After last night, we’re ten days into the college basketball season, and what a ten days it’s been. Andy Enfield lost to another mid-major. NIT-relevant basketball was back at Madison Square Garden. Andy Enfield lost to another mid-major. There were bats on the court in Reno. Andy Enfield lost to another mid-major. But lost amidst all of legendary NIT hater Andy Enfield’s losing to another mid-major is that teams have been making strong NIT cases. Here are ten we’ve liked, in order of how they appear on the NIT Championship Potential Rankings (teams I’ve watched closely) note on my phone.
1. Indiana
The thing about Indiana is that they make everyone who watches them angry. Indiana haters? Angry, because Indiana isn’t bad and shows flashes of strong potential. Indiana lovers? Angry, because the team looks dumb and doesn’t look like it’s trying very hard. NIT fans? Angry, because we are not deserving of the joy that is watching this Indiana team. Think of what could be, friends. It’s early, but there are signs of something special happening in Bloomington.
2. Saint Mary’s
This one is practical: The team is good, they lost to someone bad. Not to call Weber State bad, but…that isn’t going to be a good loss. Weber State is going to have a good season, maybe win the Big Sky, maybe challenge for NIT at-large territory, and that still isn’t going to be a good loss. What does that mean for Saint Mary’s? Similarly to numerous times last decade, the other tournament’s selection committee will probably send them our way. Saint Mary’s is where college basketball most resembles college football. You don’t get a lot of leeway when you’re Saint Mary’s.
(Yes, that makes it a great loss, and yes, I would be nicer to Weber State if they’d heeded my words and renamed themselves the Beekeepers.)
3. Wisconsin
Excitement was high around this Wisconsin team, especially on the offensive side of the ball. Then, they played a Providence we were very convinced was incapable of being good, and they scored 33 points in the first 30 minutes of basketball. They made Providence look like North Texas. Now, something weird might be going on between Greg Gard and Connor Essegian, and the vibes are bad in Madison.
Badison?
Ehh.
Madison.
Badvibesison would make it make sense but that has no flow.
Madison it is.
4. Providence
Again, we didn’t think Providence can be good. Kim English’s career hype-to-performance ratio as a head coach is the highest of anyone in the country. But when you’re capable of smoking a good team playing badly, you’re capable of winning an NIT. We’ve been around long enough to know that much.
5. Nevada
No, it’s not the bats (ok a little is the bats—I love Reno so much, and a lot of that love is that wildlife is in places it isn’t supposed to be). It’s Steve Alford. Steve Alford loved Bobby Knight. The NIT Final Four is in Indiana. Indiana might be in the NIT Final Four. If you thought Providence was getting an advantage by naming itself after the concept of fate, look at these guys.
6. UC Irvine
Signature win!
UC Irvine beat shorthanded USC in Los Angeles, establishing themselves definitively as Southern California’s NIT Contender. They’ve got NIT experience, NET doesn’t consider Boogie Ellis’s status in individual games, and they’re good but not that good. Keep an eye on the Anteaters, NIT fans. Zot.
7. James Madison
Similarly, James Madison is a good team in a bad situation with a lot of attention right now. People are making the FAU comparison with these guys, but last year’s Conference USA had a better top end than this year’s Sun Belt, and the thing about FAU was that they were improbable. You couldn’t predict them after three games. We believe JMU is good—we’re saying they’re capable of beating five good teams in a row in March—but they don’t have the margin for error FAU had last year, and we don’t think they’re as good as FAU was.
8. St. John’s
The only concern with St. John’s is that Rick Pitino might fix them. Beyond that? They look splendid. So excited for the game against North Texas in a little bit here.
9. Xavier
I am confused about who’s alive on this Xavier basketball team, but regardless, a recipe for NIT success is to be a good team capable of pulling off grand collapses, on both the micro (one game) and macro (eight games) scale. Xavier should know that better than anyone.
10. North Texas
You can’t count out the defending champs, and I’ve been impressed with them so far. Has the “Look at us. Who would’ve thought?” meme gone stale? Because I just had a vision of Grant McCasland’s Texas Tech meeting Ross Hodge’s North Texas in the NIT’s first round.
