The first marquee event of the 2025-26 men’s college basketball will take place on Tuesday night with the annual Champions Classic doubleheader featuring No. 12 Kentucky vs. No. 17 Michigan State (6:30 p.m./ESPN) in the opener followed by No. 5 Duke vs. No. 24 Kansas (9 p.m./ESPN) in the nightcap. Madison Square Garden will be the host for the event, which always draws some of the most early season eyeballs for the sport.
Here are four things you need to know before taking in Tuesday night’s showcase doubleheader.
Kansas without Darryn Peterson
The allure of Tuesday night’s doubleheader took a hit with the official announcement that Kansas superstar freshman Darryn Peterson will not play against Duke because of a hamstring strain that he’s been dealing with since the start of the season. The potential No. 1 pick in next June’s NBA Draft averaged 21.5 ppg in KU’s first two contests (a win over Green Bay and a loss to North Carolina), but has been sidelined for the team’s two games since.
The Jayhawks rolled past Texas A&M Corpus-Christi without Peterson, and though their game against Princeton was still too close for comfort early in the second half, they wound up running away and winning by 19. Obviously, Duke isn’t Princeton or Texas A&M-CC.
Without Peterson against the Blue Devils, Kansas’ offensive gameplan becomes difficult to project. When things got dicey against Princeton, Bill Self simply utilized the size on his team that the Ivy Leaguers had no counter for. Center Flory Bidunga took over the game, hitting 10-of-11 shots and scoring a career-high 25 points to go along with 10 rebounds and three blocks. Frontcourt mate Tre White chipped in 18 points thanks in large part to getting to the free-throw line 13 times.
This is an easy button fix that Bill Self simply isn’t going to be able to press against a team that has Cam Boozer, Patrick Ngbonga, Maliq Brown, etc.
Self said before the season that he’d never coached a freshman who was going to be asked to shoulder as much of the scoring load as Peterson was going to be asked this season. That’s all well and good so long as the freshman is both up to the task and 100 percent healthy. Does the Hall of Famer have a pivot up his sleeve that isn’t clear to the non-Hall of Fame eye? We’ll find out shortly.
Can Kentucky bounce back?
It’s rare that any of these teams enter this event with a loss — it also used to be impossible during the years where the double-header was played on the season’s opening night — so when that’s the case, the pressure always feels higher on the team that is looking to avoid taking a second defeat before the arrival of Thanksgiving Week.
That’s the position Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats find themselves in after losing to hated rival Louisville last week in a game where they trailed by as many as 20 points.
Adding to the problem is the fact that point guard Jaland Lowe will not play in the game after re-aggravating the shoulder injury that forced him to miss the first game of the season. UK is still without projected starting center Jayden Quaintance, who continues to recover from the torn ACL injury that cut his freshman season at Arizona State short last February.
Big Blue Nation is notoriously impatient and equally unwilling to hear excuses when the results aren’t going the way they want them to. Losing to Louisville is never acceptable, and the bulk of the fan base has expressed some issues with some of Pope’s public comments since the defeat.
With reports swirling before the start of the season that Kentucky’s roster cost a total of $22 million in NIL, and with proclamations that this might be the deepest Wildcat team in history, there aren’t many excuses you can successfully sell to BBN. A neutral court loss to Michigan State exactly a week after the loss to Louisville would ramp up the early season grumbles in the Bluegrass State several more notches.
Now would be the perfect time for Otega Oweh to play like the All-American he was pegged to be this season.
Duke looking to make an early No. 1 statement
While human voters have spent the first two weeks of the season debating Purdue and Houston for the sport’s No. 1 spot, the computers have been crushing hard on Jon Scheyer’s Duke squad. The Blue Devils currently sit at No. 1 at EvanMiya, and are No. 2 on KenPom and at Bart Torvik.
Is this justified?
Duke started the season with a nice neutral court win over a good but likely not great Texas team, and has since pounded on the mid-major trio of Western Carolina, Army and Indiana State. So, the short answer — as with almost all college basketball questions in mid-November — is who the hell knows.
Even with Darryn Peterson sidelined, a convincing win over Kansas on a big national stage would be the biggest piece of evidence yet that Duke has what it takes to get to the promised land in Scheyer’s fourth season.
Freshman Cameron Boozer is already a certified star who is going to put up eye-popping numbers throughout the year, but if Kansas focuses too much of its attention on Boozer, keep an eye on fellow frosh Dame Sarr. The 6’8 Italian started slow, but has shown some flashes of brilliance in Duke’s last two games.
Guys like Isaiah Evans and Caleb Foster are known commodities at this point who figure to be rock solid for Scheyer throughout the season. The difference between cutting down the nets on the first Monday in April or not could be the evolution of a top-tier NBA talent like Sarr, who has all the skills necessary to step up and takeover in a situation where an opposing team is overly focused on slowing down Boozer. Tuesday night could be his first coming out party.
Is Michigan State for real?
Everyone pretty much had the same preseason read on this Michigan State team: Another solid Tom Izzo squad that would safely make the NCAA Tournament, maybe make it back to the second week, but would never really exist as a legitimate national title threat.
The Spartans have shown signs of having the potential to be more than that over the season’s opening two weeks. They’ve taken care of business against Colgate and San Jose State, and knocked off then-No. 14 Arkansas in one of the better games we’ve seen to date.
The spotlight gets brighter on Tuesday night in an event where the Spartans have been treated like a redheaded step child in recent years. Michigan State is 5-9 all-time in the Champions Classic — the worst mark of the four annual participants — and hasn’t tasted victory in the showcase since a double overtime win over Kentucky in 2022.
The Spartans are 3-0 despite some consistently abysmal shooting from the outside. They arrive in New York shooting just 21.7 percent from beyond the arc as a team, good for 352nd-best out of 365 Division-I teams. Against a Kentucky team that has also had some outside shooting struggles, Tom Izzo would likely not hate if this one becomes a slugfest decided by rebounding and physicality, two areas where the Wildcats struggled in their loss to Louisville.
MSU has held all three of its opponents so far this season below 70 points. While that’s likely not going to happen against an up-tempo and uber-athletic Kentucky team, keeping the Wildcats under or at least close to 80 points feels like it’s of paramount importance if the Spartans want to make an early statement that they’re more of a Final Four threat than anyone thought.
