South Dakota at Northern Arizona, 8:30 PM, watchbigsky.com/pluto.tv
Flagstaff, Arizona is the site of tonight’s Under the Radar Game of the Day as the Big Sky’s Northern Arizona Lumberjacks play host to the Summit League’s South Dakota Coyotes. The host Lumberjacks enter tonight’s game at only 2-8 on the season, with just a single D1 win, and a head-scratching loss to non-D1 Embry Riddle, on their resume. NAU is ranked 337th out of 351 teams at kenpom.com. Despite their struggles, the Lumberjacks do have a surprisingly solid road win at Bakersfield back on December 2, when Chris Bowling’s 17 points helped pace NAU to a 60-52 victory.
The reason that this game was selected as today’s Game of the Day (aside from the overall weakness of the schedule tonight) was because it does present a road test for one of the Summit League’s top contenders, South Dakota. The Coyotes are 9-3 on the year with two of those three losses having come at Duke and at TCU (the third was to Northern Colorado). South Dakota has picked up blowout home wins over Grambling (the team that beat Georgia Tech) and Drake (the team that just fell to Minnesota by a single point this week). Junior Matt Mooney has put up some solid numbers, including a 30 point effort against UMKC, while Trey Burch-Manning has a chance to be explosive, including an strong 18 point and 14 rebound effort against Southern Miss. Also keep an eye on Tyler Hagedorn who has been inn double digits in scoring 8 times this season. The Coyotes have the depth and talent to make some serious noise, and picking up a true road win tonight will continue to help this team build towards the start of conference play just over two weeks from now.
OTHER NOTABLE GAMES
-VALPARAISO AT NORTHWESTERN. Valpo has dropped two straight after getting out to an 8-0 start, which were really the only two decent teams they’ve played. a win tonight would be huge. Northwestern got off to somewhat of a slow start but they appear to be turning things around and this would certainly continue that turnaround.
-Texas Southern @ Baylor – buy game
-Santa Clara @ USC – buy game