NCAA Basketball: Texas Tech, UConn, Indiana and Louisville in 2019 Jimmy V Classic

The Jimmy V Classic, an important annual pre-season event on the NCAA basketball calendar has apparently filled up its bracket, headlined by the Big Dance’s runner-up.

One of the most-thrilling chapters in the history of NCAA basketball is when, back in 1983, North Carolina State and its animated head coach, Jim Valvano, went on a magical journey during March Madness, culminating with a stunning upset over mighty Houston in the title tilt to claim a virtually unthinkable national championship. The inspiring Valvano, who unfortunately lost his battle with cancer a decade later, co-founded the V Foundation for Cancer Research along with ESPN in 1993, and since then this foundation has funded hundreds of millions of dollars in grants throughout the United States.

For numerous years now, the Jimmy V Week for Cancer Research – a week-long initiative spread across multiple ESPN platforms and programs to help raise funds for cancer research – has culminated with the double-header Jimmy V Classic, and it’s difficult to accurately express the full importance that this pair of games possesses, for reasons that go way beyond the court. Per collegiate-hoops insider Jon Rothstein, who cited sources in a tweet, the four squads that will participate in the 2019 Jimmy V Classic, to occur at Madison Square Garden in New York City, are Connecticut, Indiana, Louisville and Texas Tech.

Rothstein’s tweet says that the specific match-ups for this duo of contests, which will take place this December, are not yet known. In this past stanza’s version of the Jimmy V Classic, Oklahoma beat Notre Dame, and Florida defeated West Virginia.

The 2019 double-header encompasses an interesting group of crews. For one, Texas Tech is coming off the best term in school history, knocking off, among others, Buffalo, Michigan, Gonzaga and Michigan State to advance to the NCAA title affair, where the Red Raiders fell in overtime to Virginia. Texas Tech head coach Chris Beard has secured a lucrative contract extension, but he also has several players to replace, including Jarrett Culver, who saw himself on the AP All-American second unit in the 2018-19 campaign.

Louisville made the recently concluded Big Dance under first-year boss Chris Mack. The Cardinals are deemed by a bevy of recruiting analysts to have a top-10 class in 2019, and Louisville is also considered, at this juncture, as a pre-season top-10 team heading into 2019-20, although there is still a lot to shake out surrounding this June’s NBA Draft.

Indiana started off strong in 2018-19, but then the Hoosiers struggled down the stretch. Despite picking up a handful of marquee victories here and there, Indiana failed to notch a March Madness invite. UConn, meanwhile, didn’t fare all that well in its initial stint with Danny Hurley at the helm of the Huskies, however, Connecticut will welcome a trio of four-star prospects to campus in 2019-20, and it’s always a treat to watch this former Big East Conference member compete at the world’s most-famous arena.