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.
Michigan rebounds against Washington
Now-No. 4 Michigan suffered a stunning loss to Wisconsin on Saturday, ending its dreams of an undefeated season and making the competition in the Big Ten that much tighter. The Wolverines wouldn’t make it two losses in a row, however, as they took on Washington on Wednesday and delivered a W.
It wasn’t as dominating of one as most of their wins — Michigan is still outscoring opponents by over 25 points per game even after taking an L and winning a couple of close ones — but a 10-point victory against a potential tourney team is one to happily take, especially coming off that loss. And it’s worth noting that Washington ranks 62nd in KenPom’s Offensive Rating at 117.8 points per 100 possessions. Holding that team to just 72 points is a reminder that, as good as Michigan’s offense has been throughout much of this season, it’s the Division I-best defense that sets it apart. And Washington’s defense is better-regarded than its offense, too, so dropping 82 points on it is nothing to dismiss, either.
Not one player went big on their own, but the trio of junior center Aday Mara, sophomore forward Morez Johnson and senior forward Yaxel Lendeborg scored 20, 16 and 14 points, respectively, with Johnson adding 16 rebounds for a double-double and Lendeborg pulling down 7 of his own boards. This threesome helped counter that five different Huskies scored in double-digits, with between 10 and 15 points. That balanced attack wasn’t enough, not when Washington shot 38% as a team, only got to the line 11 teams and barely had opportunities to convert turnovers into points, since Michigan made just 8 of them.
Maybe not an exciting win, in the way the 30-point blowouts have been, but a strong W against a strong opponent counts for a lot and bodes well for the Wolverines, given the scare against Penn State that was immediately followed by a defeat against Wisconsin.
TCU survives West Virginia at the buzzer
West Virginia is maybe not getting the credit that it deserves to this point since it’s unranked, but ask TCU about how good the Mountaineers are and you’ll get answers. Among unranked teams in the poll, West Virginia received the most votes in the past week, and it’s already defeated a ranked Iowa State team, put a scare into undefeated and ranked Texas Tech and barely lost to Ohio State in non-conference play, performances that have it at 21st in NET.
On Wednesday, the Mountaineers were leading No. 10 TCU, 50-48, with 2.8 seconds left on the clock, and this despite a brutal shooting performance typical of TCU’s opponents. West Virginia shot just 28% overall and 1-for-8 from deep, lining up closely with TCU’s opponent average for the season of 31.1% shooting, the second-best mark in the league. West Virginia had actually played some great defense itself, limiting fouls — TCU got to the line just six times — with 37% shooting allowed from the field.
The issue was that the Horned Frogs were at least able to use the deep ball to stay in the game, with 6-for-17 shooting from deep to balance the poorer shooting up close. Well, 6-for-17 before senior forward Marta Suarez finally connected on her first trey of the game as time expired.
Suarez, who, like teammate and star Olivia Miles, transferred to TCU as a fifth-year player, had been 0-for-5 from deep to that point. The combo guard/forward is shooting 38.2% from beyond the arc for the season on 6.1 attempts per game, but West Virginia’s defense had, to that point, kept her from finding the basket. The timing of the first one to connect couldn’t have been any better, as it gave TCU the win against an opponent that, while not as strong defensively as the Horned Frogs, has still limited opponents to under 41% shooting overall on the season.
Another way to put it is that TCU only barely survived by the grace of a buzzer-beating three, but NET sees West Virginia as enough of a challenge that the Horned Frogs actually moved up a spot despite a 1-point win. The Mountaineers have been trouble to this point, and that’s likely to continue, whether they end up in the poll or not.
Purdue comes back against Iowa
No. 5 Purdue had a heady assignment on Wednesday, facing off against unranked — but plenty dangerous — Iowa in Big Ten play at home. Like with West Virginia’s women’s team, Iowa isn’t in the poll right now, but did spend the previous two weeks there and is still highly-regarded enough by NET to justify being there again. The Boilermakers were down at the half as well, 34-31, before senior guard Braden Smith surged and led Purdue to another conference W.
