C-USA Basketball: State of Conference USA — January 20th
We are now in the thicket of conference play and, like usual, there’s been some surprises.
We are now in the thicket of conference play and, like usual, there’s been some surprises.
After sweeping Marshall, the Tops were able to get back on top of the east side of the conference and are tied with ODU at 4–2 (WKU’s overall wins give them the edge). The Monarchs split games against Rice.
On the west side, UAB inexplicably lost one of their games to Charlotte by 15 points and are tied with North Texas at 3–1. Besides that, league play went as you would expect it to.
There were more sweeps than we had previously seen this past week. Southern Miss swept MTSU, Louisiana Tech swept UTSA, North Texas swept UTEP, and WKU swept Marshall. Also in the midst of all of that was FAU sweeping FIU which included a 40 point beat down in their last game.
Maybe some of the better teams are finally getting adjusted to this new schedule. Seeing how the Tops played against the Herd gave us some hope. There are obviously some things they need to work on but they were still able to sweep and win some close games (with no help from the refs in the second game).
Thankfully this blown call didn’t cost the Tops the game but it was nice to see this response from the league (although I question how anyone could miss the call that bad even after watching the replay).
This week should have several games with big implications. The most important being Old Dominion vs North Texas. Both of these teams are towards the top of their side of the division and if ODU were to lose one or both of their games it could give the Tops a bigger lead.
Another big matchup is UAB vs Rice. Both of them have ten wins and could make a run for the top of the west depending on how UNT does. Andy Kennedy has done a great job at UAB so far so I’m really interested to see how they play after that loss to Charlotte.
For the Tops, losing any game against MTSU this week would be completely unacceptable. The Blue Raiders are at the bottom of the entire conference and only have three total wins this season. If WKU wants to prove they want a conference title and an NCAA Tournament berth, they simply cannot afford blow one of these games. Both of these games should be complete blowouts if the Tops play at the level they did during non-conference.
It’s called the 100 Miles of Hate for a reason and I know that MTSU would love to spoil the Tops resumé so I hope they come ready to play.