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Only one Pac-12 school is in the CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings in this final year with the league as we know it. UCLA has been a mess for much of this season. USC is worse. The byproduct is that the Pac-12 is merely registering as the sport’s sixth-best conference with five weeks left before Selection Sunday.
It’s not all bad, though.
There are some good teams. And two of them delivered an instant-classic late Thursday, a triple-overtime thriller that took 55 minutes to decide.
Final score: Arizona 105, Utah 99.
Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats led by 16 points at halftime on the road, squandered all of that and actually trailed in the final minutes of regulation and during the first OT period before using a 9-0 run in the third overtime to pull away and record a sixth Quadrant 1 victory.
“We made one or two small adjustments in the third overtime,” Lloyd said.
With the win, Arizona is up to No. 7 in Friday morning’s updated Top 25 And 1, which pushed Kansas and Dayton down one spot each, no fault of their own. The Wildcats are 18-5 overall and 9-3 in the Pac-12 with eight regular-season games remaining. They’re one game ahead of Washington State and Oregon in the Pac-12 standings with home games against both left on the schedule. That’s among the reasons Arizona is projected to ultimately win the league by multiple games, giving Lloyd his second conference championship in just his third year as a head coach after spending the previous 22 seasons as an assistant at Gonzaga.
Top 25 And 1 rankings
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