With the holidays coming up, college basketball is slowing down just a bit. The schedule was light in Week 7 and will be lighter in Week 8 but the Saturday before Christmas delivered plenty of drama, including a great game between Auburn and Purdue as well as an upset for Kentucky at Madison Square Garden in the CBS Sports Classic.
Those results should lead to a little bit of shuffling in Monday’s AP Top 25 college basketball rankings.
The most shocking (and impactful) result of Week 7 came at the World’s Most Famous Arena as Kentucky was dominated from start to finish by an unranked Ohio State team in the CBS Sports Classic. The Wildcats looked completely discombulated without point guard Kerr Kriisa, shooting just 29.8 percent from the floor and allowing the Buckeyes to hit 56.6 percent of their field goal attempts.
In terms of Ohio State, this adds to a confounding resume which also features a win at Texas to start the season alongside blowout losses to Auburn and Maryland. Kentucky has plenty of runway to right themselves, including a final non-conference game against Brown before SEC play kicks off, but this game was a big warning flag about what could happen if they can’t find their way without Kriisa, who is projected to miss six weeks after undergoing surgery to repair a Jones fracture.
One of the week’s most impressive performances came from Florida, which won a de facto road game against North Carolina on Tuesday in Charlotte at the Jumpman Invitational. The Tar Heels are more talented than their record indicates, which they proved by upsetting UCLA at the CBS Sports Classic in New York on Saturday, and the Gators withstood a second-half surge to improve to 11-0 on the year.
Having this kind of test right before conference play could be huge for the Gators, who are just one of three remaining undefeated SEC teams alongside No. 14 Oklahoma and No. 1 Tennessee. Conference play starts with a tough week for Florida, which goes to Kentucky and hosts the Volunteers in the first seven days of January, so getting this win is a good sign that the Gators can handle the rigors of conference play.
Playing a true road game at Auburn isn’t going to be easy for anyone this year, and there is a legitimate chance that the Tigers’ 87-69 win over No. 16 Purdue on Saturday may be enough to push them past Tennessee to top the polls this week. The bigger takeaway from this matchup is that Purdue was buried early in this one, heading to the locker room down 15 and never making this game a serious contest.
That defeat was the third in four games for the Boilermakers, a run that includes an upset loss at Penn State to kick off Big Ten play, and the lone win was a narrow escape over Maryland at home. The Boilermakers’ big win over Alabama early in November still counts for something but the more we’ve seen of Purdue it appears that performance was an outlier compared to what they actually are, which looks to be a solid Top 25 team that will have trouble winning the biggest games.
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