Judgment week preview

ESPN coined this week as Judgment week where the fate of a lot of teams will be determined or significantly affected.

Here are some TV games of importance:

Mon: Villanova at Marquette. Detailed TV listings below. Check this blog for daily TV listings covering ESPN, ESPN2, FSN, Fox College Sports, ESPN Classic, CBS, ABC, Versus, CSTV, and Comcast Sports Net. No ESPNU listings are provided because Comcast does not carry ESPNU. Comcast add ESPNU now :-)

Tue: Wisconsin at Michigan State, DePaul at Notre Dame, Air Force at UNLV

Wedn: BC at VaTech, Texas A&M at OKlahoma State

Thur: Duke at Clemson. MUST win for NIT-bound Clemson!

Fri: nada

Sat: Oklahoma State at Texas Tech (in or out game), Syracuse at Providence, BYU at SDSU, Washington at Oregon, and many more

Sun: Wisconsin at Ohio State (#1 tourney seed in play), North Carolina at Maryland


Judgment Week: Arizona
Numbers don't lie. Arizona suffered their two worst point-margin losses at home this year during the Lute Olson era. Numbers don't lie. This team looked very impressive early in the year when they played the five ball-handlers almost all the time. But other teams caught up, the five players wore down, and the Silver Fox did not develop his bench early in the season (granted all but two non-conference games were against NCAA/NIT-competitive teams). Their strong SOS (currently #1) and their brand name recognition in the tourney will make it very hard for Arizona to be left out of the NCAAs and unless they don't win another game they are in. However, this team is starting to look like the team that lost to Louis Orr and Andre Barrett (Seton Hall) a couple of years ago than the team that had a 12-game winning streak earlier in the season. The root cause? Arizona is a defense-optional resort :-)

Judgment Week: Gonzaga
Without Heytvelt the Zags faced Memphis in a very important game for their at-large hopes. The game started as most people expected with Memphis having a lead and the Zags trying to bite but never able to tie or take the lead. This was the expectation. However the Zags managed to not only make it a game but send it to overtime and have a chance to win it at the buzzer. On top of that, this became the Game of the Week on ESPN Classic. This bodes well for the Zags at-large hopes, but they have to win games from now on. Since they are likely to be a #1 or #2 seed in the WCC conference tourney they have very little margin of error in picking up Ws, they will only play one or two games in the WCC conference tourney. If they win all their WCC games and lose the WCC conference final to Santa Clara, they could get an at-large bid since Santa Clara has quitely climbed up on the Respect-RPI. Anything else for the Zags means NIT or win the conference tourney or Heyvelt returns...