My 5 Favorite Things In College Basketball This Week
It certainly wasn't the refereeing
We are so back! I haven’t written this newsletter the past couple of weeks, and I apologize for that. Two weeks ago I was very sick and I was dealing with the LA fires last week. We are back to our regularly scheduled programming. At the time of writing this, Kentucky, Northwestern, Tennessee, and Illinois fans are going scorched earth against referees. It, admittedly, falls somewhat on deaf ears because many of these same fans were calling Mick Cronin a crybaby for his gripes with officials recently, but that’s neither here nor there. Because of the anger these fans (rightfully so in many cases) have right now, I’m not going to talk about refereeing in this newsletter. Let’s get into what I liked:
1. Thursday
I can’t pick only one moment from Thursday this week. This is one of the better days of college basketball that I can remember. For the sake of time I’ll limit myself to talking about three games. I have to start out by talking about the Dawson Garcia shot. Overtime, tie ball game, Minnesota is yet to win a game in the Big Ten, Michigan is undefeated in the Big Ten. Dawson Garcia takes a three from the logo, and it couldn’t be a cleaner shot. The buzzer sounds while the ball is in the air, and Minnesota takes down Goliath. But the day wasn’t over. Elsewhere in the Big Ten Northwestern was playing host to Maryland. Another tie game in overtime. With 0.7 seconds left, Nick Martinelli catches an inbounds pass, takes an off-balance shot over a defender, and nails it. Northwestern wins. But, somehow, the day wasn’t over. Oregon State is playing Gonzaga. This is a WCC game now (we’ll get into that later, the important thing is that they were playing each other). Gonzaga, a top 20 team in the country against lowly Wayne Tinkle. The unfireable man who everybody knows needs to be fired. But somehow this game goes to overtime. The Beavers somehow managed to pull it out. They have a real shot at the NCAA Tournament now. This is utter insanity, Wayne Tinkle, how do you do this?
2. The Big West Deserves Them Both
Look, I’m a west coast guy. I love the Dodgers, I love Kendrick, and I love Big West basketball. It’s always a great little piece of this wonderful sport that not enough people pay attention to. This year, the Big West is up. Just like everything on the west coast seems to be. The West is on top. UC Irvine and UC San Diego are both looking ELITE thus far. Last week, they played each other on national television, and the game did not disappoint. UCI ended up taking it on the road, and they’re now 7-0 in conference play. UCSD has since dropped another one on the road at UC Riverside, but they’re 5-2 in conference with a marquee win against Utah State. If they hadn’t lost to UCR and Seattle U, I think it’s very likely we’d be seeing both teams appearing in brackets. UCI is getting a little bit of play as an at-large team on the Bracket Matrix, while UCSD appears on a few as one of the top Automatic Qualifiers. If everything goes right, I think we could find ourselves with multiple Big West teams going dancing.
3. Mick Cronin Goes Sightseeing
I understand why people don’t always like Mick Cronin. People don’t like that he gets mad. He gets mad at a lot of things. Officials, UCLA’s NIL fundraising, Xavier University, and, most recently, the Statue of Liberty. This, is something that I think he absolutely has every right to be mad about, and he put it very succinctly. A reporter asked him after UCLA’s dominant win over Iowa if he thought the Hawkeyes performed poorly because of the travel. His response was in tirade format, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone go on a more rational tirade. He talks about how Iowa has to travel to beautiful Los Angeles (I can confirm it is beautiful, I live here), and while they’re here, they can stay in the same hotel to play both UCLA and USC. Iowa has to travel to the west coast once. UCLA has to travel all across the country. The Bruins have to switch hotels every single time. He’s seen the Statue of Liberty three times this year. He’s seen the Capitol building. He knows UCLA’s record east of the Mississippi River (It’s below .500), and he thinks it’s ridiculous that he has been asked whether that arrangement is difficult for Iowa. It might be a little annoying for them. It has been hell for him and for his team. Yet people vilify him for this because he gets angry. He has to do this travel, and Oregon State is in the WCC, even if it seems like they aren’t too mad about that.
4. LeBron DuqJames
The Duquesne Dukes, under new head coach Dru Joyce, got off to a difficult start to the year. They lost their first six games, and it was clear they were dearly missing their key players who had graduated from last year’s tournament team. Dae Dae Grant is gone. But Joyce kept the team together. And with their win against St. Bonaventure this weekend, the Dukes are officially 9-9 and are behind only George Mason for tops in the A10. Maybe they aren’t back in the tournament this year, in fact, it’s likely they aren’t because with the start of their season being so atrocious they’ll need to win the A10 Tournament to make it in. We know Barclays Madness can get pretty crazy, but at the very least, Dru Joyce has proven that he deserves this job. That he’s competent. And that’s what Duquesne needs after Keith Dambrot’s departure. His childhood friend, LeBron James has taken notice. That’s a nice recruiting tool.
5. Purposely Missing Free Throws
This weekend I saw two games live where a team was losing by three points late enough into the game where they wouldn’t have enough time for another possession. I’ve already said I’m not going to talk about officiating so I won’t mention the Illinois ending, though that likely would’ve failed with or without the officials’ intervention. The other one was much more tragic. Tyrin Lawrence was at the line for Georgia. He was tasked with making the first free throw and missing the second, while somehow making sure his team got the rebound. He made the first free throw, and his solution to the second problem was to throw the ball off the side of the rim and cause trouble with the bounce. It worked, and Auburn’s bigs couldn’t corral the miss and hit the ball out of bounds. Georgia basketball off of an inbounds play. Asa Newell was wide open for a tip in. He got thrown the ball, he’s nowhere near a defender. The tip goes up… and it’s short. From maybe two or three feet from the basket. It almost sent the game to overtime. It was so close. Newell crumpled to the ground in disappointment. He knew he should’ve had it. Poor Tyrin Lawrence, who executed his part of the play perfectly. But it just goes to show how hard this is to pull off. If it happened, this would easily be my favorite thing. Hopefully we see it again this year.
More from around Sleepers Media: