Welcome to the all-new weekly Chat Sports College Basketball article. It guarantees to be your one-stop-shop for all things college basketball from now until early April.
Top News:
1) Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino shows poor sportsmanship in loss to Kentucky on 12/26.
Pitino was clearly frustrated after suffering a two point loss to the Wildcats. The story wasn’t the fact that Louisville almost upset the not-as-impressive Kentucky, or that Pitino decided to not speak with the media after the game, instead sending out the associate head coach to the press conference. The real story was that Pitino may have made a “flipping of the bird” gesture to Wildcats fans on his way to the locker room. See the video below: Courtesy of twitter user @Fine_and_Tandy
2) Five teams go into week 8 and conference play undefeated.
Michigan State (13-0), Oklahoma (11-0), Xavier (12-0), SMU (11-0), South Carolina (11-0) are the only five teams left without a loss in college basketball. Both Michigan State and Oklahoma fought through tough match ups and came away with narrow victories over Oakland University and the University of Hawaii respectively.
Michigan State will be without their best player, and one of the best in the naion, Denzel Valentine for 2-3 weeks after he suffered a knee injury during practice early in the week.
Oklahoma's Buddy Hield has been scoring with extreme effeciency and has yet to score under 18 points in any game this season. Hield is shooting an unbelievable, beyond "Curry-esque" 52.9 percent from three-point range and is fifth in the nation in scoring averaging 24.9 points per game.
Rankings: New Additions & Dropouts
UCLA back in at No. 25. George Washington dropped out from No. 20. Not too many changes this week in the rankings. It was a slow week with the holidays. A couple notable changes, and they are minor, is that undefeated South Carolina moved up one spot to 24 along with fellow undefeated SMU moving up one spot to 17.Lastly, Kentucky and Providence switched spots as the Wildcats find themselves back in the top ten at No. 10 and the Friars drop two spots down to 12.
The Bubble: Who's in, Who's out?
In: Seton Hall, Boise State, UNLV, Wichita State
The Big East is absolutely stacked this season but Seton Hall should do enough to keep pace and earn a bid into the NCAA tournament.
With victories over both Indiana and Oregon, UNLV seemed to be a lock early on. Those wins don't look as impressive now and with some inconsistend play from the Runnin' Rebels, they are anything but at this point.
Boise State has already faced Michigan State, Oregon and Arizona twice (weird?) and are riding a five game winning streak going into conference play. That tough early season competition should have the Broncos ready to make some big noise in the Mountain West Conference.
Wichita State is not off to a great start but will once again look to dominate the Missouri Valley Conference and find themselves dancing again in March.
Out: Hawaii, VCU, LSU, Marquette
Yes, Hawaii almost upset what many people are calling the top team in the country in Oklahoma but it was on their home court in a national tournament. Crazier stuff has happened. The Warriors are off to a fantastic start under their new coach but all their games up to this point have been played in their building. The team has a whopping 20 home games this season! Need to see them win away from home before putting them in to the tourney, something that shouldn't be hard to do if they are actually a good team.
Like Wichita State, VCU is off to a slow start, unlike the Shockers though, I don't know if VCU will make it back again this year.
Ben Simmons is undoubtedly the best freshman in the nation, only problem is, the team he plays for, LSU, might not be that good. If the Tigers miss the tournament, SImmons will be ready to go to the NBA Draft sooner than many expected.
Marquette was a tough one to put on this list, which i'm sure will change frequently over this season, but there has to be one team that suffers the wrath of the incredibly tough Big East. My pick for that team this week is Marquette, who knows maybe it's Seton Hall next week?
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