Updating the Christmas List
In one of the most heart-warming developments in my life, two separate groups of people have bought me NIT Championship watches (the NIT equivalent of championship rings) on eBay over the last eight months. I am not pushing for readers to do these kind of things.
However!
I think my family reads this, and I would like to highlight that the National Bobblehead Museum up in Milwaukee has a presale going of a bobblehead of Iggy, Marquette’s mascot, drinking a milkshake. Why? Well, our guy Shaka Smart likes to celebrate road wins with milkshakes. Not just generic milkshakes, either. When Marquette beat Illinois on Tuesday, they came from Steak ‘n Shake. Shaka Smart is getting these kids a cultural experience, and the man clearly knows and respects dairy.
Dammit, Maryland
Michigan has evidently won 999 games in its history. Saturday will be 1,000. I have questions about this.
I want to know whether Michigan built its nonconference schedule over these last few years with the specific goal of timing this thousandth victory. This first came to mind because I saw the number, said, “Dang, so close to having a shot at it against Ohio State,” and then started wondering whether Michigan really thought it could beat Ohio State back when they were setting these schedules up. It seems to me the last thing Michigan would want would be to set itself up for its thousandth win to come over Ohio State and then lose that game. That would’ve looked like a very Michigan thing to do up until two years ago this month.
Anyho, what we really want to address is how funny it is that Maryland is the opponent in question. To some extent, credit to Michigan, they’ve gotten to the point where everyone assumes they’ll beat a 6–4 team (again, what a shift from two years ago). But also: Maryland. What the hell, guys? Why can’t you be competitive just once? Why does the question have to be whether Jim Harbaugh will be there instead of whether the win will happen at all?
The hearing’s tomorrow, for those needing a refresher. The quotes are forecasted to be electric.
How You Know the In-Season Tournament Is Struggling
There are a few ways to tell that the NBA’s inaugural “In-Season Tournament” is not going well. The first sign? The courts. When you’ve used up the concept of novelty uniforms to such an extent that you have to do novelty courts, you’re down bad. Bill Veeck would have had a better idea. I don’t know what it would be, but it would be better.
The second sign is that there are no brackets and it’s just the teams who already exist in the NBA. The In-Season Tournament was supposed to imitate the FA Cup and a certain postseason college basketball competition (I think we all know which one). The joy of the FA Cup, though, is that all sorts of teams play in it, not just the teams in the Premier League. Also, it kind of has a bracket. You progress through it. It’s single-elimination. Similarly to the college basketball thing. The very design of the In-Season Tournament is stupid. Nobody likes pool play in basketball. Basketball is not a pool play sport. The people want single-elimination.
The third sign is that after one week of In-Season Tournament games, the second week saw an immediate fight break out.
You think the NBA didn’t set this up?
This was an electric moment, and we of course love it. If we saw it in public? Whoa, guys! Stop! On a basketball court? All about it. If people are fighting within the arena of competition, we’re on board. Outside of it? Not always the best thing to do. Among my personal favorite things: Steve Kerr trying to talk Draymond Green down while Draymond Green has Rudy Gobert by the neck; Draymond Green actually employing a pretty straightforward way to break up a fight (#HeadlocksWork) but inadvertently escalating it because he was treating it like a real fight when it was merely an NBA fight. Draymond Green saw what was happening, thought people were fighting, and ended the fight. He is now receiving significant discipline.
Why do we think the NBA set this up?
This happened a little bit later the same night:
I don’t think Draymond Green is an NBA plant. Santi Aldama? Definitely an NBA plant. I don’t know who the plant was in Minnesota, but if Santi Aldama isn’t an NBA plant, court moppers don’t use their own sneakers to make sure they dried up wet spots.
Clearly, the NBA saw the dismal response to the beginning of the In-Season Tournament, realized that even the weird courts weren’t making people realize they were watching In-Season Tournament games, and called in the big dogs: The skirmishes. Their newest idea failing, the NBA went to the oldest idea in the book: Having athletes get scrappy.
