Few things can make the weekend before Christmas feel like March better than an interesting tripleheader on CBS.
That’s what we have on this Saturday.
Check the schedule:
12:30 ET: Mississippi State at Memphis
3:00: UCLA vs. North Carolina
5:30: Kentucky vs. Ohio State
That’s three games featuring four teams that are represented in Saturday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings — specifically No. 4 Kentucy, No. 12 UCLA, No. 17 Mississippi State and No. 19 Memphis. What that suggests is that the first game of the tripleheader could be the most interesting, especially considering Penny Hardaway’s Tigers will be trying to add a Quadrant 1 victory that would double as their seventh win inside of the first two quadrants. Right now, nobody else has more than five wins inside of the first two quadrants. So Memphis is already leading in the category and could extend the lead before the sun sets, which is a testament to the non-league schedule Hardaway created and the way his new-look team has performed against it.
The tripleheader will wrap with Kentucky vs. Ohio State. As I wrote after spending some time with UK coach Mark Pope here in New York on Friday, his Wildcats are the best story in college basketball and really just a couple of made shots or stops in a game at Clemson earlier this month from being undefeated and (probably) ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll. In the span of a year, Kentucky fans have gone from rooting for a team featuring multiple top-10 NBA Draft picks that didn’t really play or look like a team to rooting for a team with zero projected first-round NBA Draft picks that plays and looks like one of the best teams in the nation.
Needless to say, Big Blue Nation is enjoying it.
Kentucky is 10-1 and one of 10 SEC schools in the Top 25 And 1. The conference is 43-2 over the past 14 days with wins over Kansas, Gonzaga, Purdue, Illinois, North Carolina, Clemson, Ohio State, Louisville, Creighton, Arizona State and Michigan (twice). On Saturday, theoretically, the SEC could add seven more victories — among them wins over Memphis, Purdue and Ohio State. For what it’s worth, all seven SEC schools playing Saturday are favorites in their games.
