Men’s college basketball, women’s college basketball – there’s no shortage of college ball, every night.
Don’t worry, we’re here to help you figure out what you missed but shouldn’t have. Here are all the best moments from last night in college basketball.
Iowa no longer undefeated in Big Ten
Sometimes it’s easy to forget, with the ACL injury to JuJu Watkins and the Trojans falling out of the poll after struggling in Big Ten play, that USC is still capable of being a really good basketball team. It’s 20th in the NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, despite all of this, though, and after upsetting No. 8 Iowa on Thursday, which handed the Hawkeyes their first Big Ten loss of the season and dropped them into a tie for second with Michigan.
USC rode its starters hard, with four of them playing between 33 and 39 minutes, but it’s difficult to argue with the results. Senior guard Kara Dunn scored a game-high 25 points on 8-for-14 shooting and secured the double-double by pulling down 12 rebounds. Dunn also had 5 assists and a steal and block each in her 39 minutes. Freshman guard Jazzy Davidson scored 21 with 4 rebounds, a game-high 8 assists — tied with Iowa’s sophomore guard Chazadi Wright — 2 steals and a block. Senior guard Londyn Jones added 17 points, and while the bench mostly provided rest and defense, sophomore guard Kennedy Smith scored another 12 points for the starters.
Iowa could not catch up to USC thanks in large part to the Trojans’ high conversion rate for turnovers into points: the Hawkeyes lost the ball just 13 times, but USC turned those into 19 points. Iowa had more assists and rebounds, but it just let them keep the game as close as it was — those turnovers kept the momentum from ever coalescing into something, as relatively infrequent as they might have been.
The loss leaves UCLA in sole possession of first place in the Big Ten, and as its lone undefeated team. However, the No. 2 Bruins and Hawkeyes face off on Sunday at 4 p.m. ET, live on FOX and the FOX Sports app, so Iowa has a chance to get right back into first place with a W.
Tennessee upset by Mississippi State
No. 15 Tennessee lost to unranked Mississippi State on Thursday, and it’s a significant upset, yes, but don’t underestimate the Bulldogs too much. NET has them 33rd, and its greatest weakness might be that it’s stuck in a loaded SEC conference that put a record 10 teams in the poll this week.
Mississippi State is a rebounding juggernaut — it ranks 8th among all Division I women’s teams in total rebounds with 44.2 per game — and the Bulldogs showed as much against Tennessee by pulling down 50 of them. Freshman forward Madison Francis, who leads the SEC in blocks and averaged 7.5 rebounds per night, had a 12-point, 10-rebound double-double for Mississippi State against the Lady Vols. Junior forward Favour Nwaedozi did even better, with 11 points and 14 rebounds. Senior forward Kharyssa Richardson had a game-high 21 points with 4 rebounds of her own, which also happened to be the fewest any of the starters grabbed. The bench didn’t play much — just 36 combined minutes — but the four players who did come on in reserve added another 6 rebounds and 12 points.
The Bulldogs had 38 defensive rebounds — more than Tennessee had total rebounds — and this more than anything held the Lady Vols back. While Tennessee actually mostly kept up in the paint (32-to-30), and scored more on forced turnovers (20-to-16), it shot much worse (32% to 48%), and had fewer opportunities for second-chance points because Mississippi State dominated the defensive boards. Besides junior guard Talaysia Cooper, Tennessee’s starters were basically shut down offensively, and while Cooper scored 19 points she still had to work hard for them on just 9-for-24 shooting.
Despite the Bulldogs being outplayed in various facets of the game, Tennessee missed way more often and lost possession too many times when that happened. The result? The Lady Vols are no longer undefeated in SEC play, and with South Carolina defeating Auburn to move to 7-1, are now tied for second in the conference with Vanderbilt at 6-1. A tough result right before the annual rivalry game with No. 1, undefeated UConn on Sunday, Feb. 1, which will air live at 12 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX Sports app.
