The major college basketball season begins a week from today with one of those made-for-TV events that should excite everyone who’s long loved the sport.
That’s when the State Farm Champions Classic will tip off at 7 p.m. on ESPN inside Indianapolis’s Bankers Life Field House with top-ranked Kansas facing No. 10 Michigan State followed by No. 4 Duke versus No. 2 Kentucky around 9:30.
As Kentucky coach John Calipari noted in a news release for the event: “The Champions Classic has been the gold standard for college basketball’s regular-season events for the last seven years, but I love what we’re doing to use it to tip off the basketball season.”
Trouble is, among those four schools, Kentucky is the only one that hasn’t found itself dubiously tied to one scandal or another over the past 10 months, and when the Wildcats – whose Hall of Fame coach has had two Final Four appearances erased due to NCAA wrongs at previous employers UMass and Memphis – are your choirboys, you know all you need to know about the current state of college hoops.
To be fair to Duke, its only tie to the current pay-for-play mess regarding shoe giant Adidas is that its most talked-about freshman – 6-foot-6, 270-pound forward Zion Williamson – has been linked to a Kansas assistant inquiring about what financial deals would have to be worked out to sign him.