(I bet Gobert is the plant. I bet he’s under a standing order to get in the middle of anything that blows up if Draymond Green is on the court. An organization as media-savvy as the NBA has to anticipate that Draymond Green physically engaging with Rudy Gobert will end with hilarity.)
Sometimes, Privacy Violations Are Good!
76ers guard Kelly Oubre has a broken rib, saying he was hit by a car in a hit-and-run on Saturday night. The Philadelphia police say they’ve yet to find any footage of the 6’7” man getting hit by said car. This has led to some theorizing that Kelly Oubre wasn’t hit by a car—that he hurt himself some other way and made the story up.
TMZ to the rescue.
TMZ got a hold of Kelly Oubre’s own doorbell camera’s video footage from shortly after the incident, and it shows him hunched over, holding his ribs, walking a bike through his apartment door.
Freaky that TMZ got a hold of that so fast (though if I was Oubre I definitely would leak it to TMZ myself and just ask that they don’t say it came from me), but you know, hopefully the story’s just true. Hopefully he just got hit by a car. Unless the way he hurt himself was really, really funny. Like he was doing wheelies on his bike while juggling cheesesteaks to impress a pack of feral Philadelphian children telling him they only care about the Eagles.
(Privacy violations aren’t good. That part was a joke.)
Sens in Sweden
The Senators are in Stockholm right now for a pair of regular season games. They play the Red Wings today; they play the Wild on Saturday. Big games. Detroit’s a division opponent, the Wild are solid but beatable, and the Sens need wins everywhere, so every game’s kind of a big game right now. As for the Stockholm part: Cool, I guess? It’s very cool, of course. I would love a work-based trip to Sweden with the intent of growing my brand. But hockey is already so European that the novelty isn’t there like it is with the NFL, and unlike baseball, every hockey rink looks pretty similar on TV. The Sens have a game today. They would like to win it. It happens to be in Sweden.
One cool thing is that Swedish Sen Daniel Alfredsson’s going to be on the bench for the games. If this season has a good plot, he’ll end up staying in that assistant role after a pair of wins this weekend and the Sens will go on a hot streak from here that gets them into playoff contention by the end of 2023.
Americans in Austin
The USMNT plays tonight in Austin, I learned just now. They play Trinidad & Tobago. Both of ‘em! (Another joke. I love jokes.) It’s the first leg of a two-leg quarterfinal in the CONCACAF Nations League. Do we care about the Nations League? I don’t know. I can’t keep any of this shit straight. I’m going to wait until after the game ends to decide, and my decision will be based largely on whether other people say “Well, we were playing a B team,” or “We were playing a C team and we still won!”
What’s at stake? Beyond the Nations League semifinal berth and the enduring pride of our country, there’s a spot in Copa América on the line. Winner gets it. Loser has to play another two-legger against another CONCACAF team to qualify. Do we care about Copa América? That is another question to which I don’t know the answer. I’ll ask it to the room:
¿Do we care about Copa América?
Also.
¿Is it Copa América or the Copa América?
I’m seeing both.
Brad Bohannon Got Banned
The Ohio Casino Control Commission announced yesterday that it has banned both Brad Bohannon, the former Alabama baseball coach, and Bert Neff Jr., the man who tried to put $100,000 on Alabama to lose while on the phone with Bohannon as Bohannon told him Alabama was scratching its starting pitcher. This is on top of Neff’s ban from betting on sports in Indiana.
Probably a good idea.
The F1 Race Is This Weekend
At some point on Monday I thought to myself, “Wow, I didn’t hear a single thing about the F1 race Saturday night.” Turns out, it wasn’t last weekend! It’s this weekend. This delights me. Really curious if I’ll hear anything about it, although I’m wondering if the race is the reason there isn’t as much late-night college football this week? Unless that’s because of the growing creep of cold, sending us into our cozy dens as we wistfully await the harsh winter ahead. What a night to snuggle up with a book of pictures of dogs in a candlelit room while San Jose State pulls away from San Diego State and you drift off to sleep.
