Thursday night was relatively quiet for college basketball. In the conference season, a number of conferences will head up with weekend prep games on Thursday night, but on the one before Christmas, we saw relatively few decent games. Barring any upsets, the only one worthy of much of a mention was going to be Duke and UCLA. So let's take a look at what happened.
Duke 80, UCLA 63: Duke finally took it upon itself to find some defense in the second half of this game, which was tied at 37 at halftime. Duke struggled with UCLA's zone for a good portion of this game, but once the Blue Devils figured it out, its sharp offense lead to a lot of very good defense. Duke is still only going to go as far as its defense carries it this year, though. This team will make the tournament, but if it runs into a team hitting every shot, especially some sharpshooting mid-major, coupled with a lower seed than expected a few weeks ago, and Duke may be in trouble.
UCLA is the more interesting story here as we wonder why a talented team that has only lost at Missouri and to Duke in New York finds itself scratching at the media for respect. Kyle Anderson and Jordan Adams have been very good so far this year---Anderson even found himself a few assists from a triple-double tonight. What UCLA needs to do, though, that Duke has done, is win a game against a good team. Home wins over UCSB and Drexel are not going to hold up over time. Thanks to an improved Pac-12, there are still a lot of good wins possible on UCLA's schedule. Until the Bruins get into the meat of their schedule, however, they'll find themselves getting passed in the S-curve even if they continue to win.
Auburn 66, Clemson 64: Oops, an upset! I was OK with Clemson's previous losses to UMass and at Arkansas. But losing to Auburn, even on the road, is difficult to justify. Clemson's problem tonight is not easily identifiable. There was no one facet that Clemson failed at tonight. If the Tigers had 23 turnovers, we'd be able to say, "Well, just handle the ball better next time." Fact is, Clemson was average all over, just as average as Auburn was all over. The fact is, though, that Auburn has absolutely no chance to make the NCAA tournament as an at-large. Auburn has already been blown out by Iowa State, Illinois, and Northwestern State. If your team is just about the same as Auburn, you have big, big problems. This loss will not play well on Selection Sunday, and it certainly dropped Clemson.
Jackson State 73, Louisiana Lafayette 70: Oops, another upset! I included this game because ULL has a decent RPI number currently, but we should expect the RPI to drop sharply. Still ULL, prior to this loss, was in some position to perhaps win out and then make arguments for an at-large if needed. But even though ULL is permanently off the bubble now, the Ragin' Cajuns shouldn't fret too much---they are still the major favorite to win the Sun Belt Conference's automatic bid.
The rest of these teams won as expected:
Dayton 96, Iona 84
UC Santa Barbara 57, Troy 54 - oddly close game
Arkansas 102, UT Martin 56
Utah 69, Texas State 50 - no bubble yet, but Utah is working on it
Arizona 69, Southern 43
St. Mary's 59, American 44 - St. Mary's is always underrated to start each season
Friday does not have any very interesting games barring upsets. I'm most interested to see whether Princeton can keep up its good start. The Tigers are pushing hard for the Ivy League to get a second team, but Princeton will need to be razor sharp in every game against a team not named Harvard. Otherwise, if everything holds form, we'll just spent tomorrow's post looking forward to Saturday.
High Point at Syracuse
Nicholls State at Indiana
Coppin State vs. Southern Miss
SMU at Wyoming
Omaha at Minnesota
UC Santa Barbara at Utah State
Pacific vs. Princeton
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