College football is in the books. Congrats to Michigan. So now college sports fans can mostly focus on basketball, where Tuesday night’s schedule is filled with compelling power-conference matchups.
Here are three good ones:
We talked about those three games briefly in Sunday night’s episode of the Eye On College Basketball podcast because they feature the schools ranked No. 1 (Purdue), No. 2 (Houston) and No. 14 (Duke) in Tuesday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings in road contests against unranked but competent opponents. My prediction is that at least one of the those three ranked teams will get caught. According to the point spreads, the most likely candidate is actually the nation’s only remaining undefeated team — Houston.
Kelvin Sampson’s 14-0 Cougars are only 2.5-point favorites at Iowa State, which is No. 12 in the NET despite entering with a 1-3 record in the first two quadrants. Put another way, ISU has strong computer numbers but a body of work that’s lacking. The Cyclones are 0-3 against top-65 teams in the NET, 11-0 against everybody else. That’s why Iowa State remains unranked even though TJ Otzelberger’s team is in the top 20 of the NET, at KenPom.com, at BartTorvik.com and in the BPI. Simply put, the Cyclones still don’t have a needle-moving victory — but that could obviously change late Tuesday if Iowa State is able to ride what should be an electric atmosphere inside Hilton Coliseum to an upset of what is college basketball’s last unbeaten.
Itching for more college hoops analysis? Listen below and subscribe to the Eye on College Basketball podcast where we take you beyond the hardwood with insider information and instant reactions.
Top 25 And 1 rankings
