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-SMU is at Tulane tonight. They really need to put together a long string of wins to catch back up to the pack. Buffalo is also at Eastern Michigan, which we thought was going to be a good game back in November when we thought Eastern Michigan could contend for the division title in the MAC, but Eastern Michigan hasn’t been all that impressive so far.
Last night was just a bad night for a lot of teams.
-In the Big Ten Wisconsin went down for the second straight time as they lost at home to Minnesota. Minney deserves quite a bit of credit for a really nice road win, but it’s the kind of game you would expect Wisky to be able to win.
-Iowa went to Purdue, and got blasted. A really good showing by a Boilermakers team that seems to really be hitting its stride, but at the same time a discouragingly poor performance by the Hawkeyes.
It was also a bad night for a lot of UTR teams
-Old Dominion, who had two really nice OOC wins, lost at home in their conference opener to Marshall.
-Wright State, who returned six of their top seven players, was blown out at Detroit. Now to be fair they’ve dealt with injuries, but still. They were blown out. At Detroit. And have been disappointing all year
-Northern Kentucky was the only Horizon League team that had looked even halfway decent during the OOC. They lost their conference opener at Oakland.
-Belmont, who we were HUGE on after what they had done during the OOC, lost their conference opener at home to Jacksonville State.
-New Mexico State, who we liked so much that we thought they had a really good shot at running the table in the WAC lost their conference opener to Cal Baptist, who is in their first year as a transitional team. Ouch!
-And last but not least (or maybe it IS least), the highlight/lowlight of last night involved Samford at East Tennessee State. These are two SoCon teams that did really well OOC. The game was fantastic and saw Samford keep it close and come from behind to force overtime. The officiating…not so much. During a timeout, referee Karl Hess aggressively approached (that’s the best way to put it) Samford coach Scott Padgett in a way that you really only see when someone intends to start a fight. Now as a singular incident, it’s not good, but it’s not THAT big of a deal. But this isn’t the first time Karl Hess has done something stupid while refereeing a game. You may recall back in 2015 the ACC opted to never use him again after he yelled an ethnic slur at a Wake Forest fan who was in the stands, and who just happened to be a former member of Wake’s Board of Trustees. What he said to the fan was quoted to be “When I’m older, I want to sit in your seat and watch your Egyptian ass ref a game.” The fan was not Egyptian, BTW. He was Asian. So the whole thing was both totally stupid and totally bizarre. You may also recall several years before that he ejected two NC State fans who were also former players from a game for no real reason, and after that little episode the ACC opted to not let him referee the conference tournament. Well, he’s gone from yelling at fans at ACC games to charging at coaches at SoCon games. Which raises the question….why is Karl Hess still a referee?? (So he could eject Tim Miles from an NCAA Tournament game – JS)