1. Shabazz Napier bailed out Connecticut again. The senior guard, who flirted with the NBA before returning this season, has definitely made the most of it so far. Napier, like former Husky Richard Hamilton before him, collected his own miss and launched the game-winning jumper just before the buzzer sounded last night for a strong non-conference win at home against Florida, 65-64. Nappier also drew comparisons to a more recent Connecticut star, Kemba Walker, who was known for his late game heroics leading the school to its third national championship. As long as Connecticut handles Maine Friday evening, they will most likely be in the top 10 next week, but with three victories by only a single point (and another by 2), it’s hard to say exactly how good the Huskies really are. One thing that’s easy to say is, with the game on the line, there’s no one in college basketball I would want to have the ball more than Shabazz.
2. The Tampa Bay Times writes that South Florida’s loss Saturday night to Detroit could be a bubble-buster when March rolls around. Stan Heath’s squad needs to worry about getting into bubble consideration first, and losing to 4-4 Detroit is not the ideal way to do so. The Bulls gave up an eight-point lead early in the second half and were unable to bounce back. It didn’t help that Detroit was nearly perfect from the free throw line down the stretch making 11 of 12. Heath said he hopes the loss sends a message to his group, who now face George Mason (tomorrow) and Alabama (Saturday). If the Bulls want any hope of a postseason after the AAC Tournament in Memphis, they can ill-afford to drop another non-conference game.
3. SMU coach Larry Brown said maturity was the main reason the Mustangs took out in-state rival Texas A&M Saturday in the team’s biggest win of the young season. Brown said his team would have never won a game like this a year ago. The Mustangs did all of the things down the stretch needed to pull out the win: hit free throws, grab rebounds, and got stops. Senior guard Nick Russell did all three. SMU continued to show maturity by beating McNeese State by 29 last night, improving to 7-2.
4. Gary Parrish wrote yesterday about the significance of the big Memphis win over Oklahoma State for the basketball crazy town. Parrish said the bar was set with John Calipari’s last four years in Memphis, and while Josh Pastner hasn’t touched that unbelievably lofty bar yet, he has done a lot of good things in his own right. Something no one ever talks about is how Pastner’s teams have had zero off-the-court issues, which Parrish called “close to a miracle” for Memphis basketball. He has also won ball games. A bunch of them, but none bigger than Sunday night. First and foremost, he changed the narrative of not being able to beat teams with equal or better talent by beating a top 25 team, ending the 0-13 vs. AP top 25 opponents talk. And while Pastner didn’t openly talk about the significance of the win, his players did by saying the wanted to get the win for their coach.
5. Louisville guard Kevin Ware’s popularity following last season’s horrific knee injury and his response to it, and his team’s ensuing national championship, put him near the top of the most-searched American athlete list for 2013. Ware fell in line fourth behind Tim Tebow, Lindsey Vonn, and Tiger Woods. Strong numbers for a guard who averages 2.2 points per game this season (and only 4.5 points per game last season). But just the fact that he’s on the court after that injury is impressive. The next highest searched basketball player was LeBron James, who came in sixth.

