Story of the Night. There weren’t any particularly compelling games tonight from a national must-see perspective, but there were a multitude with bubble implications. Our bracketologist will be posting his Your Bubble Has Burst tomorrow morning, so we’ll just do a brief rundown of observations from tonight’s key games.
- Florida St. 80, Miami (FL) 67. FSU moved into a four-way tie for second place in the ACC with this win, and has seemingly positioned itself for its first NCAA bid in many a year (last app: 1998) heading into the final three weeks. Miami, on the other hand, now at 4-8 in the league needs a minimum of three of its next four to remain alive.
- Florida 83, Alabama 74. UF hit twenty wins for the 11th consecutive season behind Nick Calathes’ 22 pts. There are now four teams (incl. Florida) tied at 7-4 at the top of the SEC East.
- Georgetown 65, S. Florida 40. Georgetown got the first of several it needs to make a run at 9-9 in the Big East behind Greg Monroe’s 12/10.
- West Virginia 79, Notre Dame 68. Both of these teams really needed this game, and WVU got it after getting behind early in the first half. “Gody had 26/13 in the losing effort, and now ND absolutely must get four of its final five to get to 8-10 in the Big East.
- Penn St. 38, Illinois 33. We already talked about this abomination elsewhere.
- Citadel 64, Davidson 46. No Steph Curry meant Davidson shot only 25% and got run out of the gym at home tonight. How will the NCAA Cmte. view this loss w/o Curry?
- Louisville 94, Providence 76. Louisville went on a second-half 22-3 run to put Providence’s hopes of getting a signature win to rest behind Earl Clark’s 13/10/7 assts. Four Big East teams are tied in the loss column with two losses each.
- Wake Forest 87, Georgia Tech 69. Wake got payback for its most confounding loss of the season behind James Johnson’s 24/11 to get to 7-4 in the ACC.
- Ole Miss 81, Tennessee 65. There’s literally nothing that impresses us about this UT team, of course that’s true of the entire SEC.
- UNC 89, NC State 80. Tyler Zeller made his second debut of the season, contributing eight minutes of depth in the frontcourt. He didn’t help the UNC defense, though, who allowed NCSU to shoot 54% from the field for the game.
- Memphis 90, SMU 47. Memphis won its seventeenth game in a row in an absolute destruction of Matt Doherty’s team. All five Tiger starters reached double figures.
- Virginia 75, Virginia Tech 61. Va Tech is flailing right now, having lost four of its last six games, while UVa won its second in a row after having started 1-8 in the league.
- Wisconsin-Milwaukee 63, Butler 60. Butler has now lost two in row, leaving UWGB only one game behind in the Horizon race. There was some funny business going on with the game clock in this one – ah, such is the life of mid-major world.
- Mississippi St. 75, South Carolina 70. These middling SEC teams are starting to all look the same to us.
- Kansas 72, Iowa St. 55. KU is really good at avoiding letdowns in games like this despite their relative youth and inexperience. Cole Aldrich had 22/11 in the win.
- LSU 72, Arkansas 69. LSU moved to 10-1 in the SEC with a hard-fought road victory at Arkansas. The Tigers erased an 18-pt deficit and used an 11-1 run in the final few minutes to pull out the win.
- Northwestern 72, Ohio St. 69. We really wish that NW had pulled out that Illinois game last week so that we could realistically put them on the bubble.
- Wyoming 77, UNLV 68. Terrible loss for the Rebels, who are slipping out of any contention for an at-large bid. Hard to believe this team won at Louisville two months ago.