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The Breakfast Buffet: The SEC, Purdue/Michigan, Texas has a big week

Here’s today’s installment of “The Breakfast Buffet”, a daily column that can be found here every single morning getting you caught up to date on everything that’s happened from the day/night before and everything that’s going to happen in the next 24 hours.

Mangia!

Things To Sample

Is this year’s SEC “the best conference ever”?
It’s a fair question considering the fact that we’re a little more than a month away from Selection Sunday and 14 of the SEC’s 16 teams are still firmly in the NCAA Tournament picture. The old Big East owns the record for the most NCAA Tournament bids by a single conference with 11, which happened in 2011. Another thing that’s crazy? There’s still five teams from the SEC — Auburn, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas A&M — that are still firmly in play to be number one seeds in the NCAA Tournament. This year’s SEC boasts strength at the top and strength in its overall depth, which should lead to heavy volume in the 2025 NCAA Tournament.

Purdue/Michigan
Sole possession of first place in the Big Ten standings is on the line tonight when these two teams meet in Ann Arbor. The Boilers won the first meeting this season 91-64 on Jan. 24th in West Lafayette. Matt Painter’s team has quietly won 11 of its last 12 games and is playing its best basketball of the season. Keep a close eye on Purdue’s C.J. Cox and Caleb Furst, who have combined to average 18.0 points and 14.0 rebounds in this team’s last two games.

Texas has a big week
The bad thing about coaching the SEC? Every single league game feels like an NCAA Tournament game. The good thing about coaching the SEC? You have plenty of opportunities to bolster your resume. That’s what lies ahead this week for the Longhorns as Rodney Terry’s squad will host Alabama tonight in Austin and Kentucky on Saturday. That’s a pair of Quad 1 opportunities for Texas — who’s currently 15-9 overall — on its home floor. The Longhorns have lost three of their last four games entering tonight’s matchup with the Crimson Tide.

On The Side

  • Creighton has an all-time record of 4-0 against UConn in Omaha entering tonight’s matchup at the CHI Health Center. Tip off is at 9 PM ET on CBS Sports Network.
  • A salute to Gonzaga’s Ryan Nembhard, who already has more assists this season — 246 — than he had during all of last year when he tallied 243. Nembhard’s current assist-to-turnover ratio this season is a whopping 4.4:1.
  • St. John’s games during the Big East Tournament will now be deemed neutral site games by the NCAA and not home games, as has been the case in the past, a source told College Hoops Today on Monday. This means that all games that the Red Storm play at MSG in the Big East Tournament against opponents who are ranked 1-50 in the NET will be Quad 1 games.
  • Indiana has gone to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament just four times since 1994. Are we really sure that this is still a great job?
  • New Mexico’s Richard Pitino was this week’s guest on the College Hoops Today Podcast.

Daily Specials

  • Auburn at Vanderbilt
  • Tennessee at Kentucky
  • Florida at Mississippi State
  • Purdue at Michigan
  • UConn at Creighton

Leftovers