Your College Basketball Saturday Viewing Guide: February 5, 2022

There are FORTY college basketball games on national television today. That’s awesome. I think this is a byproduct of the existence of the ACC Network and the SEC Network. There’s just more space on national television for games now. Heck, there probably should be even more than this, but USA is carrying the Olympics today instead of Atlantic 10 basketball like they have for the past couple of weeks.

16 of the games on national TV today have at least one ranked team participating. Three of them are between two ranked teams, which means we get 19 of the top 25 in action today one way or another. That’s 19 of the 24 teams that aren’t Marquette, by the way, so it’s a completely stress-free day for you, the MU fan, to skip channel to channel all day long.

We get those ranked teams facing off right off the top of the day, as #17 Connecticut visits #12 Villanova at Wells Fargo Center at 11am. You’ll have to fill the time until the next one starts, as there’s a 1pm window in between that one and #8 Baylor heading north to the Phog to see #10 Kansas in what is clearly the top game of the day. When that one ends, you’ll be able to move straight over to the second half of #19 USC at #7 Arizona. It’s worth giving the Wildcats a watch today, as it’s seemingly more and more likely every day that Tommy Lloyd is the only thing stopping Shaka Smart from having the best year amongst coaches in their first season at their current job.

10 of the other 13 games with a ranked team involved have that team on the road against an unranked opponent. Those are always a chance for an upset, and in this case, we’re getting four of the top five teams in the country in that situation: #1 Auburn at Georgia, #2 Gonzaga at BYU, #3 UCLA at Arizona State, and #5 Kentucky at Alabama. Obviously, for our own reasons, Marquette fans will be cheering against every single one of those teams losing today since we’d like UCLA to do well, but it would certainly be one hell of a day if all four end up losing. The only true downside? Gonzaga and UCLA are playing at the same time, and even worse, those are 9pm Central time tipoffs since they are all left side of the country contests.

There’s a ton more action in streaming only availability, so if you catch something extra special, be sure to pipe up in the comments so everyone can tune into ESPN3 or ESPN+ to see what’s up.

Here’s the full television schedule for the day! All times Central, as always.