My biggest dream for this season was to come up with a way to slow down time. I don’t want to extend the college hoops season – it’s long enough – but every year the season starts and then a few days later it’s February 8 and some teams only have six conference games left and it feels like I’ve missed a lot of things. I was, and still am, hoping to come up with a way to change that.
The Week in Review née Day After was supposed to help with this. There are already quality daily summaries produced by Eisenberg, the CBSSports.com crew, and the NBCSports.com folks. The Week in Review wasn’t meant to be those things, it was meant to be the first step in slowing down time, eventually transitioning from my own narrative to tools you could use to slow down time yourself. At any rate, that never happened. At least not yet. Anyway, I’m cutting my losses and making this scaled down version of Week in Review the last for this season.
Without those tools, preparing this feature is very time-intensive, and takes me away from doing things that aren’t already duplicated by outstanding writers in other places. For instance, this particular effort is postponing a piece detailing why fouling when up three is, in most cases, not a good idea. That’s coming soon. In the meantime, bid farewell to the Week in Review with these nuggets.
Biggest upset of the week: #278 TCU (3%) 62, #8 Kansas 55 [67] (Wednesday). While Oklahoma State-Baylor was ending, this one was beginning. I was on it early. (Why do I feel the need to say this? I don’t know.) As you know by now, Kansas took almost 14 minutes to get their third and fourth points. Even then, they were only down eight to a team that hadn’t come close to scoring a point per possession in conference play. (TCU wouldn’t in this one, either) Horned Frog fans rushed the court in their biggest win since Jamie Dixon drained this shot (h/t @rosslancaster) to beat Texas. Bill Self said a lot of mean things about his team afterward. Kansas is still the favorite to take the Big 12, but #bruceweberbandwagon, among others, is in play now as well.
Comeback of the week: Lamar (0.9%) over Texas A&M – Corpus Christi. (Thursday) This one edges out Illinois (1.1%) over Indiana for weekly honors. The Cardinals were down 57-44 on the road with 6:35 left, and considering they hadn’t won a conference game and are ranked in my bottom ten, this was a problem. But Pat Knight made an adjustment and never accuse him of being inflexible again. He determined that it might occasionally benefit his team to attempt a three-point shot. They tried three of them down the stretch and made them all, finishing with an astounding seven three-point attempts for the game in winning 67-63. Watch out for this newfangled perimeter-oriented team, future Southland Conference foes.
Game to watch this weekend: #2 Indiana at #8 Ohio State. (Sunday, 1 PM ET, CBS) What if Ohio State loses a close game here? Would voters really drop them in the human polls after an 0-2 week than would also include an overtime road loss to Michigan? The Buckeyes continue to defy the eye test, although they do look better when LaQuinton Ross and Amir Williams play as they did against the Wolverines. True fact – against the 18th-best defensive schedule, they’ve only been held below 1 PPP four times this season. The eye test lies, man, it lies.