I’m happy.
It’s a Cyclone State
After Iowa State’s women’s basketball team held off Iowa’s on Wednesday night, the men’s team welcomed their rivals to Ames yesterday evening and promptly pummeled them. Ran them off the floor. Embarrassed them thoroughly. I don’t like talking about last year, but I’m curious how it feels to be so thoroughly beaten by a team that won only two games in 2020-21. Wouldn’t know, personally.
Izaiah Brockington was effectively flawless, especially early. Tyrese Hunter did all sorts of good things. Aljaž Kunc had some big minutes filling in for George Conditt, who was sidelined a lot with foul trouble. The team didn’t shoot all that well, and they turned the ball over a good amount, but they locked the Hawks down on defense and destroyed them on the boards, winning the rebound battle 50-32 and outrebounding them on the Hawkeyes’ own defensive end, which is quite the feat against any Division I basketball opponent. We’ve been cautious with how we’ve talked about this team, and caution is still deserved (KenPom currently only has the Cyclones favored twice in the month of January), but they’re in the tournament picture, and not the tournament picture we originally hoped for. They’re in the NCAA Tournament picture.
How do they get there? A pretty rough guess is to win more than twenty games. To do that, they’ll need to win these next three (which they should), win that last nonconference game against Mizzou in the Big 12/SEC Challenge, then win eight Big 12 games in the regular season and the tournament. Four of those should come against Kansas State and TCU, which makes hitting the mark potentially as simple as winning all three home games against the Oklahomas and West Virginia before taking care of K-State or TCU again in Kansas City. That’s manageable. Making the tournament is manageable. A bigger goal? Get to .500 in the Big 12. Finish in the top half of the league. Enter the tournament a first-round favorite.
What a start to the T.J. Otzelberger era. Keep the foot on the gas, most immediately Sunday against Jackson State.
Down Goes Purdue – Who Steps Up?
Nationally, the big news of the night was Rutgers upsetting Purdue on a near-half-court shot at the buzzer by Ron Harper Jr. The waters are further muddied towards the top of the country, and while reason (also called “KenPom”) tells us Gonzaga, Purdue, and Baylor are probably the three best teams, we’ve now seen rather bad versions of those first two. This is not the Rutgers of the last couple years. This Rutgers has a home loss to Lafayette on their team sheet already. This Rutgers just lost by 35 at Illinois and it wasn’t surprising in the slightest. This was a bad loss for the Boilermakers, even on the road. Questions abound.
This is fun, in a way. Having ten or twelve teams in the mix for one-seeds is fun. The race may winnow, the race will ebb and flow, but we’re in a fun place with this uncertainty, especially with the relevant teams coming from all over the country and playing each other so often in nonconference games. Just this weekend, we have Arizona visiting Illinois tomorrow in the early evening, Houston visiting Alabama tomorrow late at night, and Villanova going to Waco to play Baylor on Sunday afternoon. That’s five or six potential one-seeds playing cross-country games on a December weekend. Great work, schedulers.
Other College Basketball Notes
Plenty more good games this weekend, but two of note: Kentucky visits Notre Dame tomorrow afternoon, and Wisconsin goes to Ohio State earlier in the day. For Kentucky, it’s the first challenge since their opening-night loss to Duke. For Notre Dame, it’s an attempt to stop what’s become a debacle of a slide, with Mike Brey’s team coming in at 3-4 overall after entering the year with Sweet 16 aspirations. For Wisconsin and Ohio State it’s a game that could have Big Ten title implications down the line. Fun stuff.
Army/Navy
In the world of college football, we’ve got the regular season finale tomorrow, with the Army/Navy game going down at 3:00 PM EST on CBS. The game’s at MetLife Stadium, and Army’s a seven-point favorite with the over/under at 35, implying a Black Knight victory by a score of 21-14. Such a result would be Army’s fifth win in the last six years after a long run of Navy dominance in the series. It would also be the second game with more than thirty points scored since 2016. What a funny thing about college football, how differently service academies play the game.
Virginia Gets Elliott; Lanning to Oregon?
Virginia has indeed picked up Tony Elliott, marking another coordinator leaving Clemson right around the same time they lost a five-star cornerback recruit, Daylen Everette. Everette is the third top-100 prospect (by 247) to decommit this week. All are defensive players. All are coming out of IMG Academy in Florida. Keep an eye on Oklahoma with all three. Brent Venables might already be making a difference.
In the other noteworthy carousel news of the day, there was a report that Georgia defensive coordinator Dan Lanning was headed to Oregon, but that’s been shot down by other reports, so…unclear what’s going on. There’s a little debate going around about whether Oregon should hire a West Coast guy so the guy doesn’t leave, but I don’t know, guys. USC’s on the West Coast, too, alongside other schools I won’t start a fight by naming.
Eight Points Is More Than Six or Seven
This is true everywhere, but it’s especially noteworthy in football, as Bill Barnwell stressed last night on Twitter. I wanted to point it out again, because the math is pretty straightforward. If you’re down six and you score a last-second touchdown, you’ve got nearly a 100% chance of winning. If you’re down seven and you score a last-second touchdown, you’ve got about a 50% chance of winning. If you’re down eight and you score a last-second touchdown, you’ve got about a 25% chance of winning (50% shot of getting the two-point conversion, 50% shot of winning in overtime). This was a big deal last week in the Big 12 Championship, when Mike Gundy took some heat for kicking a field goal deep in Baylor territory down 21-13 late. This was a big deal last night in the Steelers/Vikings game, in which the Steelers were much further from winning than it felt like they were.
***
Viewing schedule for the weekend…let’s see. Tonight, there isn’t anything big on in the college ranks. Tomorrow, Ohio State/Wisconsin’s at noon Eastern, Army/Navy’s at 3:00, Arizona/Illinois’s at 5:00, and Alabama/Houston’s at 10:00. Sunday, I might get up and watch F1 in the morning (I’m supposed to be working on an F1 model rather soon for next year), and after that it’s really just Villanova/Baylor at 3:00 Eastern. There’s plenty of other good college basketball on, though, so if you’re looking, flip around and find some. Nothing’s that much more important than anything else. Have fun. Form an emotional attachment to a team of which you previously knew nothing.
