College basketball’s opening week was a lot of fun. It was also scheduled about as poorly as it could have been.
After Notre Dame and Villanova tipped things off in Rome on Sunday, nearly the entire sport piled into Monday. More than 180 games went off on opening day, including No. 1 Florida against No. 14 Miami and No. 5 Arizona against No. 22 UCLA, two of the best matchups we’ll see all November.
The end of Florida-Miami got bumped to ESPNews when ESPN’s main channel switched over to Monday Night Football pregame coverage, so anyone watching the No. 1 team in the country close out its opener had to find the finish on another channel.
Then the rest of the week went quiet. Tuesday’s slate for ranked teams was almost entirely buy games, like Wofford at Tennessee and Manhattan at Kentucky. Wednesday had no ranked teams in action, and Thursday’s only matchup between two power-conference teams was Wake Forest at Vanderbilt.
Opening week should be a showcase. The sport has a few days to grab people’s attention before football takes over the weekend again, and it spent most of them on one crowded night competing with football. Moving even a handful of Monday’s best games to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday would give each one its own spotlight and give fans a reason to tune in all week.
Still, the first week gave us plenty to dig into, starting with Arizona’s loss in Las Vegas.
I am worried about Mo Krivas and his impact on Arizona's offense
Ivan Kharchenkov’s 38 points are the headline from Arizona’s season-opening loss to UCLA, and they should be.
However, the number I keep coming back to is four.
That’s how many shots Mo Krivas took in the 84-75 loss to UCLA, the fifth-most on his own team. It’s a hard number to square with his status as the Big 12’s Preseason Player of the Year and one of five players on the AP’s preseason All-America team.
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