Your Saturday College Basketball Open Thread: 1/9/16

I'm not going to lie to you, guys: this is not an exciting Saturday of college basketball, at least not on paper looking ahead at it.

There's 11 games featuring a ranked opponent on the slate amongst the 27 games with a national television broadcast, but none of them have two ranked teams squaring off.  In fact, even if you dig into regional broadcasts, there aren't any games between two ranked opponents.  That's how it goes sometimes, I guess.

The national television schedule is squished down a little bit.  ESPN is running an NFL playoff game and a 90 minute pregame show, which is going to cut into the number of basketball games that we get to see.  Normally, I don't fault ESPN for putting NFL football on the air instead of college basketball, but this time I am: They're running the broadcast on ABC at the exact same time, which makes me wonder why the hell they're putting it on ESPN, too.

The highlight game of the day is probably Vanderbilt going to #22 South Carolina, since the Gamecocks are the last remaining tournament eligible undefeated team in the country.  (Hi, SMU!)  My personal highlight for the day is Maryland's trip to the Kohl Center, and it would be just fine by me if Diamond Stone breaks the freshman scoring record that he just set back on December 30th.

As always, if you find something interesting with a local broadcast in your area, be sure to speak up in the comments so everyone can catch it!