1. Memphis belongs. That much is clear after the Tigers outplayed and outlasted Oklahoma State last night in the rematch of a blowout two weeks ago in Stillwater. Josh Pastner broke his oh-for streak against AP Top 25 opponents in a big way, taking down the fifth-ranked Cowboys in the Old Spice Classic finals in Orlando. Led by Shaq Goodwin’s 17 points and eight rebounds, the Tigers proved they are going to be a force to be reckoned with in this season’s AAC race. While Marcus Smart’s abysmal play in that game should not be overlooked, the Tigers’ resilience in the rematch garnered the majority of the national attention. USA Today focuses on the play of Memphis’ guards, which was a total flip from the first meeting at OSU. The group that showed up last night will have to do so consistently for the Tigers to make a run at the AAC title, but the long-awaited win will keep Pastner’s detractors at bay for a while and could be just the jump start the Tigers need for the rest of the season.
2. Louisville’s Wayne Blackshear has to provide the conference favorites with more consistency if the Cardinals want to reach their lofty expectations. As a Cardinal, Blackshear has yet to live up to his own lofty expectations coming out of high school. The McDonald’s All American averaged 32.6 points, 14.6 rebounds, 5.7 assists 3.7 steals as a senior at Morgan Park in Chicago. He was named the Sun-Times’ Player of the Year over former NPOY Anthony Davis. Blackshear has shown flashes of brilliance, such as in Friday night’s dominant victory over Southern Mississippi, but he also has a tendency to have no-show games. For the Cardinals to reach their third consecutive Final Four and a good shot at defending their title, Blackshear will have to become the third scorer behind Russ Smith and Chris Jones, and do more than just put points on the board but also contribute in other ways too.
3. One of the more highly anticipated non-conference games for AAC teams this season will take place tonight at 7:oo PM in Gampel Pavilion when undefeated Connecticut welcomes Florida to town. The Gators’ offense has improved greatly since the return of Scottie Wilbekin, who was suspended for the first five games of the season. Combined with Michael Frazier, the Florida backcourt will give UConn a stern test in what will be a match-up of two of the best backcourts in the country. With a win, Connecticut could begin to make a strong case as the team to beat in the AAC when conference play begins at the end of the month.
4. Mick Cronin is making sure his players will not over look tomorrow night’s opponent, South Carolina Upstate. The undefeated Bearcats will travel away from home for the first time next Saturday for a tough match-up at New Mexico, but Cronin is first worried about a Spartans team that took out Virginia Tech in their season opener. As of today, the Spartans actually have a higher RPI than the Bearcats. That won’t last, but regardless of that a win here could turn out to be a better than expected victory when March rolls around and every game is scrutinized for NCAA Tournament seeding or selection.
5. Louisville deployed a more balanced attack Friday night against Southern Mississippi, which proved much more successful than the Russ Smith-Chris Jones show that ended in defeat against North Carolina last week. No player attempted more than 10 shots against the Golden Eagles, compared to that loss, when Smith and Jones accounted for 42 of the team’s 67 attempts. Last year’s national title team won with unselfishness and making the extra pass. The 2013-14 version must adopt the same mantra to reach its potential.

1. Houston freshman big man Ahmed Hamdy is one of two Egyptian players ruled ineligible this season by the NCAA, but both say they relied on the advice of a former Division I coach. Their infraction was spending an extra postgraduate year at a Texas prep school upon the advice of Marco Morcos, an Egyptian who was an assistant at both FIU and Rice and who helped bring them to the US. Morcos denies he advised them to stay, or that he had any particular influence over their decision. It seems, rather, that this is a rather stark example of exploitation; Hamdy and Aly Ahmed, a sophomore at Cal State Bakerfield, barely speak English, and a number of adults seem to have been trying to push them in directions advantageous to the adults rather than the teenagers. And yet the NCAA, as it so often does, punished a technical violation of the rule without the appearance of common sense having been applied. Here’s hoping Hamdy and Ahmed get past this and find the chances they deserve.
2. Memphis rolled past Siena 87-60, a necessary first step toward a potential rematch with Oklahoma State in the Old Spice Classic. That’s something they claim to want, despite how poorly it went the first time. Now it’s obvious that the Tigers would like to win the Old Spice Classic – they play LSU in Friday’s semifinal – and that would likely require beating the Cowboys on Sunday. At least this time it wouldn’t be in such a hostile environment. But still, they lost by 21 the first time after trailing by as many as 32. The game was a blowout after a tight first 10 minutes, and it doesn’t seem that they’ve had enough time to patch up the flaw that the Cowboys so easily exploited, namely their lack of an ability to run an offense with anything approaching efficiency.
3. Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin is most thankful for his three senior captains – Sean Kilpatrick, Justin Jackson, and Titus Rubles – to whom he gives much of the credit for the team’s 5-0 start. In particular, he says their sustained effort has allowed the Bearcats to pursue their pressure defense for the full 40 minutes. The results so far, even against a fairly weak schedule, are hard to dispute. According to KenPom, Cincinnati ranks #15 in adjusted defense, #13 in opponents’ effective field goal percentage, and a lofty #6 in turnover percentage. But probably most important is that all three are playing substantially better on the offensive end in the early going. Of the trio, only Kilpatrick managed an offensive rating over 100 last year at 108.5. His offensive rating through five games – an admittedly small sample size, to be sure – is a ridiculous 150.7, good for #11 nationally. Jackson and Rubles have seen similar improvements, from 82.5 and 87.8, to 109.7 and 108.3, respectively. If the trio can continue to produce on the offensive end, the Bearcats will likely exceed expectations based on the perception they would struggle to score.
4. Louisville had a wildly successful year athletically in the 2012-13 academic year, including its third basketball national championship and the election of coach Rick Pitino to the Hall of Fame. Now the school apparently plans to buy airtime on ESPN to relive the highlights, which also includes a Sugar Bowl win and a trip to the College World Series, among others. Pitino told WDRB that the school is producing a “Year of the Cardinal” special as a marketing tool. Athletic Director Tom Jurich has been rightly hailed as perhaps the best in the country at what he does, and this looks to be another outside-the-box idea that could pay long-term dividends for the program.
5. The news cycle has mostly moved on from Chane Behanan’s championship ring-gate, but Louisville still hasn’t officially weighed in beyond saying that it’s looking into it. That probably is just because of the holiday, but we’ll see if they have anything more to say before returning to the court against Southern Mississippi at 7:00 PM Friday night. Guessing not.

