Hunter Dickinson totally tried to kick that dude in the face

And everything else — Should we be worried about Dan Hurley? Is Indiana just a football school now? Should you freak about the NET? — worth reflecting on from a manic Feast Week

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Feast Week is among the best weeks of the college basketball season, but it has exactly one downside: It’s Feast Week. Even if you are in that 20’s sweet spot where you’re just hanging out for Thanksgiving, going home to your parents’ with zero responsibilities, it can be hard to prioritize religious college basketball viewing above, you know, focusing on the most important people in your life. (Of course it can be done. We would know.)

Once you get older and get married and have kids and start hosting family for Thanksgiving yourself, though? Man. They never tell you how time-consuming this stuff is! The whole week is a mad logistical dash. The work never really stops. It’s incredible, of course; nothing is quite as satisfying as pulling together a fun holiday weekend for your loved ones, people who traveled hundreds of miles just to be with you. But in terms of actually sitting down and watching basketball — rather than just sneaking a quick glance from the kitchen while your children and their cousins run circles around your house between sudden last-minute runs to Safeway for vanilla extract — it’s hard to be totally locked in. Sacrifice is required.

Despite it all, we managed to squeeze in a robust amount of college hoops last week, and have since caught up on anything we might have missed, and so we’re ready to run through some big takeaways here — beginning with what feels like the most obvious Feast Week take one could possibly have:

Hunter Dickinson 100 percent tried to kick Maliq Brown in the head

There was a lot of shocked reaction — both on the broadcast and online — when Kansas star center Hunter Dickinson was assessed a flagrant 2 and ejected from Kansas’s eventual 75-72 win over Duke in Las Vegas Tuesday. A lot of folks seemed to think the action was marginal, likely accidental, and not worth ending Dickinson’s night over. Wrong. Watch it again:

Come on. Dickinson might be occasionally awkward, as star basketball players go; that’s part of being a lumbering interior-oriented 7-footer. But on the athletic spectrum, Dickinson probably ranks, what, 98th percentile worldwide? Respectfully: You, dear reader, don’t control your body anywhere remotely as well as he does. You, dear reader, would also never have done what Dickinson did with his foot at the end of this possession. Nobody with this level of total body strength and athletic coordination accidentally rakes their foot over another player’s face in this position, with this amount of time to avoid doing so. It was glaringly intentional, and Dickinson was rightly sent to the locker room. (Even if it took the refs like 10 minutes to realize he was still on the bench, like a defiant child you send to timeout who sits on the stairs instead of going to their room.)

If the kick was the only thing you saw, maybe you could have had some doubt. Maybe it was accidental! But in the context of the preceding play, you can see Dickinson getting visibly frustrated with Brown — who has been a revelation for Duke as a switchable pest of a defender — to the point of nearly elbowing him in the head twice before the shot attempt that turned into a scuffle. Context matters. Dickinson’s context, as a 24-year-old in his fifth year of a college basketball career with whom everyone in the game is extremely familiar, is that he is sometimes a petulant dick. This is usually a fun thing about him. Dickinson gives great, unabashed quotes about rival fans, and happily plays his role as a villain, all of which is good for the sport. But if you’re a referee trying to divine intent in this situation, you can’t help but realize the player you’re assessing is Hunter Freaking Dickinson. Of course he meant it.

Kansas still won anyway

After an interminable wait — literally the longest officiating discussion we can remember — the Dickinson ejection came with 10:26 left in the second half. The fact that Kansas won that game anyway, despite losing their most productive player with so much time left on the clock in a close game, was yet another testament to the genius of Bill Self.