National Championship tonight, lot of basketball over the weekend, let’s hit it:
Yes, Georgia’s Probably Better
I wrote more about this (and the national championship as a whole) earlier today, but Vegas odds are your best predictive bet, so if they say Georgia’s better than Alabama, believe them. Georgia’s a narrow favorite tonight, and deservedly so, based on their whole body of work. You’d be forgiven, though, for trusting the Tide, and you may well be right. We’ll see. We’ll always see. Click that link for more thoughts.
What the Duke?
Far and away the biggest news of the college basketball weekend was Duke falling at home to Miami. Miami. Miami, who holds losses to UCF and Dayton and Alabama by 32 and, until Saturday, hadn’t beaten a single team comfortably expected to make the NCAA Tournament.
For the Hurricanes, it’s mostly fun. They do have a bubble shot, and their offense is legitimately good, but their defense should catch up to them eventually, even in this year’s atrocious ACC. It’s the kind of league where you can rack up medium-quality wins, and grab attainable good wins here and there, but also one primed for disastrous losses. Miami still has to go to Georgia Tech, Pitt, and Boston College, and they still have to host Georgia Tech. Expecting them to split those games isn’t the most unfair thing in the world. Still, very fun, and who knows? Maybe they’ll rattle off a few more and the committee won’t trust its numbers and will let in anyone who gets an ACC double-bye.
For Duke, the message is clearer: This is not a national championship caliber team. They could still win it—you don’t have to be the best team in the country to win the national championship—but unless Miami really does wind up being loads and loads better than we thought, Duke’s just another good team, a team in the Kentucky/LSU realm rather than the Baylor realm or even the Gonzaga/Purdue/Arizona realm. (Yeah, the Blue Devils beat the Zags, but they also lost to Miami so if we’re boiling it down to one game, why look at only the best one?)
Undefeated Down
Colorado State fell to San Diego State in a thrashing on Saturday, leaving just Baylor and USC undefeated. USC beat Cal on Thursday night on the road in their return from a long, long holiday break. They’ve got a nice little runway here if the schedule doesn’t change, playing eight straight against teams at the NIT level and below (and only one against a team actually playing at an NIT level, and that game at home) before they go to Arizona on February 5th. Still, Baylor might be the last undefeated when all’s said and done. The Bears are that good.
Bama, Kansas Lose
These are getting lumped together because they were of comparable note, but Kansas’s loss at Texas Tech was far less damaging than Alabama’s at Mizzou. That Kansas loss was rougher than it looks (Texas Tech’s still pretty shorthanded), but losing at Mizzou…yikes. Much like Arkansas (who we aren’t even talking about anymore), Alabama’s reputation might have gotten a little too far out ahead of it. That, or they were looking ahead to tomorrow night’s massive one against Auburn in Tuscaloosa. Maybe a bit of both.
Missed Chance for the Cyclones
It’s never good to let an eleven-point lead slip away, even if winning this would have fallen under the “stealing one” category for Iowa State. Still, positives are out there. The offense had one of its best games of the year, adjusting for opponent quality and points per possession and all that, and it was largely on the back of Tyrese Hunter, who despite turning the ball over four times had a fairly efficient day with a massive usage rate. You don’t want to ask Hunter to do that often—it isn’t his strength—but if he can do it here and there and take some pressure off Izaiah Brockington, it’ll pay dividends for an offense still finding its way. (On a similar note, it was good to see Tre Jackson get some run and hit some shots—having him as a weapon in some capacity on offense could really help the flow.)
On the defensive end, it was a rough day, but there are some pieces that were probably aberrational, like Oklahoma hitting seven of twelve threes (miss two more of those and it’s 1. still a great shooting day and 2. suddenly just a seven-point margin, which starts putting it within range). It’s too bad the Cyclones couldn’t take advantage of the Sooners’ normally sky-high turnover rate, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. Still in a good spot so far in league play, and really just need one win in these next three—Kansas (A), Texas (H), Texas Tech (A)—to still be in good shape for finishing .500 in the Big 12, making the NCAA Tournament at a 10-seed or higher, all those other attainable goals.
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Tonight’s all about college football, for the last time of the year. Enjoy it. It’s the tightest spread for a National Championship that we’ve seen in the Playoff era.
