USATSI
LAS VEGAS — This weekend has lots of interesting games on the schedule — among them Tennessee vs. Memphis, Gonzaga vs. Texas Tech and Baylor vs. Oregon. But, at this point, who knows how many will actually be played?
Things are once again changing by the hour because COVID-19 is once again wreaking havoc on sports. Breakthrough cases are sidelining players from coast to coast. Medical officials have now placed at least 16 different college basketball programs on what amounts to a COVID-19 pause this season. Two of them are UCLA and Ohio State. So the CBS Sports Classic that was supposed to be a doubleheader featuring UCLA vs. North Carolina and Ohio State vs. Kentucky on Saturday here inside T-Mobile Arena will now be a standalone game between UNC and UK.
That showdown will tip at 5:30 p.m. ET.
It should be great.
But, man, most of us would be lying if we said we expected things to get this bumpy this quickly. Everything is a mess right now. Hopefully what we’re currently dealing with is the worst of it and not something that complicates things through the end of the season. But anybody insisting that’s 100% going to be the case is just guessing. There’s simply no way to know for sure.
Either way, for now, we’ll just take what we can get — which, on Friday, is only one game that includes a school featured in the CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings. Villanova is No. 9 in Friday morning’s updated Top 25 And 1. The Wildcats are playing at Creighton in a contest scheduled to tip at 8 p.m. ET.
