Your Definitive College Basketball Cheat Sheet
College basketball’s regular season starts Friday (!!) Here’s everything you need to know.
What Happened Last Season
While the early rounds of March Madness were full of upsets (see: Yale over Baylor, Little Rock over Purdue, Middle Tennessee over Michigan State, and Syracuse over Virginia), the national championship came down to the two teams that dominated their respective conferences (the Big East and the ACC) all season long: Villanova vs. North Carolina, with the Wildcats edging out the Tar Heels 77–74.
What to Look Forward to This Year
The defending champs and runners-up should still be good, but they’ll have to contend with the return of two teams we all love to hate (unless you went there): Duke and Kentucky. Coach K and Coach Calipari are legends in their own right, which has allowed them to recruit top-tier talent: The Blue Devils have returning sharpshooter Grayson Allen plus a stellar freshman class, and the UK Wildcats brought in a high-flying group of froshies as well. Looks like the 2016–2017 season will be all about the blue and white.
Perennial Powerhouses Worth Keeping an Eye On
It should be no surprise to see these names near the top of the rankings, too: Kansas. Virginia. Arizona. Oregon. Xavier. Gonzaga. All of these teams have been reliable regulars in the NCAA tournament for the past few years if not longer and are likely to show up again this season. Check out the AP & USA Today polls for the rest of the ranked teams.
Big Ten Spotlight
Basketball is king in America’s heartland, so it makes sense that the mostly Midwestern-based Big Ten Conference boasts several schools on the leaderboard. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo was just inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, so with him at the helm, the team always has a shot. One of our fave players, Nigel Hayes (more on him in a bit) has stepped up big for Wisconsin the past couple of years and we have no doubt he’ll do so again. Indiana also promises to be a force to be reckoned with, especially since OG Anunoby is poised to build on his success from last season and have a breakout year.
The Player You Need to Know
As talented as Nigel Hayes is on the court, he’s just as awesome off of it. The senior Badgers forward has been known for a while as the funny man — he threw some hard-to-spell vocab words at a press conference’s stenographer, imitates Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy to keep his teammates laughing, and bought 2,100 donuts for the entire Wisconsin basketball student section to thank them for selling it out (and breaking the record within three minutes, no less). He’s not afraid to speak out on the serious stuff, too: He’s a staunch advocate for paying college athletes (they are stars in their own right who most of the time have to pay their own medical bills because insurance won’t cover all), and on Monday he joined several other Wisconsin athletes to decry the racism they encountered on the school’s campus. The world needs more Nigel Hayes.
The Biggest Scandal in the NCAA
The Cardinals are a great basketball team, but their on-court achievements have recently been overshadowed by scandal: News broke last year that strippers and escorts had been hired for the team’s recruits by Andre McGee, the university’s former director of basketball operations. The process to determine exactly what punishment the NCAA will hand down is still ongoing. (The team took a self-imposed punishment by disallowing themselves from the NCAA tournament this past March, but it’s pretty clear that won’t be the end of it.) It’s possible that head coach Rick Pitino could be suspended for “failing to monitor” McGee, and the NCAA could potentially vacate wins involving players that took part in the events (including their national championship title from a few years ago), but we’ll likely have to wait until early 2017 to find out more.
The Best Mascots in the Game
Is there anything better than seeing a dog as part of the pageantry at a basketball game? We didn’t think so. Two of our faves both happen to be bulldogs: Butler Blue III (aka Trip, short for “triple”) and Jack, of Big East schools Butler University and Georgetown University. The dogs themselves are buds — they hang out when the teams play, mention each other on Twitter (Trip/Jack) and Instagram (Trip/Jack) often, and even ran for President/VP:
Trip tore his ACL about six weeks ago, but will hopefully be good to go by game time Saturday evening. We’re rooting for you, buddy!
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