The night that college basketball starts to take over the TV.
Sure, NFL playoffs are starting but that’s only on the weekends (and a Monday night).
But the rest of the week is all college hoops.
And let me welcome you by saying this season already doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
They all have legit shots at making the NCAA Tournament, even Pittsburgh.
That’s probably where we need to start.
It’s a down year for blue bloods not named Kansas.
Kansas is just fine.
But Kentucky, Duke, UNC and even the likes of Baylor and Villanova are all down.
As for Player of the Year?
Oh all those 5-stars.
All those guys coming back?
Nope just a monster.
Basically what I’m trying to say is we’re in a new era.
It’s not the transfer portal necessarily.
There’s just been a shift.
A shift in where the bluebloods don’t have this massive gap from others.
It’s different than college football.
Sure, we get a TCU in the mix.
Tennessee was viewed as a surprise.
Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State, USC, Alabama were all in the playoff race at some point.
Oh and it’s more than players.
We have new coaches across the country immediately finding success.
Dennis Gates at Missouri, Sean Miller back at Xavier, Jerome Tang at Kansas State.
Even Kevin Willard found some early success at Maryland before coming back to life.
I had some people send questions and wanted to touch on them.
I think everyone knows Kentucky and Duke aren’t good now.
The best conference by far and not even a question is the Big 12.
Legit all 10 teams can make the NCAA Tournament.
Basically everyone is a Quad 1 team.
No one is ranked worse than 41 on KenPom - Texas Tech, a team battling injuries right now.
We’ve seen teams win by scoring 116.
We’ve seen teams shut down other teams.
There’s not a bad team in the conference.
Tennessee and Houston currently have two historical defenses.
Lonny Baxter and Chris Wilcox ain’t coming back.
Providence is a weird team to me.
Not that they are bad, they are for sure good.
They have a star in Bryce Hopkins (like come back).
Their defense needs to get better to be in that sort of tier.
They’ve beaten 4 bad teams on the road.
Lost to decent teams on the road/neutral.
That matters in March.
I’m on board with this so I don’t have to hear Syracuse and the bubble.
My preseason futures are still alive:
Houston at 11/1 is good value.
They are the best team in the country right now.
Baylor and Kentucky, not great!
But we do have Miami at +2000 to make a Final Four, which isn’t insane.
Same with Texas at +600 to make a Final Four.
UCLA is flying a bit under the radar, even almost blowing a home game to USC.
TCU has that disgusting loss to Northwestern State, but they are healthy now.
They were top-15 preseason for a reason.
For Final Four odds?
Xavier at +1400 and Kansas State at +1800 are both values that catch my eye.
Either way, welcome to a very weird year.
March is going to be awesome.