It looks like Christmas has come early for Kentucky fans this year. On the heels of Louisville’s first loss since February, reports emerged last night that Chane Behanan’s 2012 Final Four ring was up for auction on a high-end sports memorabilia website called Grey Flannel.

Grey Flannel quickly suspended the auction, and added an explanatory note to the listing

The ring was quickly removed from auction after Behanan’s mother, Heaven Warren, notified Grey Flannel that it had been stolen. In subsequent interviews with local media this morning, Warren indicated that she had stashed the ring at her mother’s house in Cincinnati to ensure its safekeeping. She told the Courier-Journal’s Adam Himmelsbach that she thought the auction listing was a hoax when she first saw it last night, and had discovered otherwise only after she called Behanan’s grandmother to have her look in her jewelry box. Warren speculated that the ring was likely taken by someone passing through her mother’s house, which is apparently a congregating place for friends and extended family, and said Behanan was “distraught” by the news. Another source close to the team told the Courier-Journal that the junior forward was “just as surprised as anyone,” and Behanan himself reportedly denied any involvement in a Facebook post last night.

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1. We have the early clubhouse leader for worst loss of the year by any AAC team. Rutgers somehow fell short of the low expectations of, well, everyone by losing to Farleigh Dickinson 73-72. How bad a loss was this? Well, FDU was 1-6 entering the game. The one win was against the Caldwell Cougars, a Division II squad, in the season opener. One of the losses was also to a Division II team, Metro State. Their one game against a power conference school was 100-50 loss to Arizona. There are 351 teams in Division I, and KenPom.com ranked FDU #349, giving them only a 4 percent chance of beating Rutgers, who he had pegged as the worst AAC team before the loss. This will be hard to … bottom? More importantly, it will serve as yet another anchor on not just Rutgers’ RPI, which clearly won’t matter much to them this year, but to the RPIs of all the AAC teams who face the Scarlet Knights twice. Adding insult to injury, the only reason Rutgers played FDU was that it lost to Drexel last week, denying itself a trip to MSG for the preaseason NIT final four. Simply brutal.
2. Rick Pitino revealed Tuesday that Louisville and Minnesota, coached by his son Richard, might open next season squaring off on a American military base. Pitino told WDRB’s Rick Bozich that the deal isn’t done, but if it works out they may play in Puerto Rico. That would be a nice addition to what is setting up as an outstanding slate for the Cardinals next year: a home date with Kentucky, Indiana in New York for the Jimmy V Classic, presumably another Big Ten opponent in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge, and capped with their inaugural season in the ACC. While that’s very exciting for fans (and Pitinos), it underscores the weakness of this year’s schedule, which offers Kentucky, North Carolina and … Southern Miss? It’s interesting that the non-conference schedule would appear more difficult when they will be playing in the presumably tougher ACC.
3. In other scheduling news, Cincinnati fans might get a glimpse of both the present and the past next Thanksgiving weekend. The Bearcats will be playing in the Emerald Coast Classic in Niceville, Florida, a year from this weekend, opening against Middle Tennessee. Depending on outcomes, they could face Ole Miss in the final; the Rebels are coached by Andy Kennedy, who took over as Cincinnati’s interim coach after Bob Huggins was fired in 2005, and who gave way to Mick Cronin when he left for Oxford after that season. With all the turmoil, Cronin struggled early before righting the ship and reaching three straight NCAA tournaments and counting. Kennedy made his first tournament last season, but managed to make it to the Sweet 16. We’d take Cronin, but we understand some Bearcat fans may disagree.
4. J.J. Richardson says he is happier with his situation as a member of the Houston Cougars, but still has some regrets about transferring from Pittsburgh after two seasons. So he was happy to reunite with his old teammates this week at the Legend’s Classic in Brooklyn. Richardson and his old mates had hoped to square off on the floor, but Pitt won its opener while Houston dropped two games, so the reunion was limited to off time at the team hotel. Richardson’s mixed emotions about his transfer are understandable; while he’s getting more minutes and shots as a Cougar, the senior is averaging only 2 points and 1.5 rebounds this season. He is closer to home, but it would appear he’s much farther from an NCAA tournament.
5. Connecticut has secured its first commitment of the 2015 class with a pledge from the amazingly named Prince Ali, a four-star point guard from Florida. No word yet on whether Jasmine or the Genie will be part of a package deal. Seriously, it probably can only help coach Kevin Ollie in the recruiting efforts for guards to point at Shabazz Napier, a player who was good under Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun but has blossomed and become great under Ollie the past two seasons.