[College Basketball Games of the Week: Historic Women’s Clash, Huge Rivalries]
Mississippi State’s W — its first ranked road win since 2020 — makes it that much more likely that it won’t have to play in the first round of the SEC tournament that the bottom-four teams are forced into, and puts them a game back of Kentucky and Georgia and the middle portion of the SEC standings.
Illinois moves into 4-way Big Ten tie
The Big Ten featured five teams in the poll this week, which is nothing astounding on its own. Consider, though, that all five of those teams were ranked within the top 12 and four of those in the top 10, and you get a sense of what the top of the Big Ten’s own standings look like. Those four teams? No. 9 Illinois, No.7 Michigan State, No. 5 Nebraska and No. 3 Michigan. And, after Illinois defeated Washington 75-66 on Thursday, all four of those teams are now 9-1 in Big Ten play, in a four-way tie first in the conference.
Freshman guard Keaton Wagler didn’t explode for a career-high in points this time around, but he did score 22 to lead all the scorers in this game, which paired well with fellow freshman David Mirkovic’s 19 points. While neither Illinois nor Washington shot particularly well — 43% and 45%, respectively — the Fighting Illini made up for quality with quantity by sinking 11 3-pointers, nearly doubling up on the Huskies’ half-dozen. Nearly everything else was fought fairly down the middle, but those additional 3s helped hold off Washington’s 40-point second-half surge that followed a fairly pedestrian first.
To make the aforementioned four-way tie even messier, Nebraska takes on Illinois Sunday at 4 p.m. ET live on FS1, in a rematch of the Dec. 13 game that gave the Fighting Illini their only Big Ten loss of the season, while Michigan and Michigan State square off on Friday at 8 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX sports app. We’ll have some Big Ten clarity after the weekend, sort of!
Quinnipiac bests Fairfield in rare clash
There had not been a game like Quinnipiac vs. Fairfield in the entire Division I women’s college basketball season until last night. It was the first instance of two teams that were at least 10-0 in conference play facing off against each other — both teams were 11-0 — and even better, the result was an upset if you go by the NET rankings. Despite Fairfield almost being a top-50 team and top-90, it was the Bobcats besting the Stags, 72-58, and on the road.
The key to the win was shutting down Fairfield’s 3-point game: the Stags rank first in all of D-I women’s ball in made 3-pointers per game by a full 3, 12.1 to Richmond’s 11.1, and are shooting 38.2% on the season, sixth-best in D-I. Quinnipiac played a physical defense that kept Fairfield from getting good looks from deep, though, and the result was twofold: the Stags went just 5-for-22 from beyond the arc, and its pair of scoring juniors, guard Kaety L’Amoreaux and forward Meghan Anderson, were held to a combined 18 points and 2-for-11 shooting from 3. The pair has averaged a combined 35.7 points and 5.5 made 3s per game this season.
Quinnipiac’s offense wasn’t all that outstanding — its 72 points were buoyed heavily by 19-for-22 shooting from the line — but the tone set by its defense made for a W, anyway. And that it played as physical as it did while limiting fouls was also key: Fairfield went to the line just nine times, so making up for the lack of a deep ball became that much more difficult for them.
The two will face off again on Valentine’s Day, and there is more at stake here than just conference standings. The MAAC is likely to only have an automatic bid for March Madness, so despite Fairfield’s NET ranking it could end up shut out of the tourney if it can’t solve Quinnipiac’s defense the next time out… and a possible third time in the conference tourney, if necessary.
A (necessary) 35-point game
Northern Colorado’s Quinn Denker had a hell of a Thursday. The senior guard scored a career-best 35 points and added 7 rebounds, 10 assists and 2 blocks to that total. He led Division I basketball in both points and assists, and posted the highest GameScore of the day in both men’s and women’s ball because of that plus the overall near triple-double performance.
