Sorry.
I tried to give some college basketball games that were worth watching, and failed miserably. If you took my advice and tuned in to either Northern Iowa at Saint Mary's or Belmont at Memphis, perhaps you can take solace in the fact that I watched those games, too, and was struggling to maintain any interest. I should have told you to watch Washington State at Gonzaga (which I did watch, thankfully) and Kent State at West Virginia (caught the second half).
Belmont Memphis looked like it had some major potential for an upset. It wasn't even a good game. Belmont was in it for the first couple minutes, when the Bruins led 4-3, but afterward Memphis went on a run and never looked back. There was never a sense that Belmont was getting back into the game, and while it didn't result in a 30-point blowout, Memphis still put up 97 points and wasn't worried. Maybe the Tigers are for real this year.
At least the Belmont-Memphis was exciting as far as offensive production was concerned, even if there was no doubt who was winning. Northern Iowa-Saint Mary's was the game I was most excited about of the pre-7 p.m. slate. It will likely end up as one of the worst men's college basketball games of the season. Seriously, I felt like the guy running the academic decathlon in Billy Madison: "The game you just played is one of the most insanely pitiful showcases of talent I have ever seen. At no point, in your unorganized, turnover-ridden play were you even close to anything that could be considered decent basketball. Everyone in the arena and watching on TV is now worse off for having watched it. Neither of you deserve to win, and may god have mercy on your fans this season." Northern Iowa turned in one of the worst offensive halves I've ever seen: 13 points, 21 percent shooting from the field, one assist, ten turnovers and had just one free throw ATTEMPT (which was a miss). Still, they entered the second half and you felt like they had a shot if they could step their game up from miserable to halfway decent, because Saint Mary's had not exactly been tearing it up, scoring 26 points in the half. Then Saint Mary's hit four threes in a row early in the second half, and that was that. If NIU really is one of the better teams in the Missouri Valley Conference, then it's going to be a long year in the nonconference for the MVC. The Panthers looked bad.
The good news is some better basketball is just on the horizon. We're less than three hours away from the next game I said to get excited about (George Mason at Virginia Tech, although you should probably take that with a grain of salt given my track record today) and less than five hours away from having Duke, Michigan State, Syracuse, Florida, Ohio State, Cincinnati, Xavier and Vanderbilt all playing at the same time. If you can't find something worth watching in all of that, there's no helping you.
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