Last night’s 10-point loss to Stanford may have exposed Houston’s fast start as a byproduct of some soft scheduling, but those expecting last night’s game to expose junior forward TaShawn Thomas‘s gaudy statistics as a byproduct of the same scheduling received a rude surprise. Thomas entered last’s night game averaging 16.8 points, 11.6 rebounds, and 4.6 blocks per game. Those are impressive numbers no matter the competition, but because Houston’s schedule had thus far featured such college basketball luminaries as Howard and UT-Pan American, most expected Thomas to regress against some improved competition.

It’s About Time People Start Paying More Attention To TaShawn Thomas (Photo: Kathy Willens, AP)

Then the Cougars squared off with a Cardinal team that featured a lot of size and athleticism on Monday and all Thomas did was shoot better than 57 percent from the floor on his way to 22 points, 14 rebounds, five steals, and three blocks in losing effort. Stanford’s strength is its frontcourt and between Stefan Nastic, Dwight Powell, and Josh Huestis, the Cardinal seemingly had more than enough size and talent to control the paint and the glass. Instead it was Thomas who controlled the paint and the glass all by himself. The Cardinal frontcourt got its buckets, but Thomas almost kept the Cougars in the game on his own by grabbing seven offensive rebounds and repeatedly getting to the free throw line in the second half. He was so obviously the best interior player in the game that when Nastic went to the bench with four fouls in the middle of the second half, ESPN’s announcers openly wondered how the Cardinal would get rebounds even though it still had two players on the floor — Powell and Grant Verhoeven — larger than Thomas.

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Four Thoughts is our way of providing some rapid reactions to some of the key games involving AAC teams throughout the season. 

Stanford

1. Houston Has Upside. Yes, the Cougars fell apart at the end of the first half and most of the second half, and yes, their defensive performance left a lot to be desired. But that said, Houston looked like a better team than most of the teams surrounding them in KenPom’s latest updated rankings. The Cougars are full of athletes who love to run and have a lot of different individual offensive options behind the spectacular TaShawn Thomas. Stanford isn’t a marquee name this season, but the Cardinal are a very good team with legitimate NCAA Tournament aspirations and Houston looked like the better squad for a good portion of the game. Houston’s main problem seems to be maintaining consistency and defensive effort for a full 40 minutes (a hallmark of a young team), and lest we forget, the Cougars boast a rotation that features just two significant upperclassmen. Nobody is saying that Houston showed enough in a losing effort to make the NCAA Tournament, and certainly the schedule gets much more difficult from this point, but there is more than enough talent to surely finish in the top half of the AAC standings this season.
2. They Need to Find a Shooter. It’s difficult not to imagine how lethal the Cougars would be with a pure shooter on the wing, someone like Connecticut’s Niels Giffey. Point guard L.J. Rose is an effective shooter from behind the arc but he is also in charge of running the offense and isn’t the type of guy coach James Dickey wants to run off screens for catch-and-shoot opportunities. The roster is full of ridiculous athletes like Danuel House and Jherrod Stiggers, who are great in transition but considerably less threatening when they are being dared to shoot over the zone. Stiggers was supposed to be a marksman after shooting better than 37 percent from downtown last season, but he missed all four of his three-pointers against the Cardinal and is off to a slow start from deep this season (28.6%). Tione Womack and Jaaron Simmons are competent backup guards but one more pure shooter to complement Stiggers and catch passes from Thomas when he kicks it out of the post would make the Cougars tough to stop offensively. Read the rest of this entry »

