Let’s start with basketball.
Kentucky’s Statement
Kentucky went to Lawrence on Saturday and, in the Big 12/SEC Challenge’s headliner, throttled Kansas, beating the Jayhawks 80-62 in a game exactly as close as that score indicates. It was a powerful showing from the Cats, and if you want to raise them from our “National Championship Possibility” category to our “National Championship Contender” category, go right ahead. We’ve been saying they’re the best team in the SEC, and they keep showing it. Just not when they went to Auburn.
Should Baylor Be Concerned?
In the Big 12 and SEC’s next-best game, Baylor lost by nine in Tuscaloosa. It was their third loss in six games, and when they nearly fell at home to West Virginia last night, alarm bells went off.
It’s fair to be alarmed. While Baylor’s still the pretty clear favorite to land the top overall seed (Auburn should wilt, at least a bit, and Gonzaga won’t have the beef on the résumé Baylor will have if they do what’s expected and win the Big 12, both regular season and tournament), they’re also pretty clearly not the best team. Gonzaga looks like they’d be favored by two or three right now on a neutral court, and against Kentucky or Arizona or another handful of schools, Baylor might not be favored. Good place to slide to, but you would prefer not to slide.
Jaden Ivey’s Shouldn’t-Have-Been-Necessary Heroics
Purdue’s game Sunday was an odd one. The Boilermakers led by twenty with 14:35 on the clock, and by double digits inside of the three-minute mark. They needed a remarkable shot by their sophomore to escape with the win over Ohio State. Add in that all of this happened on their home court, and 37 minutes of a great performance turned into a cause for concern.
Some of this is silly. Had Purdue played Ohio State tight the whole way and won in a thriller, we might be celebrating their third straight win as an indicator they’ve returned to the top ranks. But at the same time…that defense is porous. Porous, porous, porous. And Purdue nearly got burned in a terrible way.
Revisiting the Categories
Where does that leave our categories? I’d place the top two as follows:
National Championship Contenders
- Gonzaga (whooped Portland on Saturday, plays at San Diego and BYU this week and weekend)
- Baylor (doesn’t play again until Saturday’s trip to Lawrence)
- Kentucky (hosts Vanderbilt tomorrow, goes to Alabama on Saturday)
- Arizona (beat ASU on Saturday, hosts UCLA and USC [!!] this week/weekend)
National Championship Possibilities
- Auburn (smoked Oklahoma on Saturday, host Alabama tonight)
- Houston (yawning through the AAC)
- Villanova (beat St. John’s on Saturday, visit Marquette tomorrow)
- Purdue (visit Minnesota tomorrow, host Michigan on Saturday)
- UCLA (beat Stanford on Saturday, visit the Arizonas this week)
- Duke (beat Louisville and Notre Dame on the road Saturday/Monday, visit UNC this weekend)
- Kansas (visit Iowa State tonight)
- Illinois (won at Northwestern on Saturday, host Wisconsin and visit Indiana this week/weekend, Kofi Cockburn is back)
Texas Tech, with a win tonight, might be worthy of inclusion in that second category. Alabama, with a win tonight, would at least merit consideration. The other teams hanging around that space, though…it’s not an inspiring crew. Maybe some of this is eyewash—Tennessee, LSU, and Texas are all painful to watch, and UConn hasn’t gotten to play a tournament team since January 8th—but some of it is just that this is where the national landscape lies. These categories are going to be somewhat arbitrary. We’re drawing lines in a gradient slope. But they help with conceptualizing things.
Iowa State Hosts Kansas
Do the Cyclones need a win? No. They took care of business against Missouri on Saturday after a spotty first half, they’re projecting to finish the season as a 6-seed and they’re KenPom underdogs tonight, this would be a great win but it would neither lock them into the tournament nor lock them into other goals, like finishing Big 12 play at .500 in-league. There will be work to do after tonight regardless.
That said, with Ochai Agbaji (Covid protocols) and Remy Martin (that knee injury) both out tonight, this is one the Cyclones really ought to win. Doing that would wipe a lot of the bad taste out from the trip to Lawrence, would pull the Cyclones within a good weekend of moving into the league’s top half (TCU’s currently the unexpected one in the way), and would be a hell of a time. Hilton should be rocking. It’s a fun situation.
Kansas, as we saw in Lawrence, is turnover-prone. Their defense borders on impotent. Iowa State has plenty of its own problems—it makes Kansas look like Fort Knox when it comes to holding onto the ball, it struggles to make anything beyond the arc, it struggles inside the arc too but thankfully not as badly—but the matchups are there, and if George Conditt can do something heroic against David McCormack…
Something that hasn’t gotten a ton of attention but is also mildly self-evident is ISU’s reliance on Tyrese Hunter playing well. In games in which Hunter’s offensive rating, on KenPom, is at or above 100 (average), the Cyclones are 10-1, and 4-1 against teams around and above the NIT level (basically, as good as Memphis or better). When Hunter’s below that mark, the Cyclones are just 6-4, and 3-4 against competitive opponents. Since so much of Hunter’s impact is felt in assists and turnovers, those are the pieces to watch tonight. If he’s moving the ball effectively, like he did on Saturday, and protecting the ball effectively, like he did on Saturday, the offense is likely clicking. If he’s coughing it up four or five or six times, like he’s done in over half the Big 12 games, it’s going to be tough to win.
My perception is that Hunter keeps getting better on the offensive end as the season goes on, with his defense excellent the whole way through. So, that’s a good sign.
Tip’s at 6:00 CST on ESPN.
Other Basketball Tonight
The other big ones tonight are…
Alabama’s trip to Auburn, where the Tide are still trying to prove they can play like Saturday consistently (these guys have beaten Gonzaga and Baylor each by nine, but lost to Mizzou and Georgia and Iona and Memphis and etc. etc. etc.) and the Tigers are trying to get people like me to take them seriously.
And…
Texas’s trip to Texas Tech, where the atmosphere is expected to be college basketball’s most raucous of the season, and I watched the end of Colorado State/Wyoming last night.
Those both tip at 8:00, on ESPN and ESPN2, so if you’re a one-stream household like someone writing this is, at least it’s quick to flip between them.
Caleb Williams to USC, National Signing Day Tomorrow
Caleb Williams will join Lincoln Riley out west, where USC might be on the rise and also might have a long, long way to go. Transfers can help a ton, but the cupboard was left pretty dry there.
On that note, the second edition of National Signing Day is tomorrow. It’s significant, but no matter how it goes on the Iowa State side, the takeaway from the recruiting season is going to be that it was the best recruiting season ever for the football team in Ames…ever? At least in a long time. Given how well the program has played under Matt Campbell with slightly more mediocre recruiting, this bodes well for the long-term hopes.
Cubs, Have a Season Please
Finally, one request to the Cubs: Please have a season. We bought season tickets yesterday. We went in with a friend, so we’re going to draft the games to split them up. It will be a lot of fun if there’s a full schedule of games to work with. So, for this and all the other reasons, please end the lockout, Major League Baseball. We want to watch you play.
