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Every weekday, a panel of our college hoops experts discusses the biggest issues, trends and themes in and around college basketball.
1. VCU and Villanova won't be getting too many shots at ranked opponents during the regular season. So does this head-to-head matter a little more?
Andy Katz: Yes. This is one of the better predetermined semifinals in a holiday tournament. The Legends Classic got this one right. Both teams have legit chances to advance into the second weekend in March. Look for who can't handle the pressure late in the game to be the loser here. Teams that can press don't usually like to have it done to them.
Eamonn Brennan: A little more, sure. Even at this early date, both teams look like eventual NCAA tournament locks. Still, a nonconference win like this would be a strong addition to the résumé for either team, both of which play in conferences that will offer just a handful of genuine opportunities over the course of the 2014-15 regular season.
C.L. Brown: At the very least, it will put a little more pressure on the team that loses this meeting to obtain a nonconference marquee win down the line. Both schools will have an opportunity, with VCU facing Virginia and Nova getting Syracuse.
2. Kansas returns to action after getting throttled by Kentucky. If you were Bill Self, would you have harped on what happened against the Wildcats or tried to forget about it?
Katz: Erase it. The Jayhawks won't meet another team with the same amount of size or depth. Texas has a few bigs who are comparable, but not in mass numbers. Kansas needs to get back to the hustle plays it had early in the game, make better decisions and continue to be aggressive. The Jayhawks will be fine.
Brennan: Back in Indianapolis, Bill Self didn't seem quite sure how he would approach his embarrassed team when it got back to campus. The Jayhawks would revisit the game tape, Self said, but whether they would do so once or several times (the more punitive of the two options, no doubt) was up for debate. Odds are Self came down somewhere in the middle: Yes, Kentucky was really good, but the scattered young Jayhawks did so many things wrong, there had to be a few valuable lessons to extract in the postmortem.
Brown: You can't let one game ruin a season. I would have gone over key breakdowns in execution that happened in the game, but other than that, I wouldn't mention Kentucky at all. The Jayhawks don't need to be reminded that they didn't play well.
3. What holiday tournament is the most interesting to you?
Katz: The best is Battle 4 Atlantis. But the Orlando Classic offers up an intriguing storyline. Kansas now has to get past a surprising team in Rhode Island and Michigan State would need to advance beyond a suddenly relevant Georgia Tech. The path to an expected KU-MSU final Sunday is suddenly not as clear.
Brennan: I'm not sure the Maui Invitational has the strongest field of the bunch, but as we scan the horizon for potential UK killers, it's going to be very interesting to see how Arizona performs against the batch of solid-to-good opponents in the Lahaina Civic Center. Arizona has looked great in its three-game home open, but none of those three games (Mount St. Mary's, Cal St. Northridge, UC Irvine) will be nearly as revealing as a potential matchup with San Diego State.
Brown: The Battle 4 Atlantis is the best and the most interesting because of how much we'll potentially learn. There's Butler, Georgetown and UCLA. All enter largely untested and could catapult into the Top 25 with strong showings. There's Florida and Oklahoma trying to re-establish themselves after unexpected defeats. UAB is the only participant that seems overmatched, and there's no guarantee that we'll see a North Carolina-Wisconsin final.
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