Full Court Toga Party

by E. Spencer Kyte
Love of Sports Correspondent

Maybe you haven’t noticed, what with all the mid-week NFL action, the NBA in full swing, college football winding down and some game being played on ice, but the college hoops season is underway too.

We’re only four months away from March Madness! Forget counting down the days until Christmas, gimme a ticker telling me how many more sleeps until the play-in game…

Anyway…

With only a handful of games in the books, I wanted to take a chance to break in a new segment I’ll be delivering here at The Love of Sports.

Full Court Toga Party will be where I deliver all kinds of insightful nuggets about the NCAA Men’s Basketball season. In the spirit of our favorite shot, the three-point dagger, I’ll be dropping three key points each time throughout the season. Won’t you come along?

I could go real easy and give you three kids to keep an eye on this season, but you’re all smarter than that. Besides, if you don’t know about the likes of Blake Griffin, Stephen Curry or some kid named Hansborough as of yet, you really, really missed the bus.

Instead, I’ll give you three teams I feel strongly about this season, two good, one bad and we’ll call episode one a wrap.

Here we go…

Beware the Blue Devils

As a UNC guy, this pains me to no end. I know you know that Duke is always good. What they haven’t been lately is deep, usually running with two, maybe three subs seeing significant minutes. This year, try ten deep. If a starter goes down anywhere else, it’s major problem. At Duke, it still sucks, but not nearly as badly as say if Oklahoma lost BG. How good could the Blue Devils be this year? Greg Paulus, the guy who has started at point every year he’s been with Coach K, is going to be coming off the bench thanks to Nolan Smith.

Gonzaga Gonzoing to Be Gonzood!

Give them the West Coast Conference Title right now. No one in the conference is going to touch them. That much I guarantee you. What is going to make them even more dangerous than previous years is the continued development of Jeremy Pargo who just so happens to be the reigning WCC Player of the Year, the emergence of Austin Daye (13.7 & 8.7 per so far) and Josh Heytvelt returning from being a complete idiot who nearly wasted his considerable talents to become the presence coach Mark Few always expected him to be.

The Run is Over for UCLA

They’ve been so good for so long that it’s hard to predict anything but a Final Four appearance for the Bruins, but something tells me this team is going to have a letdown of a season and that was before they lost to Michigan. The depth just isn’t there this season and I can’t for the life of me figure out who is going to rebound the ball consistently on this team. The Pac-10 a tough conference, ASU looks solid, Arizona is always good and USC will get better as the season goes on. UCLA will still make a trip to the Big Dance, but they’ll be going home earlier than normal.