We finally got college basketball on Wednesday. Sure, it wasn’t as much as we hoped and the marquee game originally expected to highlight the slate (Arizona State-Baylor) didn’t happen, but there was certainly college basketball — and plenty of it.
Was it a normal opening day? Not really, but what’s normal in 2020? We saw players playing in masks, George Washington coach Jamion Christian sporting a Bane-esque mask and Memphis forward D.J. Jeffries initially wearing his jersey backward. That’s just going to come with the territory nowadays.
It had been 258 days since we previously had a Division I college basketball game, so there might be a tendency to make sweeping narratives based on one day of games. We were chomping at the bit, OK?! So whether you want to call these observations or overreactions, here are some things we learned from day one of the 2020-21 college basketball season.