Next Tuesday, November 6 is the opening night for college basketball. I looked on ESPN’s website and there are a ton of teams playing that night. Does anyone know why MA didn’t schedule an easy home game next Tuesday so that they would have a “real” game under their belt before playing Texas on November 9?
What is the status of Jordan Phillips? Is he practicing? Will he be available against Texas?
Thanks in advance.
Not totally sure on the first question. Jordan Phillips, though, as of late last week, got released to begin more aggressive rehab and started jogging a bit, according to Mike Anderson. He added that Phillips’ progress has been very positive to this point.
I’ll shoot a text and found out on the schedule.
With 18 conference games, Arkansas is allowed to have 13 non-conference games on the schedule.
This is the first that the NCAA has allowed teams to open on a Tuesday instead of the normal Friday.
One of those non-conference games is in Jan with the Big 12/SEC Challenge.
So that leaves 12 non-conference games to be played between Nov. 6 or Nov. 9 and Jan. 5 when SEC play starts.
Basically 12 games in 60 days.
Plus the exempt games - put in place with the Puerto Rico thing fell through - have to be played in a span of 14 days.
So they could have played Nov. 6 and had a game in their pocket for the Nov. 9 game with Texas in El Paso.
But it was decided it would be better to start on the Nov. 9 and go through the schedule and remove as many long gaps between games as they could
Thanks Scottie and DD. I appreciate your responses.
The change to the Nov. 6 start date came after Arkansas and Texas had already scheduled this game. The Razorbacks always planned for this to be their season opener. They are going to El Paso at least two days early to do some community events leading up to the game.
Thanks Matt.