Former Duke Star Hurley And His Buffalo Team Impress

Two notes from what we like to call sister schools - teams coached by former Duke players. Tommy Amaker's Harvard was upset by Holy Cross, 58-57. More impressively, Bobby Hurley took his Buffalo team to Rupp and came right at Kentucky, actually leading at the half, 38-33.

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Kentucky took the second half, to be sure, but that's incredibly impressive for Buffalo and Hurley.

Incidentally, in John Clay's article, listed below, he says that  Kentucky is"...the team some consider the most talented in the history of college basketball."

Nothing against Kentucky, but we've heard that before. There's really not much debate about this.

Back when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a skinny freshman named Lew Alcindor, and therefore ineligible to play varsity ball, UCLA was the defending national champs.

The freshmen beat them by nearly 20. They went on to lose one game in three seasons, not counting the freshman games, and three national titles. That's a level of dominance that hadn't been seen before and certainly not since.

Kentucky can't match that in today's environment, but to at least contest it they'd need to go undefeated and to dominate. Struggling with Buffalo, and we say this with the greatest possible respect for Bobby Hurley, is not a good recommendation for being the greatest of all time.

And by the way, up at Marquette Wojo won his debut, beating UT-Martin 79-63.

Tuesday will present a much tougher test as Marquette plays at #20 Ohio State.

That's at 7:30 on ESPN2 for proud Duke fans who want to take a peek at Wojo's progress.

• John Clay: Even a team with UK's talent has to play defense
• Kentucky gets first-half scare from Buffalo, then pulls away to win 71-52