One year to the day after eventual national champion Louisville fell to a different ACC team in a different non-conference tournament, the program’s longest winning streak ended with a 93-84 whimper against North Carolina on Sunday. Aside from the date, the two losses couldn’t have been more different. Last year’s team admirably traded punches with an Elite Eight-caliber Duke squad playing at full strength; this season’s squad was a Russ Smith 36-point performance away from getting run out of the gym by what appeared to be a borderline Top 25 team playing without its best player.

Louisville’s porous transition defense gave up a number of demoralizing buckets (Michael Dwyer / AP)

Simply put, the Cardinals are not yet what we expected them to be. As much as they dazzled on both ends of the floor in five dominant wins, new starters Chris Jones and Montrezl Harrell were exposed as behind schedule defensively by North Carolina’s skill and athleticism. Jones scores baskets in ways that Peyton Siva rarely attempted in college, but that’s not what Rick Pitino needs out of his point guard this year. Against the Tar Heels’ efficient transition offense, Jones struggled to get back into position several times – sometimes seeming a little too eager to gamble on a steal or an offensive rebound – resulting in some of the uncontested dunks and layups that helped UNC shoot a strong 55 percent from inside the arc.

Nor did his on-ball defense live up to prior performances: Pitino’s new point guard forced only one steal, while the Louisville press generated a season-low 18 percent turnover rate, a full 10 percent below its average. In fairness to Jones, Russ Smith was as much to blame for this issue, recording only a single steal himself. Smith’s explosive offense has distracted from the fact that his steal percentage has dipped noticeably this season, although that probably speaks to the growing pains the Cardinals’ new lineup is experiencing more than a sudden deficiency on Smith’s part.

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1. Rodney Purvis can’t play this year, but he’s still helping the Huskies get off to a hot start. The former highly-touted recruit who transferred to UConn after a year at NC State has been the star member of the scout team, helping one of the nation’s top backcourts prepare for the likes of Dez Wells and Yogi Ferrell. The full year of practice will be crucial for Purvis, who likely will have to step into the sizeable shoes of Shabazz Napier next season. Of course, it may also be playing a pretty big role in Napier’s blazing start, which will have him in consideration for a number of postseason awards if he can maintain it. Based on the early returns, luring Purvis to Storrs looks to be a pretty major win-win for both he and head coach Kevin Ollie.
2. Sean Kilpatrick was angry when coach Mick Cronin redshirted him due to a crowded backcourt and a mechanical flaw in his jump shot four years ago. Both he and Cronin have to be pretty pleased with how it worked out, though, as Kilpatrick now ranks #13 on the school’s all-time scoring list as a fifth-year senior. If he keeps up his current pace – he’s averaging nearly 20 PPG through five games – he could end up second on the list to some guy named Oscar Robertson. And while Cronin might have had some inkling that the little-recruited guard would help more down the road than right away, he almost certainly couldn’t have understood just how much. Kilpatrick is posting a ridiculously high 155.2 offensive rating through five games, vital for a mediocre offensive squad like the Bearcats. If he can approach that number during a key three-game swing next month – at New Mexico, then neutral court games with Xavier and Pitt – both he and his team will earn some rightful attention.
3. Kevin Ware‘s eventful year (life?) continued with a plea deal involving a $268 fine, bringing the latest kerfuffle over a speeding ticket and missed court date to a merciful end. This follows Rick Pitino’s rather pointed press conference on the topic last week after he was apparently blindsided by the news. That all followed on the heels of, shall we say, some colorful tweets from Ware’s Twitter account to Anthony Davis, quickly deleted and attributed to hacking. That followed denials from Ware and Pitino of summer “reports” that Ware had been secretly dismissed from the team. All of that, of course, follows the gruesome injury in last season’s NCAA Tournament which catapulted the quiet reserve to national prominence. That followed an indefinite suspension last spring that lasted one game. Even that followed a recruitment which included a commitment to Tennessee, later withdrawn when Bruce Pearl was fired in the face of an NCAA probe, then a commitment to UCF, later withdrawn in the face of an NCAA probe, then a commitment to Louisville, delayed by a semester due to the NCAA probes. Seems like quite a bit of drama for a junior with a career high of 11 points, no? Whew.
4. When Louisville went way off the board for the fifth member of its signing class last week, no one knew much of anything about Matz Stockman. He wasn’t ranked by any of the major recruiting watchers, nor had his name been tied to the Cardinals publicly before his papers came through the fax machine. Not even Rick Pitino had seen him play. Now that his team has played a few games on American soil, word has started to trickle out. Jerry Meyer of 247Sports says the seven-foot Norwegian will be a three-star recruit, one who has a good scoring touch near the basket but “will likely need a couple years of development before he is ready to compete at a Louisville type level.” A year ago, Louisville’s thin backcourt ended up with a walk-on as its only reserve in the Final Four, so the recruiting class featured three guards. It’s no coincidence that this year’s Cardinal frontcourt, which got exposed by North Carolina on Sunday, has led to Pitino bringing in three recruits 6’9” and taller.
5. Another night, another couple of blown opportunities for AAC teams to earn a much-needed yet impossible to find quality win. First, Oklahoma State continued its roll through the conference with a 93-67 win at USF. Then Houston gave Stanford a tough test before falling in Brooklyn. And now the AAC nears the end of November with UConn’s two wins over a mediocre Maryland, and a young, inconsistent Indiana, and that’s about it. This is nice for the Huskies, but less great for the other teams that hoped for a few chances for quality wins in conference play to make up for weak non-conference slates. Now those opportunities might not be there, making it tougher to build an NCAA Tournament-worthy resume.

