It occurs to me, looking at the sparse slate tonight, that this is probably finals week for a lot of our collegiate readers. Good luck, friends.
More Indignity for Memphis?
Memphis, as we have documented, has been a mess since Iowa State whooped them in Brooklyn. They’ve lost to Georgia. They’ve lost to Mississippi. They’ve lost to Murray State. Of those four losses, only Iowa State is currently more likely than not to at least make the NIT. Not a good look for the Tigers, and with the AAC thin behind Houston and plenty of reasons for Memphis powerbrokers to want to move on from Penny Hardaway, the flies are gathering, risking a fiery end should the dumpster ignite.
Still, chances remain, and it’s not like the team’s done nothing. They did beat Virginia Tech. They get Alabama at home tonight. They play Tennessee in Nashville on Saturday. Will it work out? I don’t know. But win one of those two—and probability says that’s the most likely outcome here—and I think there could be an argument saying they’ve righted the ship heading into conference play, where the corollary to the dangerous AAC slate is that Memphis could roll through most of it. They’ll need to hold onto the ball for a win tonight to happen, and they’ll need to shoot better, and they’d benefit from doing something on the defensive glass other than foul, but there’s a path here, and it makes for a rather high-stakes for the Tigers tonight against the Tide.
Go Gophers?
Minnesota’s off to an impressive start, and they’re our best bet tonight against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. KenPom still has them finishing just tenth or eleventh in the Big Ten this year, with an 18-12 mark overall entering the conference tournament, but even that could be NCAA Tournament-worthy, depending how the Big Ten shapes up. They’ve avoided bad losses so far and grabbed two great wins. Awesome start for Ben Johnson in his first head coaching job.
Early National Signing Day
The early signing period starts tomorrow for college football, and while I get that it’s a big deal, I’m not personally in the weeds enough to tell you how much we’ll learn. My perception is that a lot of the cake is baked with recruiting classes at this point in the holistic sense, especially away from the programs dealing with a lot of four and five-star guys. That’s just a perception, though. We’ll see where the rankings lie later this week.
Model Post-Mortem
We wrote up a little post-mortem on our college football model today, so if you’re interested, here it is. Nothing too earthshaking for regular readers, but helpful for us, and we’d be grateful for any thoughts you might have.
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Nothing else this afternoon. More baseball later this week. I’ll probably start tonight with that SELA/Louisville game, because it’s on, then jump to Furman/UNC (lot of downside for the Tar Heels), split time between that and Minnesota/TAMCC, and get over to ESPN for Alabama/Memphis in the later shift. Like I said: Sparse week.
