It was a bizarre sports weekend that began with college basketball upset wins for Western Illinois, Monmouth, William & Mary and Radford.  They were the type of season openers that could only make sense on Friday the 13th.

And as the oddity of outcomes transitioned to Sunday football, with Green Bay losing at home to the lowly Lions and Peyton Manning effectively benching himself, a traditional power in college basketball returned to form.

The Cincinnati Bearcats ripped Robert Morris, winning 106-44.

Robert Morris was a tournament team last season.  However, they only returned four players to this current roster.  (This is also the same Robert Morris program that defeated Willie Caulie-Stein/Kyle Wiltjer’s Kentucky team in the 2013 NIT).

Still, Cincinnati ran circles around the Colonials with 32 team assists for the game.

Chad Brendel is the co-owner of bearcatsjournal.com and was in attendance.  After the game, he was asked by collegebasketballeyetest.com if this was for real.

“Bearcats are very much for real,” Brendel responded.  “Robert Morris not as good as last year, but still (a) decent mid major. (Robert Morris) just got rolled.”

Bearcat fan Walt Merritt agrees.  “(They) passed my eye test — making shots they didn’t make last year.

“(Their) defense struggled in first game but killed it today,” Merritt said.

The Bearcats repeatedly launched 20-something to single digit scoring runs.  The Bearcats shot 53.5% from the field.  Senior Shaq Thomas put a punctuation mark on it all:

Bearcat fans were excited by Mick’s boys taking a track meet approach.  Timmy Hinds watched the game on TV.

“(I was) impressed by how much better shape the bigs are; those guys look so much better and fluid,” Hinds tells @CBBEyeTest on Twitter.

“The maturity of the team is great,” Hinds continued.

Freshmen Jacob Evans and Justin Jenifer played quality minutes.  Jenifer scored 11 and dropped 9 assists in just 16 minutes of action.

The win had some national pundits, like CBS’s Jon Rothstein, demanding a top 25 ranking.  And that’s what you can expect to happen early this coming week.