Penn State 66, #19 Michigan State 62
Michigan State has been in a little bit of a slump, and over the past few years they have a history of playing to their level of competition in conference play, but this result is still shocking. I know that Penn State was at home, but they have no homecourt advantage. Officially they had an attendance of 8,564, but on television it looked like the attendance was about 17. And Penn State is probably the worst team in the Big Ten conference. What makes this result even more shocking is that Talor Battle had a terrible day (3-for-14 from the field, including 1-for-8 behind the arc), and all season Battle has been the only player on Penn State doing anything. Instead the Nittany Lions got great games from Jeff Brooks (17 points, 12 rebounds), David Jackson (3-for-7 on threes) and Andrew Jones (7-for-10 shooting, 4 offensive rebounds). Michigan State's offense really struggled in this one - nobody really stands out, they were all poor. The Spartans are now 2-1 in the Big Ten with a key stretch upcoming. They play Wisconsin on Tuesday night, and then after a home game against Northwestern they head on the road to play Illinois and Purdue. Penn State, for all their troubles, is in 6th place in the Big Ten at 2-2 right now. That should start to fall, however, with their next three games coming against Illinois, Ohio State and Purdue.
Colorado 89, #8 Missouri 76
This unbelievable upset was a coming out party for Alec Burks. The Sophomore had been leading the team with 19.1 points per game, but he blew up with 36 points on 12-for-19 shooting in this one. The key to this game for Colorado was not turning the ball over (they only did it 10 times). Missouri's press is consistently over-eager, and while they force a ton of turnovers they have a very poor effective field goal percentage against (they came into this game 110th in the nation in eFG%). Colorado hit 48% of their shots in this game, and also collected enough offensive rebounds (15) to overcome those few turnovers. The nature of Missouri's high-risk, high-reward play is that they're occasionally going to have a bad game, but this is a really surprising loss nonetheless. Still, this is only their second loss of the season and they do have wins over Vanderbilt, Illinois, and Old Dominion. With the struggles of Kansas State and Baylor, Missouri is either the second or third best team in the Big 12. Their next game is Wednesday against Nebraska. As for Colorado, they actually are 12-4 right now, but it came against a very soft schedule. Other than this game their biggest win was against either Indiana or Colorado State, and they have losses to San Francisco and Harvard. This win gets their RPI up to 105th, which is better than expected, but they'd have to pull a few more big upsets before I take them seriously as a potential bubble team. Speaking of potential big upsets... they get another shot at one on Wednesday night at a Kansas State team that will still be without Curtis Kelly.
Arkansas 68, Tennessee 65
With all of the crazy upsets today this one will get lost in the shuffle, particularly since Tennessee has been such a Jeckyl & Hyde team that we expect the unexpected with them, but this is still really surprising. This was no fluke win either - the Razorbacks led the entire second half and got that second half lead up to double-digits for a while. Tennessee was poor defensively (Arkansas shot 50% from the field) and was very sloppy offensively (Jeronne Maymon had four turnovers by himself in only 9 minutes on the floor). Arkansas moves to 11-3 with this win, although their only other quality win was against Seton Hall and they have a loss to UAB. They are 1-3 against the RPI Top 100 and their own RPI is a putrid 123rd. That said, the RPI doesn't really matter and their Sagarin ELO_CHESS should move up close to 85th in the nation with this win. If they can get to 11-5 in conference play (not as unlikely as you'd think when you consider that they still have 10 games to play against the putrid SEC West) they'll at least get considered on Selection Sunday, which would be a tremendous achievement for John Pelphrey when you consider how barren his roster is.
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2 comments:
Why exactly was Arkansas beating Tennessee a big surprise? Vegas had the game as a pick'em, and Pomeroy only had Arkansas as a 2 point dog with a 41% chance to win. And Pomeroy didn't even factor in the Vols not having Bruce Pearl on the bench.
It's a surprise if you look at the lineups. The five best basketball players in that game all played for Tennessee.
But like I said, nothing makes sense in Tennessee right now and they've been playing like crap. So in retrospect it shouldn't have been a shocker that they underperformed against a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts Arkansas team.
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