Your College Basketball Saturday Viewing Guide: December 7, 2019

Today is one of the best days of the college basketball calendar, although it doesn’t get the respect and notoriety that it deserves. We all know about the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, the first day of the season, Selection Sunday, Feast Week & DAYTIME BASKETBALL~!, and a lot of others I’m probably forgetting.

Today, however, is College Football Championship Day.

That’s a big deal, because it’s the first Saturday of the calendar where college football doesn’t have a deathgrip on the television schedule and thus we get a lineup of 19 nationally televised college basketball games to stick into our eyeholes. It’s not perfect, of course, because there’s still seven football games on today. Even with ABC carrying two of the games, that’s still a lot of real estate on college hoops powerhouse channels — ESPN, CBS, and Fox — that’s occupied either by games or pregame shows. It is what it is, but 19 games is nothing to sneeze at either.

Eight of the games that we get today feature at least one ranked team involved, and two of them have two ranked opponents facing off in a non-conference matchup. We have to say “non-conference” here, because part of the boom in the schedule is the 20 game schedules in the Big Ten and the ACC. Both conferences are running league play today — it’s the start for the Big Ten while the ACC started on opening night of the season — and thus the clarification.

IN ANY CASE, obviously the two games with two ranked teams are the best games of the day, and weirdly, they are both Big 12 vs Pac 12 games with the Big 12 team hosting in both circumstances. #12 Arizona visits #18 Baylor right off the top of the day at 11am, while #20 Colorado heads to Allen Fieldhouse for a clash with #2 Kansas.

The only other game with a ranked team on the road is #23 Villanova visiting Saint Joseph’s. Maybe that’s not a big sign highlight of the day game, but it is a Philadelphia Big Five game, so that’s always worth a look-see.

Speaking of the Big East, our favorite conference is holding things down in the evening hours with two road games. Marquette visits Kansas State, of course, as well as Georgetown taking a trip to Dallas to see SMU. Those games tip off half an hour apart from each other and after both of the last football games have started as well. If those turn into blowouts — Clemson and Ohio State are involved, after all — we could see a big influx of eyeballs to the clearly superior college sport.

Here’s your schedule for the day with all times Central, as always. Got something interesting happening in the streaming only games? Pipe up in the comments so everyone can go track it down and watch.