FloHoops Feast Week absurdity continues, 2024-25 edition

For those unfamiliar, I wrote a recent history of the FloHoops Feast Week last year, but in short: FloHoops is the preferred streaming network of most prominent Thanksgiving tournaments, known best for being extraordinarily expensive ($30 per month, 2.5 times as much as ESPN+) and having mediocre quality control. Countless games between otherwise interesting teams go unwatched every Thanksgiving as a result of this uninviting combination, surprise blowouts and historic thrillers alike falling by the wayside, with unusual and inexplicable results flourishing.

Last year’s forgotten moments included LSU barely beating a Virginia team that later got bounced in the WBIT second round, Caitlin Clark’s flagrant frustration foul and a shootout between Stanford and Florida State that used the wrong 3-point line.

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This week wasn’t quite as crazy as seasons past; no top-20 teams got swept by unranked teams in a beachside tournament, which is something that actually happened in two of the previous three years. Instead, fans saw TCU’s breakout, which by the law of transitive wins means that USC is maybe not a top-15 team anymore. Fans also have Duke’s offense apparently being among the best in the country. And there’s Washington, Big Ten contender.

But more on that later. Because the true highlight of the 2024-25 FloHoops Feast Week, a phrase I will keep repeating for SEO reasons, was the Puerto Rico Shootout (an event formerly known as the San Juan Shootout). The event featured a number of fun bubble teams, including Drake, Virginia, Norfolk State, Green Bay and Wazzu. Also, Wyoming was there. The results, not in chronological order, were as follows:

• Drake beat Wazzu, lost to Green Bay and Wyoming
• Green Bay beat Drake and Norfolk State, lost to Virginia
• Virginia beat Green Bay, lost to Wazzu and Wyoming
• Wazzu beat Virginia and Norfolk State, lost to Drake
• Norfolk State beat Wyoming, lost to Green Bay and Wazzu
• Wyoming beat Drake and Virginia, lost to Norfolk State

That’s multiple circles of suck, if you’re taking notes.

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To demonstrate the goofiness of FloHoops Feast Week in its totality, I am going to attempt to square the circle of recent games. I am going to continuously roll a boulder up the hill that is making sense of these incoherent post-midterms collegiate vacations. I present a top 25, almost exclusively taking into account results since Thanksgiving tournaments started last Saturday. (This includes games that weren’t part of the tournaments themselves just for simplicity’s sake.)

1. UCLA — beat South Carolina.
2. TCU — beat Notre Dame and demolished USF by almost the exact score UConn did a couple weeks earlier.
3. Duke — beat Oklahoma, while scoring 109 points, and Kansas State.
4. South Carolina — held Iowa State to 36 points, its lowest scoring output in over 12 years, per Her Hoop Stats, which is very funny but decidedly less impressive than what the Frogs or Devils did.
5. UConn — beat Mississippi by 13, which is good, but also beat Oregon State by the same margin that Illinois and Arizona State did, which is less good.
6. North Carolina — demolished Indiana and pretty good Villanova and Ball State teams.
7. K-State — lost to Duke but had a better point differential than the Sooners against the same opponents.
8. Oklahoma — lost to Duke in overtime.
9. Texas.
10. Mississippi State — transitive win over Notre Dame.
11. Utah — actual win over Notre Dame, loss to the Bulldogs.
12. Indiana — beat Baylor before getting mollywopped by the Tar Heels.
13. Notre Dame — beat USC before losing to TCU and Utah.
14. LSU — beat NC State.
15. NC State — lost to LSU.
16. Washington — lost to LSU by only one point but had a worse point differential than the Wolfpack against the same opponents.
17. USC — lost to Notre Dame.
18. Ohio State.
19. Kentucky — beat Illinois.
20. Illinois — beat the Beavers by the same margin as UConn, lost to Kentucky.
21. Georgia Tech — beat South Dakota State and Oregon.
22. West Virginia.
23. Iowa State — beat Drake and MTSU, who are both good teams, and also scored only 36 points against South Carolina, dear god.
24. Mississippi.
25. Columbia — lost to Indiana and beat Ball State.

Honorable mention to South Dakota State and Iowa.

Every team in its right place, makes perfect sense to me.

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