Kansas Lost a Starter on the Eve of Kentucky. Duke and Michigan State Open the Night.

The Champions Classic does not ease anybody into a season. Four of the biggest names in the sport share one building in Chicago on Tuesday night, all of them 2-0, all of them fresh off a week of home games they won by an average margin of 34 points. Nothing about last week proved anything. Everybody in the United Center knows it.

Then Monday's practice in Lawrence changed the second game.

Kansas has to rebuild its backcourt tonight

Melvin Council Jr. broke the fifth metatarsal in his right foot during practice on Monday. He will have surgery in the next couple of days, and Bill Self does not expect him back before conference play. "We expect a full recovery and we're hopeful he will return around the start of the conference season," Self said. Kansas opens Big 12 play on January 2 at home against West Virginia, which means the Jayhawks run their whole nonconference gauntlet — Kentucky, UNLV, Villanova, UConn and Ohio State — without a starting guard.

Council started both games last week and averaged 8.0 points, 5.0 assists and 3.5 rebounds. The raw line undersells the loss. He was the Big 12 Newcomer of the Year last season, when he started all 35 games and averaged 12.7 points, 5.1 assists and 5.0 rebounds, and he is the adult in a backcourt built around freshman Taylen Kinney. Self's first options are sophomore Leroy Blyden Jr. and senior Keanu Dawes, who played the most bench minutes on Friday. The other option is more of the ball in Tyran Stokes's hands, which is its own storyline.

Stokes is the No. 1 recruit in his class, and in April he picked Kansas over Kentucky. On Tuesday he plays the program he turned down, in the second week of his college career. His line against Middle Tennessee was quiet — eight points, five rebounds and two assists in 21 minutes — because Kansas did not need more from him. Trey Kaufman-Renn, the Purdue transfer making his first start as a Jayhawk, scored 17 points on 7-of-8 shooting in 18 minutes. The Kansas bench scored 46 points. Middle Tennessee, as a team, scored 45.

Kentucky arrives with a grievance of its own, and it is not only the Stokes decision. The Wildcats won both of their games and still slipped a spot in Monday's AP poll, down to No. 24. The opener was easy: Milan Momcilovic scored 24 points and hit six of his nine three-pointers in an 85–57 win over Manhattan. Friday was not easy at all. James Madison pushed Kentucky to 89–80 on Kentucky's home floor before five Wildcats in double figures closed it out, Zoom Diallo and Alex Wilkins scoring 16 apiece. Tuesday is Kentucky's first game away from home this season, and the opponent is the one team on the schedule Mark Pope's players have been hearing about since April. Follow the nightcap in the Game Center.

The opener is a top-five game with a score to settle

Duke's first two games were a demolition tour. The Blue Devils beat Army 84–50 and Coastal Carolina 113–52, the 61-point margin the largest of Jon Scheyer's tenure. Patrick Ngongba II scored a career-high 28 points on 10-of-13 shooting against Coastal, and his 18 points in the first half matched the Chanticleers' entire team output at the break. Cayden Boozer, Duke's freshman point guard, had 11 points and 12 assists against one turnover that night. Through two games Boozer has 15 assists and a single turnover.

Michigan State's point guard has a personal reason to want this one. Jeremy Fears Jr. runs everything for the Spartans — 25 points and 20 assists through two games, including 12 points and nine assists in Thursday's 91–61 win over Toledo. Last December, Duke won at Michigan State, 66–60, and Fears shot 0-for-10 from the field and scored six points. That box score has been sitting in front of him for eleven months.

Around Fears, Michigan State is built to make Duke work. The Spartans have assisted on 44 of their 65 baskets, they are outrebounding teams by 22 a game, and they start a 7-foot-2 center, Charlotte transfer Anton Bonke, who is averaging 10 points and 10 rebounds. Freshman Jasiah Jervis scored 16 with four three-pointers against Toledo — the first Michigan State freshman to start a season opener since Max Christie in 2021. Duke counters with the best defense Michigan State has seen: the Blue Devils have held two opponents to 32.2 percent shooting and forced 41 turnovers. Something bends.

The history leans one way and both coaches know it. Duke leads the series 16–4 and has won the last three meetings. Tom Izzo is 3–15 against Duke in his career; he is also 766–309 in his 32nd season, and his teams have a habit of treating November like a laboratory and March like a deadline. Scheyer is 126–25 in his fifth season and has never lost this matchup. Duke's 34 straight home wins, the longest active streak in the country, stay behind in Durham — the United Center is nobody's home floor. The opener is in the Game Center.

Tuesday does not stop at the United Center

The Classic is the headline act of a loaded night, not the whole of it. No. 1 Florida plays at Florida State at 6 p.m. ET on ESPN2, an hour before the Chicago opener. No. 3 Illinois goes to No. 16 Texas Tech at 8 p.m. ET, and Illinois drags a small piece of history into Lubbock: the Illini scored 232 points across their first two games, the highest two-game total any Big Ten team has ever opened a season with.

By the time the second game ends in Chicago, two of these four programs will own a loss, and all four will own the one thing last week never gave them — a result against a team that can actually beat them.