A sports blog by and for Midwest Sports Fans
A number of players need to play well tonight for Indiana to knock off yet another top-5 team in Assembly Hall. But no Hoosier is more important to the Hoosiers’ chances of beating a tough, talented, tested Michigan State team tonight than junior forward Christian Watford.
On Tuesday at 7:00 ET, the 20th-ranked Indiana Hoosiers (22-7, 9-7) return home to host the 5th-ranked Michigan State Spartans (24-5, 13-3) on ESPN.
If Saturday’s glut of upsets, exciting games, and nail-biting finishes is any indiation, this year’s NCAA Tournament is going to be fantastic. As it stands, this looks like Andy Bottoms’ second the last set of Power Rankings for the season, because once the field is announced and March Madness begins, any lingering debates will be settled on the floor.
The Big Ten has established itself as the nation’s top conference this season, and a slew of Top 25 teams and at-large hopefuls should make for an incredible conference tournament when the action starts in Indianapolis on March 8th.
With just three weeks left until Selection Sunday, Andy Bottoms’ Top 25 stayed relatively stable with just one new squad making their way onto the list this week.
“Coach with passion!” That is the message from Fran McCaffery to the person who made the winning bid of $2,100 for the chair Iowa’s coach infamously picked up and slammed to the floor earlier this year during a game against Michigan State in the Breslin Center.
Many of last week’s top matchups lived up to their advanced billing, and when the dust settled following an excisting week of basketball, 13 teams in the Top 25 had lost at least once. While that certainly made Andy Bottoms’s job of assembling this week’s rankings a bit more challenging, it certainly bodes well for March Madness 2012, which begins with Selection Sunday in just four weeks.
With the Super Bowl in the books, and the sports world will finally be able to turn more of its attention to college hoops. A terrific Kansas-Missouri game on Saturday night provided a springboard into “Rivalry Week,” which features a number of intriguing matchups. Before that tips off, Andy Bottoms provides his latest college basketball power rankings.
It sounds a bit odd to say this, but last week was relatively tame in the college hoops world since “only” nine teams in the Top 25 lost. Even so, there are no new teams in this week’s edition of Andy Bottoms’ College Basketball Power Rankings.
Saturday was arguably the best day of college basketball so far this season, as a pair of Top Five sqauds squared off, the top-ranked team went down, and a buzzer-beater ended a lengthy home winning streak just to name a few of the notable happenings. And as usual, that led to plenty of shakeups in Andy Bottoms’ Top 25.
After yet another week where nearly half of the Top 25 suffered at least one loss, it was another challenging exercise for Andy Bottoms to put together his latest power rankings. The middle of the list has proven to be a complete mess, but since road wins have been so tough to come by, there are some teams that actually stayed put or even moved up despite losing.
Andy Bottoms breaks down the contenders for Big Ten Player of the Year at the halfway point of the season. It’s fair to say this list has some significant changes compared to what he would have put together prior to the season.
After 12 teams ranked in the Top 25 lost last week, Andy Bottoms had some work to do when putting together this week’s edition of the Bottoms Line College Basketball Power Rankings.
Andy Bottoms hasn’t paid much attention to college football during the bowl season. Instead, he’s been watching college hoops and putting together this edition of the Bottoms Line Stock Watch, which starts off with someone hoops fans in the Hoosier state will be quite familiar with.
A number of college basketball bracketologists released updated projections on Tuesday, prompting Andy Bottoms to break down where nine Big Ten teams are seeded.