Smith scored 16 points to lead Purdue and every one of them came in the second half, in which the Boilermakers outscored the Hawkeyes 48-38 to more than close the narrow first-half gap between the two. He also dished out a game-high 8 assists, grabbed 4 rebounds and 2 steals, and shot a perfect 4-for-4 from the line. All of that ended up being necessary, since Purdue’s defense could not slow Iowa one bit: the Hawkeyes shot 53% overall and sank a dozen 3-pointers on 48% shooting. Purdue had to go on a serious run at the end to win this thing because of those numbers, making 11 of its final 13 shots while outscoring Iowa by 16 in the last 14 minutes of play for a 79-72 finish.
The Boilermakers are now 6-0 in Big Ten play, while Iowa fell to 2-4. The conference is just so, so good this season, to the point that even a team as good as Iowa is flat-out struggling within it.
Vandy upset, no longer undefeated
Vanderbilt was riding so high this week, moving so to a season-high No. 10 in the poll and sitting in the top 10 in NET, as well. And now… well, it’s not over. But the Commodores were upset by unranked Texas on Wednesday and are no longer undefeated, and have also been pushed back to both 11th in NET and sit there in KenPom, too.
This was not a close heartbreaker, either: Vandy got smoked in the second half after it was already trailing, and lost to the Longhorns, 80-64. The bench’s minutes weren’t particularly high with the Commodores trying to keep their starters in to close the gap, but in the 53 minutes the reserves did play, they managed a combined 7 points on 2-for-9 shooting, and just one rebound, assist, steal and block. With senior forward AK Okereke held scoreless in 28 minutes and also not contributing much elsewhere in the box score, that was quite the scoring load left on the shoulders of the rest of the starters.
Texas got 22 points and 7 rebounds out of sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis, 21 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 blocks from senior guard Tramon Mark — his fourth 20-point game of the season — and 29 points from the other three starters, while its bench provided 12 rebounds to help the Longhorns outpace the Commodores there, 42-24. Given that gap, you will not be surprised to read that Texas outscored Vanderbilt 30-14 in the paint, helping the Longhorns stay well ahead even on a night without high-volume 3-point shooting.
Texas has now strung together upsets against then-No. 13 Alabama and Vanderbilt, and in the process moved to 2-2 in SEC play. Vanderbilt is obviously still in a great place, but shooting 37% against Texas without being able to slow its attack was not ideal.
Meanwhile, Arizona is still unbeaten
A first-half scare made it look like No. 1 Arizona could go down just like Vanderbilt, but instead of things getting worse late as they did for the Commodores, the Wildcats came back and opened up their own lead. Arizona took down Arizona State, 89-82, on the back of a 24-point, 9-for-15 night from freshman forward Koa Peat, as well as a big game off the bench for senior forward Tobe Awaka, who dropped a game-high 25 on the Sun Devils with 5 boards and a block.
Arizona remains undefeated — now just one of three Division I men’s teams that can make the claim — but this was also a significant loss for Arizona State in the right kind of way. Losing to the undefeated No. 1 team in the country by just a few baskets isn’t going to help with conference seeding, but it is the kind of thing that NET and the selection committee notice. The Sun Devils actually jumped up from 89th to 81st in NET in defeat — that’s not enough on its own, but it’s a start.
Spiraling Iowa State drops fourth-straight
Iowa State is in serious trouble. After peaking at No. 10 in the poll and beginning the season 14-0, the Cyclones have now lost four in a row: to ranked Baylor, to unranked Cincinnati, to a tough West Virginia team and now to Colorado. From undefeated to 2-4 in Big 12 play is a problem in a vacuum, but when the conference is as loaded as it is this year, with Texas Tech, TCU, Baylor, Oklahoma State, West Virginia and Utah all 4-2 or better, and another six teams in between Iowa State and that bunch? It’s a big problem.
