MURRAY \u2014In the past few years, preseason men\u2019s college basketball has undergone a major change.<\/p>\n
It used to be that teams \u2014 even the so-called \u201cblueblood\u201d programs (Kentucky,\u00a0 North Carolina, UCLA, etc.) \u2014 could only face club outfits (one of the most popular was Athletes in Action) or lower-division college teams from NAIA or NCAA Division 2 or 3. They did not have the D1s play the D1s.<\/p>\n
Now, that does happen, and that is how Murray State is being given a golden opportunity this weekend. The Racers and new Head Coach Ryan Miller are not only facing a \u201creal\u201d team, they are facing one of the best programs in the nation in the past several years, Big East member Xavier, which has made lots of noise in past NCAA Tournaments, including three Elite Eight appearances.<\/p>\n
And now the Racers, with a completely new roster, get to see how far they have come in the offseason and preseason when they meet the Musketeers Saturday afternoon in the Cintas Center in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a true-life game. It\u2019ll be 40 minutes, like any other game would be,\u201d said Miller, whose team\u2019s only other experience with someone other than itself was a three-game set in early August in The Bahamas, where the Racers faced one Bahamas team and last year\u2019s Canadian college runner-up – Calgary – winning all three games by wide margins. \u201cNow, we\u2019re here playing Xavier in an exhibition game and it\u2019s a pretty awesome deal and we\u2019re excited and I know the guys are excited to play someone besides ourselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a chance to get some nervous bugs out of the way and to get into real-life action by facing a team like Xavier, whose been a prominent team for a long time and we want to thank them and (Head) Coach (Richard) Pitino and his staff for helping us put the game together.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is probably no way to know, at this point, how large of a crowd Saturday\u2019s game will attract. However, the potential is in place for a Cintas to be more than a little bit hostile, as it has a reputation for being one of the toughest home-court venues in all of college basketball with room for 10,000 fans, which is very close to the capacity that is slated for the expansion of the Racers\u2019 home \u2014 the CFSB Center \u2014 ahead of the 2026-27 season.<\/p>\n
One very high-profile exhibition game a year ago also shows how these types of games with \u201creal\u201d opponents can create quite an atmosphere. This happened when Kansas, a Big 12 superpower, went to Southeastern Conference giant Arkansas and played in front of a sold-out Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville … for a game that did not count and marked the unofficial debut of new Arkansas Head Coach and former UK skipper John Calipari.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s game has a similar feel. Both teams are being led by new head coaches (Pitino, son of former UK and Louisville head man Rick Pitino is coming from Florida International after a long tenure at Big Ten stalwart Minnesota) and both teams\u2019 rosters have few returners. Murray State, in fact, has none, which is why Miller said opportunities like this are vitally important.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want our guys to play in the bright lights,\u201d said Miller, who is very familiar with X. The past four years, he served as assistant head coach at Big East power Creighton and saw Cintas from a courtside view. \u201cFor those of you who haven\u2019t been there, Cintas is one of the most electric environments in college basketball. Now, I don\u2019t think this will be like a Creighton-Xavier game in February but it\u2019s still going to be important for both of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0Forward C.J. Traynor said he has noticed a strong uptick in intensity as this week approached.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is Game Week now! We\u2019re taking it to another level. We\u2019re treating this as if we\u2019re playing for the Missouri Valley Conference championship,\u201d said Traynor, who, like Miller, also has experience in the Big East. He played last year at DePaul. \u201cAnd it\u2019s exciting, coming from the Big East last year. Xavier has a good team, good school, good history. I\u2019m sure, for the first couple of minutes, there will be a couple of nerves, but after that, we\u2019ll just play our basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
This game is not one of the \u201csecret\u201d scrimmages that have been played over the past several years between D1 programs. Saturday\u2019s game will be played with both teams in game uniforms and usual game-day atmosphere. Secret scrimmages permit no fans to be in the venue and results are kept secret.<\/p>\n
So, with that in mind, Saturday\u2019s game also falls in line with usual gameday coverage for Racer media outlets. The Ledger & Times will have a story in Monday\u2019s paper, but the game can also be heard on Froggy 103.7, starting with pregame at 1 with Voice of the Racers Jeff Bidwell on the call with former Racers assistant Kenny Roth on color. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MURRAY \u2014In the past few years, preseason men\u2019s college basketball has undergone a major change. It used to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99,128693],"class_list":["post-230813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports","tag-xavier-musketeers-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}