Upsets Abound in College Hoops

This weekend in college hoops was like walking into a rural, out of the way, roadside joint for breakfast and being treated to all the "Specials" of the day. Well this weekend had Upset Special as the big item on the menu and boy it was tough to swallow for most of the top 25 teams in the land. Between Saturday & Sunday on Upset Weekend we had no less than 11 top 25 teams, that were favored, lose. I can't remember a time when this happened last. We actually had 4 contests where the game featured both teams ranked. In those 4 games only two of the better seeds came out on top as Texas (#7) defeated Missouri (#11) 71-58 and Purdue (#12) defeated Minnesota (#16) by a score of 73-61. We had three teams (Villanova, Connecticut, Vanderbilt) where the lower seed lost at home.
Here is a recap of the teams that lost:
#3 Duke loses bad to St. John's 93-78
#5 Connecticut loses a tough one at home in double OT to #23 Louisville, 79-78
#8 Villanova drops one at home to #21 Georgetown 69-66
#9 BYU Loses to New Mexico 86-77
#10 Syracuse loses their fourth in a row to Marquette 76-70
#13 Texas A&M loses to Nebraska on the road 57-48
#17 Wisconsin loses at Penn State 56-52
#18 Washington loses to state rival Washington St by a score of 87-80
#19 Vanderbilt loses at Memorial Gymnasium against invited guest Arkansas, 89-78
#22 Florida State gets kicked around by Clemson 62-44
#24 Florida loses to Mississippi State 71-64

It could have been worse too. There were some close scares but the favored teams survived. Like #1 Ohio State slipping past Northwestern 58-57. #2 Pitt snuck by Rutgers, 65-62. #25 Michigan State just got past Indiana at home in overtime, 84-83 What a wacky weekend of college hoops. It may be just a warm up to what we might expect this year in March madness. Speaking of madness, on the statistic front check out these numbers. Here are some crazy statistics from this weekend compliments of my Las Vegas Sin City Editor, Spike Measer. 11 of 94 scheduled games went into overtime on Saturday with 4 of those went into double overtime. Then on Sunday, we had 3 more overtime games out of 23. That brings the weekend total of 14 games in OT out of 117 so almost 12% of the games went into overtime. That is an unusually high statistic.

A couple of teams to watch out for now that are flying under everyone's radar are teams that all hurt ranked teams this weekend. Keep your eye on the following unranked teams:
Nebraska (15-5)
Arkansas (14-6)
St. John's (12-8) the long shot here

Other teams in the top 25 not getting enough publicity:
#23 Louisville
#11 Missouri
#21 Georgetown
# 4 San Diego State

I realize these rankings were from this past weekend and are to change today but I did not get a chance to look at those new rankings yet.

Some good games to watch tonight on this Blog Snob's birthday are:
#23 Louisville at #21 Georgetown - Georgetown winner of 4 straight and feel they are stronger team. Louisville can't play another back to back game like they did at UCONN here. Georgetown to win by 4 or 5
#7 Texas at #13 Texas A&M - Texas has not won in Aggie country in 7 years. A&M has won 14 in a row on their home court. Those stats would point to A&M winning tonight but I think the Longhorns pull out a 3 point win.......or .......get beat by 14. How is that for playing the fence.

So much more to talk about but have to run. Look for more college hoop rankings, high school notes and high school player rankings tomorrow if I can get to it.

One more final note - not to blow my own horn but I am going to. I am competing on the NFL Gridiron Challenge for Fantasy football playoffs. There are over 300,000 entrants and yours truly is in 7th place nationally. My entry name is Rusty Nails and I am at 376 total points going into the Superbowl. The leader is at 382 total points. The top two scorers get a $2000 Best Buy gift card and a $1000 Best buy Gift card. Based on what the others ahead of me have as remaining players it looks like I can not place in the top 2 but it could be possible to finish in the top 3 or 5. If you want to check it out the link is http://games.espn.go.com/gridironpc/en/frontpage
Just check out the leaderboard on the far right page