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It’s the final Saturday of the regular season, and most races within the power conferences have been decided. Kansas is the outright Big 12 champion. Purdue is the outright Big Ten champion. Alabama is the outright SEC champion. Marquette is the outright Big East champion. UCLA is the outright Pac-12 champion.
The only power conference still up for grabs? That’s the ACC — where Miami, Virginia and Pitt are tied atop the league standings with 14-5 conference records. Virginia is hosting an unimaginably bad Louisville team on Saturday, meaning the Cavaliers will almost certainly move to 15-5 in the ACC and share the league title with the winner of Saturday’s game between Pitt and Miami that’s scheduled to tip at 6 p.m. ET on the ACC Network.
“If anybody [would’ve] told me and [Pitt] coach [Jeff] Capel [before the season] that we’d be playing for the championship of the regular season [in] the last game of the year, I think we’d both be pretty happy with that,” said Miami coach Jim Larranaga.
Undeniably, that’s true.
Miami is listed as a 6.5-point favorite over a Pitt team that’s ranked 55th in the NET, 65th at KenPom.com and 76th at BartTorvik.com. The Panthers have lost six games outside of the first quadrant, which is among the reasons they’re a 10-seed in Jerry Palm’s latest projected bracket for the 2023 NCAA Tournament. Regardless, Pitt remains just one win away from winning its first ACC regular-season title. Miami is trying to win its second while Virginia is on the verge of securing its 11th.
Miami is No. 19 and Virginia is No. 20, respectively, in Saturday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings,…
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