College Football Championship Saturday means there’s FREE SPACE ON TEEVEE for hoops!
HELLO AND WELCOME TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP SATURDAY!
It’s a great day on the college basketball calendar, because it means there’s only a handful of Division 1 football games going on. That means lots of free space for college basketball to stretch its legs and take up space on the television schedule.
This year, we’ve got 24 nationally televised games including three women’s games…. and one of those is one of the best games of the day. That’s #22 Louisville and #2 UConn squaring off at Barclays Center in the Champions Classic that Fox smartly put together. The other half of that event is Tennessee vs #17 Iowa, which I’m sure is nice if you’re into that kind of thing. The third women’s game of the day is #6 USC going on the road to face Oregon….. in a league game….. that is broadcast on Big Ten Network.
It’s going to take me a minute to get over that, much like the weirdness of Stanford at Cal on the ACC Network today.
On the men’s side of things, the top game of the day is the very last game of the day. #4 Kentucky, thanks to a deal that the previous coach insisted on, heads to Seattle and Climate Pledge Arena, to face #7 Gonzaga. That’s at 9pm Central on ESPN2, so moderate your caffeine intake as needed.
Marquette/Wisconsin is the only other game with two ranked opponents, but we’ve already said so much about that one, so I’ll highlight #18 Pitt on the road against Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, and we’ll let you get to the schedule to plan your day.
Here’s the full national television schedule for the day! If you bump across something good that’s streaming-only — and there is a lot of it on ESPN+ — then shout it out in the comments for everyone to swing over and check it out.