PHILADELPHIA– This is one year where there is no clear cut No. 1 in college basketball.
There is no great team like Kentucky, which grabbed our attention last season as it attempted to become the first team since the 1976 Indiana to finish the season 40-0. There are no unbeaten teams left after SMU lost to Temple Sunday Jan. 24 in Philadelphia, only familiar faces that have until recently been involved in an endless game of musical chairs, temporarily occupying the top of the polls.
North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan State, Kansas and Oklahoma have been at the summit, only to fall from the heights in a year where there is so much parity and no seemingly unbeatable teams. Through Jan.31, teams had lost 23 games when ranked in the top five, a record. Of those 22 losses, 13 were against unranked teams.
North Carolina and Oklahoma have started to stabilize their positions at the top of the polls in the past two weeks. .
For the second straight week, the AP and coaches polls are split between those two teams. Oklahoma (18-2) was voted the No. 1 team by AP with North Carolina (19-2), Villanova (18-3), Maryland (19-3) and Iowa (17-4) rounding out the Top 5 Last week’s AP poll had Oklahoma, North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas and Texas A & M. North Carolina is the top team in the coaches’ poll followed by Oklahoma, Maryland, Villanova and Xavier (19-2). Last week’s Coaches poll had Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Texas A & M in the Top 5.
Villanova, A & M, Iowa, Xavier and Kansas all lost games last week.
No one knows how long the pecking order will stand in this shifting landscape.
Consider the four teams that advanced to the 2015 NCAA Final Four. Michigan State (19-4) is the only team ranked in the Top 10 but the Spartans are sixth in the BIG standings with a 6-4 record. Defending national champion Duke (15-6) is unranked in both polls after losing four of its last five games to fall into ninth place in the ACC with a 4-4 record. Perennial SEC champion Kentucky (16-5) has lost an uncharacteristic four road games to UCLA, LSU, Auburn and Kansas and a neutral site game to Ohio State in Brooklyn and is ranked 20nd by AP and 19th by the Coaches. Unranked Wisconsin is 13-9 and eighth in the BIG standings with a 5-4 record.
Predicting the four teams that will advance to the Final Four has become more difficult than ever with a fractured crystal ball. Last year, three No. 1 seeds advanced to Indianapolis. This time, the sum total of seeds who make it to Houston might be an all time high. I don’t envy the tournament selection committee when it has to pick the field and seed the 68 teams.
This is one year where upsets have been the rule, not the exception. The college basketball world has turned upside down and every week feels like the opening round of the NCAA tournament. No one is immune. Monmouth, for example, was everyone’s Cinderella in December. The MAAC Hawks are 15-5 and have beaten UCLA, USC and Georgetown, but then they have also lost to Canisius, Army and Manhattan, three teams with RPIs over 200.
Just three weeks ago, Kansas and Oklahoma were 1 and 2 in the polls and had just played one the epic games of the last decade. Kansas won, 109-106, in overtime at Allen Field House in a heavyweight Big 12 battle where Sooners’ guard Buddy Hield established himself as the frontrunner for national Player of the Year with 46 points and eight three point goals in 54 minutes. Since then, it has been a blood bath in the Big 12. West Virginia and Oklahoma State have beaten Kansas in Morgantown. Oklahoma has beaten West Virginia in Norman. Iowa State has beaten Oklahoma at Ames and Texas shocked the world with a win over West Virginia in Morgantown.
Heading into this week, Oklahoma, Baylor and West Virginia were all tied for first place in the standings with 6-2 records and Kansas, Texas and Iowa State are 5-3.
With the exception of the ACC, where Carolina has a perfect 8-0 record and leads Louisville by two games, the gap between top and bottom has gotten smaller in the Power 5 conferences. Texas A & M (7-1) leads the SEC by game over Kentucky, South Carolina and LSU. Indiana and Iowa lead the BIG with 8-1 records, a game ahead of Maryland (7-2) and a game and a half behind of Michigan (6-2). Oregon leads the Pac-12 with a 6-2 record, a game ahead Colorado, Utah, Washington and USC. Texas A & M, Iowa, Oregon, Colorado, USC Washington and West Virginia were nowhere to be found in the AP pre-season Top 25 last November.
It should make for an entertaining February.
It would be easy to pin this season’s unpredictability on the proliferation of one and dones, which have forced perennial powers like Duke, Kentucky, Arizona and UCLA to constantly reload every year. But one and dones have been around since 2006 as have dominant teams. The bigger cause of the problem has been the inability of elite freshmen to lift their teams to expected heights.
NBA scouts may have fallen in love with this freshman class, based on upside potential and the latest mock drafts have LSU forward Ben Simmons, Duke forward Brandon Ingram, Cal forwards Jaylen Brown and Ivan Raab, Kentucky guard Jamal Murray and center Skal Labissiere, center Dayonta Davis of Michigan State and center Stephen Zimmerman of UNLV, center Henry Ellenson of Marquette among those listed as lottery picks.
The 6-10 Simmons is a generational talent who should the first pick in the NBA draft. But his team is 13-8 and it’s hard to know how high the Tigers will be seeded if they advance to the tournament. Murray and possibly Simmons are the only players in this group capable of doing the heavy lifting for teams with the potential to reach the second weekend of the tournament.
Duke and Kentucky had the best recruiting classes in 2015, but unlike 2012 when Kentucky won the national championship with future 6-10 Olympian Anthony Davis and forward Michael Kidd-Gilchrist; and last year, when Duke won the tournament with three freshman starters– center Jahlil Okafor, forward Justice Winslow and point guard Tyus Jones, both the Cats and Devils have struggled at times with young lineups against more experienced teams and senior dominated mid-major teams. It’s one thing to play well against your peers in summer travel team play, yet another to dominate while playing up a level.
March madness is less than two months away. It’s going to be a wild ride.