The source of the issue is the injury to Addy Brown. The junior forward is second on the Cyclones in points per game (13.1), second in assists (5.8) and first in rebounds (9.0), and has now missed the last three games due to an undefined lower body injury. Iowa State announced that she’s now out indefinitely to recover from it, and you can already see the toll that her absence has taken on the Cyclones.
Audi Crooks had been unstoppable with Brown in the lineup, by virtue of her ability to share in the rebounding load, draw defenders away due to her being a scoring threat on her own and dish the ball inside to Crooks whenever the opportunity presented itself. Without that counteracting and imminent danger to concern themselves with, opposing defenses can focus more on Crooks, who, after stringing together 29.4 points per game in Iowa State’s first 14, has been held to 22 per in the last four. The junior center has been pulling down more rebounds, but out of necessity in Brown’s absence.
None of this is a referendum on Crooks, so much as a reminder that what can make a player like her dominate — and allow others like junior guard Jada Williams to also flourish — is having more and more things a defense has to concern itself with on the court at once. With Brown out, Iowa State has one less weapon on both sides of the ball, and the early returns have not been promising.
Stanford upsets UNC behind Okorie
Stanford freshman guard Ebuka Okorie scored at least 30 points for the fourth time this season, and set a new career-high, with a Division I-leading 36 points on 12-for-20 shooting with 9 assists, 3 rebounds and 2 steals against North Carolina. Even better for both Okorie and Stanford, but this high-level performance also gave the Cardinal an upset W over the No. 14 Tar Heels, 95-90, pushing Stanford ahead of them in the ACC standings, to boot.
UNC was up 47-45 at the half, a gap that was only that narrow because the Cardinal had already erased most of an early 12-point lead behind Okorie’s scoring. Then Stanford dropped another 50 points in the second overall to not only catch up, but go ahead, and did it all without injured senior forward Chisom Okpara, who is second on the team behind Okorie in points per game at 13.9 but missed the UNC matchup thanks to a lower-back issue.
He did not do it alone, however. Junior guard Ryan Agarwal scored 20 points with 6 rebounds in his 34 minutes, while senior guard Jeremy Dent-Smith, in 21 minutes off the bench, dropped 20 points while shooting 6-for-7 from beyond the arc. This was more than enough to counter the dual 26-point games from North Carolina’s junior center Henri Vesaar and freshman forward Caleb Wilson.
This is the second ranked win for Stanford in January, as it already took down No. 16 Louisville to kick off the new year, and it puts them right into potential bubble territory as far as the NCAA Evaluation Tool is concerned: Stanford now ranks 65th in NET, while North Carolina slipped out of the top 25 in the same list.
Okorie’s 22.9 points per game leads not just the Cardinal, but the Atlantic Coast Conference, and puts him fifth in all of Division I men’s basketball behind Tarleton State’s Dior Johnson, Northwestern’s Nick Martinelli, BYU’s AJ Dybantsa and Prairie View’s Tai’reon Joseph.
Jaloni Cambridge, again
Ohio State sophomore guard Jaloni Cambridge was already named Associated Press Player of the Week for her performance last week owing to a career-best 41-point performance that she followed with another 28-point gem, and she’s not done yet. On Wednesday, she led all of Division I’s women in points yet again with 33 on 13-for-20 shooting, sinking 4 threes, grabbing 5 boards, dishing out 6 assists and adding a steal and block a piece to the mix. That helped put Ohio State over Penn State in a Big Ten shootout, in which both teams had three players with at least 20 points.
Cambridge was the difference, however, as the lone scorer not just over 30 but also over 25, and it led Ohio State to a 108-84 victory despite Penn State getting 66 combined points from junior center Gracie Merkle, sophomore guard Kiyomi McMiller and junior guard Moriah Murray. Four players logging a combined 34 minutes going scoreless balanced that impressive attack out in the wrong direction for the Lady Lions.
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