How about that Super Bowl, huh? Sure was cool! And those commercials, amiright? And Rihanna? [extremely Ron Burgundy voice] out of sight, my man!
I don’t care about any of that; I stopped caring about the time Harrison Butker put his kick through the uprights, and perhaps long before then. Football is over, may it rest until September. March Madness is nigh. And we have but a few weeks left until it gets here so get those eyeballs on a TeeVee this weekend. You’ve but a handful of chances remaining to see Loyola Marymount and our Lord and Savior Keli Leaupepe, if Thursday night was any indication.
As always, the weekend starts at 7 p.m. ET on Friday; props to Eastern Michigan for continually giving us an early-Friday Emoni Bates scoring binge fix, this time against MAC favorites Kent State.
Must Watch (Times ET)
No. 9 Baylor at No. 5 Kansas, 2 p.m., Saturday (ESPN)
Baylor keeps showing up here and I can’t get them to leave, which happens a lot when you play a top-10 schedule. Technically, the Bears have “only” played seven ranked opponents this season, but that doesn’t include Marquette (unranked in November, now Big East favorite), Iowa State (unranked in December, now top-20 and also probably the best team in the country when playing at home) and Kansas State (unranked as recently as January 7, now cruising toward a top-four seed).
Frankly, you’ve heard me wax poetic enough about both Baylor and Kansas at this point. Even in a year as wide-open as this one in college basketball, there’s only a dozen or so teams that harbor real hopes of winning the title. Two of them square off in Lawrence on Saturday; the loser drops a crucial game in the league regular season title race and has to vacate the Intercontinental Championship belt, but the main event looms in March.
(Jalen Wilson’s last three games: 11.3 ppg, 5.0 rpg, 37.8% shooting from the floor and five total free-throw attempts. Kansas won all three games; if they want to win in March, Wilson has to get back on track.)