Your College Basketball Saturday Viewing Guide: December 1, 2018

We did it, y’all!

We made it through the long slog that is the college football season and now, finally, college basketball can re-take the television airwaves.

Well, mostly.

Maybe not mostly. Let’s say “kind of” instead.

There’s still all of those conference championship games on today, and then there will be bowl games coming up pretty quickly, and those will block out a decent amount of space on the ol’ TV schedule. But that’s fine! Things have alleviated enough to the point where there are 22 basketball games on national television today, 11 of which have a ranked team participating, and seven of those have a ranked team playing away from home.

That’s pretty great!

The highlight game of the day comes to us by way of the Big Ten kicking off league play this weekend. No, they’re not playing their conference tournament a week earlier than normal so they can be at Madison Square Garden again this year. That’s why they had early December conference games last year. This year, they’re keeping the early December thing because they have moved to a 20 game schedule. Why are they not just playing these games in the last week of December right before their other regularly scheduled conference games like a normal league would do? The world may never know.

In any case, #19 Purdue visiting #7 Michigan is the best game of the day. Creighton, Marquette, and USC all get big opportunities for big wins on their slate as they host #1 Gonzaga, #12 Kansas State, and #5 Nevada Wolfpack respectively. #18 Oregon visits Houston, which should be kind of neat, too, and #20 Texas Tech squaring off with Penny Hardaway’s Memphis in Miami is a fun neutral court game. Keep an eye on #23 Villanova visiting La Salle, by the way. The Explorers had a 62-61 lead with under five minutes left against Villanova last season, and the Wildcats have appeared to be not quite the behemoth that they were last season to this point of the 2018-19 campaign.

Here’s the national television schedule for the day, and remember: There’s a ton more hoops streaming on WatchESPN and ESPN+!