And the Bears needed every bit of that in order to win, too. Despite Denker erupting in every facet of the game and Northern Colorado holding Idaho to just 38% shooting, the Vandals still made it a close one, 91-83, thanks to sinking 11 3s and a 24-for-28 performance from the line. The Bears had 23 of their own free throws, but with Idaho hitting all those triples, even shooting 53% with a bunch of free throws wasn’t enough to completely put the Vandals away until time expired.
TCU survives Kansas
No. 12 TCU is in a bit of a weird spot of late. It was a top-10 team in the poll for six weeks in a row, then fell to No. 13, made its way back into the back-end of the top 10 for two weeks, and is now No. 12. It leads the Big 12 with an 8-1 record, so it’s not because of losses, but the Horned Frogs have been winning a bunch of close games. This month alone has featured an overtime loss to Utah, a 69-61 win over Oklahoma State, a 51-50 ranked win against now-ranked West Virginia, a 71-69 non-conference ranked loss against Ohio State, and now a 79-77 win against unranked Kansas. And that one nearly went the other direction, too, as Kansas scored the first 11 points on the fourth quarter while TCU starters Marta Suarez and Clara Silva both fouled out with over five minutes left, just over 30 seconds apart, then star fifth-year guard Olivia Miles also fouled out with 13 left on the clock. And on her birthday, no less!
Despite the lack of starters left in the lineup by the final plays of the game, TCU held on for its 38th-straight home win, the longest active streak in Division I. Kansas would hit a 25-foot 3-pointer with one second left on the clock to bring the score to 79-77, and then could not capitalize on a turnover by senior guard Veronica Sheffey that happened with a single tick still left in regulation.
Still, with the Big 12 having zero top-10 representation, and TCU just getting by against quite a few of these teams in the last month despite its size and excellent defense — TCU ranks 11th in the nation in Defensive Rating — and the fact it’s supposed to be the big dog in the conference, it’s fair to wonder how the Horned Frogs will hold up against the real juggernauts of the SEC and Big Ten when it gets to be that time of year. There’s still more conference season left for that to all be sorted out, though.
10-straight double-doubles
Merrimack made 22 turnovers in a 58-51 loss the last time it faced off against Iona a couple of weeks ago, yet the Warriors still could have won the game if the deep ball had been falling for them — instead, Merrimack shot 3-for-15 from beyond the arc and couldn’t make up for all the turnovers because of it. On Thursday, the two matched up again, but this time was different in every way: Merrimack came out firing from 3, and ended up hitting 11 while shooting 41% of them, and did so while turning the ball over just 8 times. The result? An 87-63 win, and an 8-3 fourth-place record in MAAC play, just before the Warriors face off against conference-best Quinnipiac and third-place Sacred Heart in the next week.
While the performance of senior forward and Northeastern transfer Oralye Keifer stands out — she scored 22 points while shooting 6-for-9 from 3 with 3 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 blocks to extend her conference-leading average to 2.6 per game — Madison Roman also deserves a spotlight here for achieving a significant streak courtesy a 12-point, 16-rebound performance that also included 6 assists and a steal.
Roman is averaging 15.1 points and 14.6 rebounds per game over the last 10 games, and isn’t just averaging a double-double over that stretch but has also logged one in every one of those games. Ten double-doubles, in a row! That’s not all that the junior forward has managed, either, as she’s also averaged 3.4 assists per game in this stretch, and leads the MAAC in rebounds per game for the season, at 11.1, which also puts her eighth in all of Division I women’s basketball.
10 blocks? 10 blocks
What would you consider “a lot” of blocks? Seems safe to say that 10 qualifies, being a double-digit number of them and all. That’s how many senior center and Maine transfer Milos Nenadic had for Lindenwood against Southern Indiana on Thursday. That’s one hell of a double-double, too, as Nenadic scored 18 points on 8-for-19 shooting and grabbed 9 rebounds, as well — he very nearly had a triple-double with 10 blocks in it!
Those 10 blocks are an NCAA-era record for the program, as well. Lindenwood would pick up the dub in addition to the historic rejection total, defeating the Screaming Eagles 73-60, to improve to 7-4 in Ohio Valley Conference play.