Every week the four AAC microsite writers will come together in an effort to make sense of and answering questions about what happened in the AAC over the course of the previous week. In the future, we hope these thoughts will post on Monday and the questions will get more interesting as the schedule does. 

1. Does Connecticut’s win over Indiana coupled with Louisville’s loss to North Carolina mean the Huskies are the team to beat in the conference?

Shabazz Napier Has Been Outstanding This Season

Mike —Connecticut’s win over Indiana was unexpected and Louisville looked terrible in its loss to North Carolina, but I still think the Cardinals are the better overall team. They struggled with foul trouble, didn’t find a lot of quality looks against the Tar Heels’ zone defense, and ran into the Marcus Paige buzzsaw, yet they still only lost by nine points. The game proved that Louisville has plenty of flaws and a lot of work to do before it can repeat as national champions, but they are the deeper team and will get it sorted out by the end of the regular season. The Huskies impressed a lot of folks by beating the Hoosiers, but they were lucky that Shabazz Napier is unstoppable right now because otherwise things could get ugly. The team proved that it can play with anyone and will always be in contention with Napier at the helm of the offense, but their secondary players did not show up, and they can’t let Napier carry them and expect to win the conference.

C.D. —Probably not, even though it seems a more reasonable query than before the Cardinals’ miserable weekend in Connecticut. However, the Huskies lack the one thing that allowed North Carolina such success Sunday — talented bigs. Without being able to expose Louisville on the interior, UConn’s still in second — but gaining.

Will —It’s hard to deny that the Huskies have clawed their way into the AAC driver’s seat. Although their wins over Maryland, Boston College and Indiana have come by a combined four points, the Huskies have taken care of business and become the team to beat, on paper. But looking further down the line, I can’t predict that they’ll stay there for long. Louisville’s experience and frontcourt talent still give the Cardinals a much higher ceiling. Even if we’ve overestimated how quickly the revamped lineup would mesh, it’s easier to convince Montrezl Harrell and Chris Jones to learn the defensive schemes and guard with discipline than it is to fill the holes in UConn’s roster. We’ll have a better sense of the pecking order at the top of the league by the end of December, after UConn hosts Florida and Louisville enters Rupp Arena.

Ross — Louisville is still the team to beat in the AAC, but it definitely has some issues to address if it wants to stay there. The loss of Gorgui Dieng may be much more difficult to cope with than the Cardinals originally thought. North Carolina scored basically at will in the paint against them on Sunday. While undefeated and playing a stronger schedule than Louisville, Connecticut has problems of their own by winning three games against unranked foes by a total of five points. Outside of Shabazz Napier and an occasional Niels Giffey three, the Huskies are struggling to put the ball in the basket when it matters.

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