Thursday was a bad night to be a ranked team on the road.
If it was, you lost.
Temple defeated nationally ranked Memphis 88-81. Minnesota beat nationally ranked Michigan 84-81 in overtime. And, in the game of the evening, on CBS Sports Network, Oregon State beat nationally ranked Gonzaga 97-89 in overtime.
Relatively speaking, it was a slow day in sports (except for another Florida coach accused of wrongdoing in a Title IX complaint). But it was super fun with several buzzers – the biggest of which was Dawson Garcia’s logo-3 that ended Michigan’s five-game winning streak and left Michigan State as the only member of the Big Ten with a record perfect in the conference.
Did you see Garcia’s buzzer?
Otherwise, here it is:
The three road losses to unranked opponents by Memphis, Michigan and Gonzaga dropped the Tigers, Wolverines and Zags to 17th, 20th and 24th, respectively, in the daily CBS Sports Top 25 and 1 college basketball rankings updated Friday morning, where Auburn remains no. .1 for the 10th consecutive day.
I’m sure none of the fan bases tied to teams on the wrong side of these results were happy – but it must have been particularly frustrating for Memphis fans, if only because it must have seemed so familiar . Remember, Memphis started last season 15-2 and rose to No. 10 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll before losing too many games to too many bad American Athletic teams Conference and miss the NCAA tournament. This season, the Tigers won 13 of their first 16 games and rose to No. 18 in the AP poll. Everything is fine. But then they went to Philadelphia on Thursday and lost to a Temple team ranked 123rd in the NET.
So what comes next?
I’ll be surprised if this season’s team collapses like last season’s team collapsed, and for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the already bad AAC is undeniably worse. So my advice to Memphis fans would be to relax until this bad loss turns into a bad streak because, truthfully, it probably won’t. That said, it’s troubling — and just plain confusing — that Memphis is 13-4 against power conference teams and 14-9 against AAC teams over the past two seasons.
This doesn’t make any sense.
So yeah, I understand why a loss at Temple would give Memphis fans flashbacks. But Penny Hardaway said Thursday night he’s not worried…yet. To that, I would say the same. But sure, let’s go back in a few weeks and see where we are then.
