The final day of 2022 delivered two incredible and drama-filled College Football Playoff games. Congrats to Georgia and TCU. Their victories over Ohio State and Michigan, respectively, dominated the sports conversation, deservedly so.
But it was also a pretty great day of college basketball.
From late morning deep into New Year’s Eve, there was one fun game after another — among them Xavier’s 83-73 win over UConn that dropped Dan Hurley’s Huskies from the list of undefeated teams and in Sunday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, where Purdue remains No. 1 for the 22nd consecutive day.
UConn is now No. 3 — just behind No. 2 Houston and just ahead of No. 4 Arizona and No. 5 Kansas. In my opinion, those four schools, at this point, could reasonably be placed in any order. But I do believe those are the four schools that should follow Purdue when the Associated Press Top 25 poll updates Monday, and I suspect that they will.
I honestly had a tough time deciding what to do with No. 26.
There are a lot of sensible options — among them Kansas State, Auburn, West Virginia, Marquette, Florida Atlantic and Iowa State. But I opted to give that spot to Jamie Dixon’s TCU Horned Frogs, who are 12-1 and on a 10-game winning streak after Saturday’s 67-61 victory over Texas Tech. Yes, I know, TCU has a horrific loss on its resume — specifically a 64-63 loss to Northwestern State that qualifies as a Quadrant 4 defeat. Yuck. But the circumstances surrounding that loss should matter, and the circumstances are that TCU played that game without leading scorer Mike Miles Jr. and third-leading scorer Damian Baugh. In other words, the Horned Frogs were missing two big pieces in that contest. Had they had them, or even just one of them, it’s reasonable to assume TCU would still be undefeated like Purdue and New Mexico.
Top 25 And 1 rankings
IN: TCU | OUT: West Virginia