By Aidan Joly
It’s the thick of the college basketball season and we are starting to see the good and the bad teams weed themselves out. Some thoughts from a busy weekend of hoops:
The most notable result came Sunday while football was on, with Temple taking down No. 1 Houston 56-55 at Fertitta Center. It was a grind-it-out type win as the Cougars struggled to put the ball in the basket, while Temple did just enough to win. They did it the day after the late John Chaney would have turned 91 years old, too.
One of the major storylines across the country was UConn’s struggles as conference play began. After winning its first three in the Big East, the Huskies dropped five of six games to bring them down to 4-5 in the league after starting 14-0 and peaking at No. 2 in the country.
One could have thought a road game against a struggling Seton Hall team would be the game to get right, but it came one game later after UConn loss to the Pirates 67-66. UConn finally looked like November and December UConn on Sunday with a convincing 86-56 win against Butler. The Huskies have a major test coming up on Wednesday against Xavier as it hopes to split the series with Sean Miller’s Musketeers.
The Huskies can still make a deep run, but it can’t afford another stretch like that.
Pitt’s tournament hopes took a hit on Saturday when it suffered a 71-64 loss at home to Florida State, which is the Panthers’ first Quad 4 loss of the season. Rebounding from a Quad 4 loss isn’t easy, especially when you have now lost three of five after a stretch of winning 10 of 11 from November 20 until January 3.
One should have expected Saturday’s game between TCU and Kansas to be close, but it wasn’t. The Horned Frogs went into Allen Fieldhouse and blasted Kansas by 23, 83-60. It was TCU’s best performance of the season as it improved to 15-4 overall, but only 4-3 in the hyper-competitive Big 12.
The Horned Frogs certainly look like a second weekend team. Meanwhile, Kansas is still a Final Four contender but has now lost two in a row. Monday night’s game against Baylor in Waco feels like a huge one for the Jayhawks.
The stunner of the week came on Thursday night, when Loyola Marymount snapped No. 6 Gonzaga’s 75-game home winning streak to hand the Zags their first home loss since January 2018, 68-67.
Loyola Marymount hadn’t beaten Gonzaga in Spokane since 1991. The program hadn’t won a game against a top-10 opponent since 1961. On the flip side, Gonzaga hadn’t lost a conference game to a team not named St. Mary’s or BYU since February 2014 (San Diego) and hadn’t lost a WCC home game that wasn’t to either of those teams since February 2007 (Santa Clara).
This was an unprecedented loss for Gonzaga, who followed it up by struggling against Pacific late Saturday night, the game tied at the half but the Zags won by nine. This is Mark Few’s weakest team in a number of years.
The Atlantic 10 is really bad. There is a ton of mediocrity in the middle of the pack, while the two teams that are 6-1 in the league, VCU and St. Louis, have non-conference losses to Jacksonville and SIU-Edwardsville, respectively. The league is well on its way to being a one-bid league for the first time since 2005.
It’s worth noting that it would have been a one-bid league last year if not for Richmond, who stunned its way to the conference’s automatic bid while Davidson was a team you couldn’t leave out. No teams in there have an at-large resume right now.
Finally, there has been a dynamic shift in the WAC this year. Seattle is at the top of the league at 7-0, trying to get to the tournament for the first time since 1969. It had an impressive 81-60 win against Southern Utah on Saturday. Chris Victor is doing a great job in his first season as permanent head coach after being the interim last year. On the other end, New Mexico State is still reeling amidst a scandal where one of its players, junior Mike Peake, is accused of shooting and killing another man on the campus of University of New Mexico in November. It has gotten really ugly.
On the court, the Aggies are 0-8 in league play and haven’t won a game in over a month.
AJ Hoops 