OK, so some other stuff DID happen

January 22nd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Most notably, a bunch of college basketball games were played. Here’s a sparse roundup of the action:

The Big Ten is three teams deep. We’ll get a better look at things Tuesday night when Indiana travels to Illinois (a game we’ll be attending, by the way), but for now, it looks like it’s Wisconsin and Ohio State at 1a and 1b, respectively, Indiana at 3, and Everyone Else in sharply cascading downward fashion. Even with their recent play, it would have been hard to put the Hoosiers in that top 3, but after their impressive, resilient win over UConn on Saturday, IU looks like the cream of that Big Ten crop. Relatively speaking, of course.

Give credit where it’s due. It’s easy to sleep on the Pac-10, what with their wacky Thursday-Sunday schedule and their late start times and such, but that conference is far and away the best in the country this year. Not only is its top team (UCLA) possibly the best in the country, but it goes about seven teams deep to the point that even Stanford will be able to make a pretty strong tourney case by the end of the year. Oh, and Aaron Brooks (no, not that Aaron Brooks), is tearing it up in Eugene for a pretty impressive Oregon team.

Sit down, Kansas. Every time Kansas makes it seem like they should crawl back into No. 1-seed contention, they go and do something like this. (In case it’s not abundantly clear, “this” is a 69-64 loss to Texas Tech in Lubbock Saturday.) That Kansas team is loaded with talent, but they seem unable to really string things together to get over that national hump. A 10-game win streak will put you in the discussion, sure, but you can’t go losing to TT after the fact. Ouch.

Have you heard about this Greg Oden guy? Apparently, he’s pretty good. Oden dropped a dominant, will-exerting 29 on Iowa Saturday, a career high he’ll probably eclipse at least once more before the season’s over.

Also, something about a guy named Durant…Kevin, maybe? All these future NBA Hall of Famers are hard to keep track of! What makes Durant different from Oden, at least today, is that his team lost a pretty boring game to Villanova this weekend while Oden’s rolled. We’ll see who has the last laugh, though, when Durant is making that NBA wing player endorsement money and Oden is toiling in obscurity in the low post. Punk.