This was supposed to be the season where the madness was, relatively speaking, minimized. Much like two years ago, the sport’s super powers were going to dominate the regular season, and then the beautiful four-month journey would end with a star-studded Final Four in Phoenix.
College basketball’s regular season was supposed to be predictable. Instead, it’s chaos.
The more things change, the more impossible it gets to accurately forecast anything that’s going to happen in college basketball.
Thomas J. Russo-USA TODAY Sports
Instead, here we are, once again dealing with a lopsided proportion of questions to answers as we prepare to dive headfirst into the heart of conference play. We aren’t dealing with the historic number of ranked upsets that we were last year, but that doesn’t mean the national landscape is any less muddied than it was at this time 12 months ago.
Let’s start pulling the thread by examining the nation’s only two remaining unbeatens, Baylor and Gonzaga.
The Bears began the season without receiving a single vote in the first two AP or coaches’ polls, but now find themselves a win over Oklahoma State on Saturday away from becoming college basketball’s new No. 1 team. Baylor hasn’t been to a Final Four since 1950, but Scott Drew’s team has the best resume in the entire country after two months of play.
Gonzaga, which has still never been to a Final Four, began the season ranked No. 14 by the AP, and accumulated quality wins over Iowa State, Arizona and Florida before beginning play in the West Coast Conference. The biggest obstacle in the path they’ll take from here to March is (at least) two games against archrival Saint Mary’s. The Gaels are ranked 19th thanks to a sparkling 12-1 record, but that one defeat remains one of the most bizarre of the season — a 65-51 home thumping at the hands of UT-Arlington.
Baylor’s potential ascent to No. 1 was made possible by reigning national champion Villanova’s Wednesday night loss to Butler: ‘Nova’s first defeat of any kind since last year’s Big East championship game on March 12. The fact that the defeat came at the hands of Butler is appropriate for this discussion, since Chris Holtmann’s team has perhaps the most Jekyll and Hyde body of work to date. The Bulldogs have dropped games to Indiana State and lowly St. John’s, but are a perfect 4-0 against teams ranked in the top 25. For comparison’s sake, Butler’s four wins against teams ranked in Ken Pomeroy’s top 30 are twice as many as the SEC has as an entire conference.
Speaking of the SEC, that brings us to Kentucky. The Wildcats might be the team in the country most capable of beating a quality opponent by 50, but there’s a major issue with their resume, as well. UK has a quality win over North Carolina in arguably the season’s best game to date, but against the other two quality non-conference opponents on their early schedule — UCLA and Louisville — the Cats came up short.
With their wins over Michigan State and Arizona State not seeming as impressive as one might have predicted in October — and with the SEC appearing to have no other legitimate Final Four (or maybe even second weekend) contender — there is a serious chance that if they lose to Kansas later this month, Kentucky could head to Selection Sunday with only one really sparkling win on their resume. That wouldn’t make them any less of a national title contender, but it could make it hard for them to earn a No. 1 seed, especially if they have a slip-up or two in conference play.
Kentucky and Villanova are the second and third teams to lose while wearing the No. 1 crown this season, so now let’s talk about the first one.
Duke entered 2016-17 as the near unanimous preseason favorite to win the national title, and had more than a few people claiming that they could be a "superteam" that had its way with the rest of the ACC. That hasn't been the case, as the Blue Devils have been forced to deal with lingering injuries to three members of their top-ranked 2016 recruiting class. First, an indefinite/one-game suspension for preseason Player of the Year/habitual tripper Grayson Allen, and now a leave of absence for Mike Krzyzewski that will leave Jeff Capel to coach the team for the next month. Along the way there have been stumbles to Kansas and Virginia Tech, as well as the loss of the notion that this team could potentially roll to a 16-2 or 17-1 regular season conference record.
The reason for that lack of faith is the strength of the ACC, but even that hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. On the first night of conference play, Boston College won its first conference game in 664 days, and Georgia Tech beat North Carolina by 12 in a game where the Yellow Jackets were an 18-point underdog. Virginia Tech also hammered Duke, but we already mentioned that. What we didn’t mention was that the Hokies turned around in their next game and got beaten 104-78 by unranked NC State.
The only two unbeaten teams after one week of play in the ACC? Notre Dame and Florida State, two teams that weren’t among the six from the conference that were ranked in the top 20 to begin the season. The only team in the league yet to taste victory? Louisville, which likely produced the best non-conference resume of any team in the ACC after claiming wins over Kentucky, Purdue, Wichita State, and Indiana.
The Hoosiers also represent the next chapter in our story of absurdity.
No coach has teetered between two extremes over the last five years more than Tom Crean, and this season has been a microcosm of his tenure at Indiana. The Hoosiers have two wins over Kansas and North Carolina that are as good as any in the country, and yet they’re riding a three-game losing streak and are likely to find themselves unranked this time next week. The reason is that the losses, aside from the most recent ones to Louisville and Wisconsin, are fairly difficult to justify. In-state foes Fort Wayne and Butler knocked them off in games where there were more Hoosier fans in the crowd than fans of the other in-state team. Then they opened Big 10 play with a home loss to a Nebraska team that was .500 and had just been beaten by Gardner-Webb.
That same Cornhusker team, which was beaten four times by double-digits before Dec. 11, is one of just three unbeatens left in the Big 10, joining Wisconsin and Michigan State.
Now you know we have to talk about the Spartans, who appeared destined for the NIT in November and December when they were losing to Northeastern and getting throttled by each quality opponent on their schedule. Now, suddenly, they have star freshman Miles Bridges back, and they have conference wins over a trio of teams that are 36-7 against the rest of the country.
Tom Izzo thrives in situations where he has to do more with less, so it wouldn’t be a shock if the Spartans have a wildly successful conference season that leaves the NCAA tournament Selection Committee with no idea how to handle them come March.
Perhaps the next two months will go more according to script than the previous two, but it seems foolish to bank on anything at this point.
DePaul is 0-2 in the Big East and has an overall record below .500. So, at least there’s that to keep us sane.
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