There was lots of basektball action happening this weekend, but it was mostly on the NCAA side of things. In the past I have been adding in some snippets of recaps about my nieces basketball games down in Ohio as well. It seems Ohio got hit with a pretty hefty winter storm this past week, so the games that should have been played on Friday were cancelled.
I did get to watch one freshman game on Saturday and that ended up being really good. My younger niece is not by rule a point guard, but when the point guard on their team was turing over the ball right and left, they gave my niece the duty of moving the ball down the court. She did great. It definitely turned the tide of the game and what started as a close contest ended up as a decent victory for my nieces team.
We are getting close to the playoffs, so it won't be too long that I won't be able to share their accomplishments with you.
On the NCAA side of things, there were zero top 25 games played on Friday night. My wife and I took advatage of that lull to start watching "Reacher" on Amazon Prime. While not basketball related, it is worth watching and as you will see we ended up binging the entire 8 episodes in one weekend.
Saturday on the other hand gave us a mountain of games in the top 25. It also gave us plenty of upsets too. Many of you might have been watching the olympic games this weekend, but I am telling you, the real action was on the hardwood with college basketball.
Auburn narrrowly holds onto their #1 ranking with a two point victory over Georgia on Saturday. In what I would consider a mild upset, #23 Texas beat #20 Iowa State to get the upset train rolling. Then we got to see unranked DePaul take down #21 Xavier. Keeping things rolling, #10 Kansas beat #8 Baylor by a pretty convincing amount. Speaking of convincing victories, it pains me to say that unranked Rutgers absolutely handed Michigan States butts to them.
It wasn an absolute joke of a game on Saturday. They were playing horrible and they just didn't even deserve to win. In fact, I was so disgusted with them that I didn't even bother finishing the game. Instead my wife and I continued watching episodes of "Reacher".
If you are a Michigan State fan, you pretty much know this implosion is normal. Typically we see it closer to the end of the season and into the tournament so it is even more heartbreaking. My hope is that by getting it out of the way now, they can regroup and focus on what needs to be done to get them into March.
I expect they will move down to the high teens if not the twenties after this loss to an unranked team. They need to get their act together or it will be a long tournament for me without the Spartans to cheer on.
Twenty One points! They got beat by 21 points! Ugh!
In further upsets, unraked Vanderbilt took down #25 LSU.
Finally, in what could probably be considered the biggest upset of the day on Saturday and the most exciting game, unranked Arizona State took #3 UCLA into three overtimes and eventually beat them by three points to secure the win. Well done Sun Devils! My wife's cousin went to Arizona State, so we have some round about ties to that school. It is nice to see them getting such a big win.
Oh, I forgot to mention, there were a total of seventeen top 25 games played on Saturday.
Sunday gave us only three top 25 games and none of them were upsets. In fact, none of them were even close in terms of scores. I see that Ohio State is now ranked #16 and it pains me a bit to think that they are probably going to move up past Michigan State when the new rankings come out this week.
I am also guessing the loss to Rutgers this past weekend pretty much cements the fact that MSU can't be the Big 10 regular season champion. They still have a chance in the conference tournament if they can pull things together. We will see...
