Your College Basketball Saturday Viewing Guide: December 30, 2017

What the hell is the Big Ten doing with their schedule?

It’s no secret to long time readers that the league has completely rearranged their schedule this season in order to play their conference tournament at Madison Square Garden a week earlier than they normally hold it. Every team played one home and one road game over the first weekend in December so they could fit all 18 of their league games into the slightly shorter week.

Except.....

Today, on the Big Ten Network, there are four Big Ten men’s basketball games against buy game level opponents. If you check out the league’s entire schedule for the week, it’s nothing but buy games. The Big East, AAC, SEC, Big 12, Pac 12, Atlantic 10, and ACC are all playing league games this week. Some not til today, but they’re all getting in at least one game. Big Ten? NOPE, gonna just keep playing buy games until after the first of the year. I thought that the whole point of the early December games was to make use of this week to fit in the conference games. NOPE. It’s entirely possible that this is being done just so Big Ten fans don’t feel bad about missing good basketball games in order to miss important football games.

EXCEPT.... they’re just stupid pointless bowl games. Sure, part of it was a gamble that there would be a Big Ten team in the Playoff Semifinals on January 1st, which would have led to traveling on the 28th through the 31st. That would have been just one team’s fans, though. The other 13 fanbases aren’t going to be traveling for that. I get that part of it could have been television exposure for the games, but like I said, there are four buy games on BTN today.

What a weird pile of decisions.

ANYWAY

There’s two major games on the national television broadcast schedule today, and unfortunately for us neutral fans, they’re both at 1pm Central. #24 Florida State head into Durham to square up with #4 Duke, while out in Fort Worth, Trae Young and #12 Oklahoma visit #10 TCU. That might be the most important home game in TCU history, and it might be the most important game in the Big 12 that doesn’t involve Kansas this season. Those are two incredibly big games on a national scale, and they’ll hopefully be wrapping up right before Marquette tips off against Georgetown at the Bradley Center.

Here’s the slate of games for today! Enjoy!