NCAA Basketball: Keegan Murray, UVA struggles among key takeaways

Great basketball outside the power conferences

Unless they are a fan of Pepperdine or Presbyterian, most college basketball fans do not have the proper motivation to watch the majority of their games. In most cases, it has nothing to do with being a casual fan, it is more of a time restriction. With 61 box scores available on ESPN.com on Monday Night, getting through them is an impressive feat, let alone watching all of them. The bottom line is, you do not have to wait for a top-25 matchup, or even for mid-tier power conference opponents to meet up, you have great basketball everywhere.

On Monday, Belmont defeated Furman in overtime 95-89 in a game that featured 16 ties and 16 lead changes and had six players score fourteen points or higher.  The West Coast Conference and the Western Athletic Conference met up as Utah Valley defeated Pepperdine in overtime 86-74. A game that saw Pepperdine hold a twelve-point lead, but also saw Fardaws Aimaq score 34 points.

Wednesday featured Texas A&M-Corpus Christi getting 17 fast breakpoints and Jalen Jackson scoring 19 as the Islanders defeated Denver 69-67. One should never mistake a close basketball game for a good basketball game, but these non-power conference teams are indeed playing good basketball and even in losses such as the two-point loss Hofstra suffered at Maryland, the Pride – whose seventh man played just nine minutes – managed 27 points off of Terrapins’ turnovers. If that is not the prime example of a quality mid-major team outplaying a power conference team then you are not paying attention.