By Aidan Joly
Now that the Super Bowl is over, college basketball has the floor for the next seven weeks until the national championship game in Houston on April 3. Another weekend gone, more to talk about. Let’s get into it.
One of the biggest results of the weekend took place during the Super Bowl pregame, as Northwestern picked up its biggest win in recent memory with a 64-58 win against No. 1 Purdue at Welsh-Ryan Arena.
Behind a two-headed monster in Boo Buie and Chase Audige, the Wildcats now sit at 9-5 in Big Ten play and 18-7 overall, good for third place in the Big Ten. That includes six Quad 1 wins. More winnable games await and Chris Collins has this squad close to earning its second NCAA tournament bid in program history and its first since 2017. Could this team even win an NCAA tournament game? We shall see.
Another team that had a good weekend was Creighton, which picked up a 56-53 win against UConn on Saturday. The Bluejays have now won eight in a row and haven’t lost a game in over a month, putting them at 11-3 in Big East play, which puts them in a tie for second place. Again, a lot of people questioned some of the preseason hype around this team when it struggled early in the season, those doubters have been silenced.
One team that didn’t have a good weekend is the Kentucky Wildcats. Its tournament chances took a big hit on Saturday, with a 75-68 loss at the hands of Georgia, which had just four SEC wins coming into the day. Kentucky has just one Quad 1 win this season. Unless the Wildcats have a big turnaround before the regular season ends in less than a month, the selection committee might have a hard time putting them in.
Here’s a stat for you: Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina and Syracuse have four Quad 1 wins combined. As mentioned before, Northwestern has six on its own.
Two ugly things happened in college hoops this weekend. The first was at the ending of the Virginia-Duke game, when Virginia’s Ryan Dunn was called for a foul on Duke’s Kyle Filipowski as he went up for what was an attempt to win the game at the buzzer, but the call was overturned after a review. This was because the referees determined that the foul happened after the clock hit zeroes and sent the game to overtime, where Virginia won 69-62.
However, after the game the ACC announced that the foul should have been upheld because the ball was still in flight, which would have given Duke two free throws with a few tenths of a second on the clock and a chance to win the game in regulation.
Admittedly, it was a bang-bang play and a tough call to make on the spot, but it’s clear that the officials got it wrong.
This is part of a larger problem in college basketball officiating (there’s one in the NFL too, yikes). It’s gotten very arbitrary and a lot of times it seems that there’s not a ton of consistency as to how games are called. This is something that the NCAA needs to get cleaned up so that we can have fewer games where we aren’t talking about the officiating when the game is over.
Finally, we have another ugly situation at New Mexico State. While the Mike Peake shooting loomed over the program, the program suspended the season on Friday amidst some ugly hazing allegations, that according to reports are of a sexual nature, and then announced on Sunday that the program will not take the court again this season. Meanwhile, the entire coaching staff was placed on paid administrative leave. Without it being officially called that, a self-imposed “death penalty” for the rest of the year.
What a fall from grace for this program. Less than a year ago, the Aggies won an NCAA tournament game here in Buffalo against UConn, then gave Arkansas a run for its money for a bid to the Sweet 16. Former head coach Chris Jans left to take the job at Mississippi State.
Greg Heiar took the job for his first Division I head coaching job, having worked under the likes of Larry Eustachy, Gregg Marshall and Will Wade, who all lost their jobs due to either abuse allegations in the cases of Eustachy and Marshall, or recruiting violations in Wade’s case. It’s tough to put that squarely on Heiar, but it’s not the best track record.
After all of this, it’s all but impossible to see a way in which Heiar keeps his job, or ever coaching in college basketball again. New Mexico State AD Mario Moccia’s decision to hire Heiar should go down as one of the worst administrative decisions in college sports in a long time.
AJ Hoops 