There’s nothing in our way now. No more football, Bowls of a Super (or not-so-super) variety, no Signing Day. From now until the first few days in April, there’s really no point in paying attention to anything that doesn’t revolve around the hardwood and roundball.
Each week during the year, we’ll talk about three games on the weekend slate—one you have to see, one you have to keep an eye on and one you should avoid at all costs. It’s like rain, but on the wedding weekend, not the wedding day.
As always, the weekend begins at 7 p.m. ET on Friday. Apologies to a Harvard-Cornell matchup that might be one of the better Ivy matchups this season. But also, not the best one this weekend.
Must Watch (Times ET)
No. 4 Marquette at No. 1 Connecticut (3 p.m., Saturday, FOX)
Yes. Absolutely yes.
The nation’s longest active win streak belongs to UConn at 13 games. The Huskies active home winning streak stands at 17 games, one behind the national lead. Marquette is no slouch in its own right, winners of eight straight, including five in a row away from home—against Butler, Georgetown, Villanova, DePaul and St. John’s, but let’s not get bogged down in the details.
At this juncture in the season, a rift is threatening to split between three teams—Purdue, Houston and UConn—and the rest of the college basketball elite. Marquette is at the head of that class of close but not quite. And this is an opportunity to either crash the party of the elite or bring one of them down a peg.
At this stage in the campaign, defeating UConn on the road would probably constitute a top-five victory by any college basketball team this season. Resume-defining wouldn’t quite cut it; that 2-3 start to Big East play suddenly looks like a blip of despair from a team trying to figure out how to make it work with Sean Jones and Chase Ross in various states of injured and navigating the perils of Tyler Kolek having literally the worst two-game stretch since his freshman season. Beating UConn in Storrs would be one of the crown jewels of the Kolek-Oso Ighodaro era at Marquette.
Unfortunately, UConn is shooting 52.3% from the floor and 42.4% from three over the last six games. The Huskies aren’t firing on all cylinders; that’s a pyrotechnic display like Yondu got at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 they’ve got on their hands. That’s probably how you start the nation’s longest active winning streak in the first place, I suppose.