Look, this is what the schedule was when I went to bed on Friday, okay?
I had some free time on Thursday, so I popped open the Saturday schedule for college basketball and knocked together the Google Sheet that generates the schedule table you’ll see a bit down the page. Ah, yes, the busy work for this Saturday tradition all done with.
And then the rest of Thursday kept happening, and then all of a sudden there were a lot of games that were no longer taking place due to COVID protocols.
Timing wise, that’s not surprising. Teams that need to travel for a Saturday game are going to make a call on Thursday afternoon as to whether or not they’re traveling at some point during the day on Friday. This all makes sense, and the cancellations have been appropriately removed from the schedule.
However, as you can see from the publishing time at the top of the page, this article wasn’t written and published at the same time. I’m just letting you know, if somehow a game gets canceled between about 10pm Friday night and whenever it happens on Saturday, it’s probably still going to be in the schedule. I’d apologize for the error, but I’m not actually making a mistake, y’know?
ANYWAY
I believe the main event of the day on the men’s side is Gonzaga and Texas Tech squaring off in Phoenix for some reason. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the only nationally televised game with two ranked teams squaring off. There’s also two top 10 teams on the women’s side butting heads in the afternoon, and that is a standard issue home game for Tennessee as they host Stanford.
There’s also an HBCU showcase event going on in Newark. Not only are the two games in that event getting on national television, which is great for the teams involved, but they’re going to be broadcast on TNT. I think it’s very cool of TNT to do that AND I think it’s good for the sport for Turner Sports to start broadcasting some regular season basketball games since they have half of the NCAA tournament contract.
Here’s the full schedule of events for the day! All times Central as always.