It wasn’t long after Duke had pushed through Friday’s win against Seattle that coach Jon Scheyer lamented a missing piece of the Blue Devils’ recent schedule.
“We need practice time,” Scheyer said.
It’s a plight facing a lot of ranked teams that criss-crossed the country to play in top-tier tournaments and made-for-TV matchups, particularly around the Thanksgiving holiday. There’s been little time to adjust or refine weaknesses, and it could stand out this week in a series of marquee matchups that will give the sport a bigger spotlight as the football regular season winds down.
The big night on the AP Top 25 schedule comes Wednesday, when No. 2 Auburn visits Scheyer’s ninth-ranked Blue Devils at famously rowdy Cameron Indoor Stadium in the ACC/SEC Challenge. That follows another big matchup a short drive down the road where each of the teams’ instate rivals — No. 10 Alabama and No. 20 North Carolina, respectively — meet in a rematch from the NCAA Sweet 16.
“A lot of responsibility comes with all the notoriety,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said Monday. “We get an opportunity to go play one of the best teams in the country in probably one of the toughest environments.”
And those teams all have racked up the mileage of late.
The Tigers, who seriously cut into unbeaten Kansas’ hold on No. 1 in Monday’s latest poll, are coming off a three-game run to the Maui Invitational title. The Blue Devils won at then-ranked Arizona on Nov. 22, then stayed out west before losing to the Jayhawks last Tuesday in Las Vegas.
The Crimson Tide also played three games in Vegas at the Players Era Festival, while the Tar Heels — who have already played at Kansas — visited Hawaii on the way to joining the Tigers in Maui. The Tar Heels lost to Auburn and Michigan State in that tournament, leaving coach Hubert Davis sounding a bit like Scheyer.
“When you play four games in six days or three games in three days, you don’t get a chance to practice,” Davis told reporters Monday. “You’re preparing. Maybe some of the discipline and details and things you work on in practice, you don’t have time to talk about or reinforce because you’re preparing for the next game.”
The schedule is loaded Wednesday night outside of North Carolina, too — and it represents just a start for fifth-ranked Marquette’s demanding week. The Golden Eagles (8-0) first visit No. 6 Iowa State, then have an instate home game against 11th-ranked Wisconsin on Saturday.
It’s another high-profile week for Marquette guard Kam Jones, who has elevated his game with career highs in scoring (19.6), shooting percentage (.653), 3-point percentage (.455), rebounding (4.6) and assists (6.3). Jones was last week’s AP national men’s college basketball player of the week after he had a triple-double to help Marquette beat then-No. 6 Purdue.
Two-time reigning national champion UConn is coming off an 0-3 showing in Maui that dropped them 23 spots to No. 25 in Monday’s poll. Things don’t get much easier, either, with Wednesday’s visit from No. 15 Baylor.
UConn had won 17 straight games before falling to Memphis in the Maui opener. They rolled past Maryland-Eastern shore on Saturday at home, but next welcome the Bears for a matchup of top-flight offenses: UConn is sixth in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency (120.8 points scored per 100 possessions), while Baylor is eighth (120.5).
Kentucky, which jumped four spots to No. 4 on Monday, gets a weekend test with Saturday’s trip to Seattle to face No. 7 Gonzaga in front of an instate crowd.
This is the third meeting in a six-game series announced in 2022, which included matchups for each team with a home-region backing (next year’s meeting is in Nashville, Tennessee). They close the series with matchups at each team’s home arena in the 2026-27 and 2027-28 seasons.
Kansas plays two road games this week as it aims to maintain the No. 1 perch it has held since preseason.
The first comes Wednesday against Creighton, which started the year ranked 15th but fell out of Monday’s poll after a recent three-game skid. Then comes Sunday’s trip to Border War rival Missouri, the Southeastern Conference school that formerly was alongside the Jayhawks in the Big Eight and Big 12.
There’s a crop of power-conference teams hovering just outside the poll in Michigan State, Arkansas, Texas, Michigan and Arizona State.
Of that group, the Longhorns have the biggest game that could vault them back into the poll. After visiting N.C. State in the ACC/SEC Challenge on Wednesday, the Longhorns host UConn on Sunday.
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AP Sports Writer John Zenor in Alabama contributed to this report.
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