturday were pretty run of the mill except maybe the #14 Houston game versus #9 Alabama. That game was decided by a single point.
Michigan State played a really good game against Penn State. As I have said before, Michigan State has been plagued by turnovers (15+ per game average), so you never quite know which team you are going to get or what the outcome might be. Thankfully, they were able to play pretty smoothly and the game was not much of a contest for them.
One of the things that commentators and Izzo always seem to talk about this year is the fact that there isn't one single stand out player on the team. It seems that they all have their bright moments and pretty much every game a different one of them goes off for a ton of points. In my opinion that is a good thing and I think it speaks to the depth this team has. I really hope they can hold things together come tournament time.
My nephew had a fourth grade game this weekend, so my wife and I made the drive down to check that out. It is funny watching them when they are that young. It is more like watching feral cats sometimes than watching basketball because they are just all over the place.
It is recreation league though, so you really can't expect too much from them. My wife played basketball all through high school and it is funny listenting to hear yell at them telling them what to do or what they should be doing. The rec teams have coaches, but they are high school players and they mostly just stand around and watch without interacting much.
I really think my wife would be an awesome coach one day, if she ever decided she wanted to.
On Sunday, there were seven top 25 games with only one of them ending in a upset. Unranked Maryland took donw #20 Florida by two points. I have a feeling Maryland probably won't be out of the top 25 for long this season. They tend to be a pretty good basketball school historically. Purdue who suffered that huge loss to Rutgers last week was able to beat North Carolina State, but it took an overtime to do it.
That has to be a little concerning for the Boilermaker fans out there.
The game against Washington and Gonzaga (now #5) was cancelled.
I'd just like to point out the fact that the final score of the Jackson State/(17) Iowa State game was 37 to 47. That is an incredibly low scoring game!
In addition to that, the final score of the #6 Villanova/ #2 Baylor game was 36 to 57. Another low scoring game. Either their defense was really on point, or their shooters were ice cold. I didn't watch it, so I can't tell you.
I think it is also important to point out that unranked Minnesota beat unranked Michigan by a good ten points on Saturday. What a long fall it has been from the #4 ranking the Wolverines had at the beginning of the season...
Sadly, I don't get to watch much Michigan State basketball over the next week or two. They have eleven days off since they had such a tough schedule up to this point. While other teams are playing more of those cupcake games before conference play official starts, I hope the Spartans can take this time to shore up some of their problem areas (like turnovers!).
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Insane defense on both sides. The field goal % was atrocious for both. Neither team let up more than 10 free throw attempts to the other.
The frustration was enough to cause technical fouls on both sides.
Baylor might go deep this year with that sort of performance.
Ah, thanks for the analysis! I will keep that in mind about Baylor when I am filling out my bracket!
Due to work obligations I missed all the games this week. Thanks for the recap!
Glad I could help out! Maybe you will get to catch some over the holidays!