The first day of the college basketball season featured many buckets… including the buckets of very cold water which drenched a number of ambushed programs.
It’s always a part of early-season college basketball: New faces and new lineups in a sport played by only five human beings at a time will create November instability. That’s just the way it is.
This sport allows space and time to its participants with a 30-game schedule. Two losses will not disqualify a team from being able to compete for a national title; that’s football’s unique tension point. However, it’s not as though teams receive an endless supply of opportunities to correct their mistakes. The accumulation of too many setbacks — either bad losses or failures to accumulate big-poker-chip wins — will matter in March. This is the exquisite drama of the whole of the college basketball season, reminding us that November through February matter.
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As we start what is essentially the “November Through February Matters” Tour, let’s start in two locales: Raleigh and Madison.
While several teams felt the sting of an opening-day loss, no two programs were hit harder than North Carolina State and Wisconsin.
North Carolina State’s loss — not just at home, but by 17; not to a Power 5 opponent, but to William and Mary of the Colonial — offers an immediate and rather thunderous reminder of the Wolfpack’s identity as a program which needs to take the next step. Coach Mark Gottfried just had his contract extended. Making Sweet 16s justify that, but part of the point of the extension was a belief that the program’s best days are ahead of it, not in the rearview mirror. This means that the Wolfpack — with a lot of returning players from last season’s team — are supposed to become a top-six NCAA tournament seed if not a top-four seed. Getting bombed by a good opponent — but one from a mid-major conference — on home hardwood will only reaffirm N.C. State’s place as a team which will play in an 8-9 game at best, or be a 12 seed at worst. The program needs to fight past that label, and now the struggle becomes that much more real.
This kind of hashtag is utterly appropriate… and that’s the problem of both perception and reality the Wolfpack face after opening night:
— Lauren Brownlow (@lebrownlow) November 14, 2015
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The other especially big story from Friday night in terms of a game result — the Pittsburgh-Gonzaga cancellation rated as a big story, but obviously, no final game result emerged in Okinawa, Japan — was Wisconsin’s stunning loss at home to Western Illinois.
The main detail to absorb from that game is that Western Illinois was not perceived as an up-and-comer in the Summit League. The Leathernecks were picked last by the coaches in that conference. Wisconsin certainly lost a lot from last season’s national runner-up squad — Sam Dekker, Frank Kaminsky, Traevon Jackson, Josh Gasser — but losing to a lower-rung opponent from a one-bid conference at home? That’s jarring under any circumstance and from any vantage point.
The biggest eye-opener from Friday’s loss — but also the source of calming and soothing reassurances that Bo Ryan can fix this — is that Wisconsin could not defend. The Leathernecks shot 54 percent from the field, 7 of 9 from three-point range.
If players lack skill, they won’t do much on offense. Defense, on the other hand, is not so much about skill, but effort and coordinated communication. You can fix defense much more readily than offense. Ryan — who has never finished lower than fourth in the Big Ten in his Wisconsin career, truly one of the most remarkable active streaks in college basketball — has a lot of work to do.
He can do it, because he knows how to teach defense. Nevertheless, Ryan might still be inwardly surprised at the extent to which he must repair and revive his team this season.
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Other teams suffered unwelcome stumbles at the start of a new season: Georgia (Chattanooga), South Florida (Troy), and Illinois (North Florida) endured very discouraging defeats. Georgia can say with some legitimacy that Chattanooga is a good team. Indeed, the Mocs appear to be a foremost contender in the Southern Conference under first-year head coach Matt McCall.
The problem for Georgia, though, is that it made the NCAA tournament last season in large part because coach Mark Fox (to his great credit — this is not a knock) cooked the RPI’s special sauce. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but it shows that Georgia did not achieve a lot in terms of high-quality wins last season. If the Bulldogs can’t pick off a few big wins in non-conference play, their NCAA resume might become paper-thin when February rolls around. They’ll have to do more late-season work to get into the Dance this time.
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It’s only one night, and we’ll get to revisit these situations — particularly in a month, once final exams roll around and the season hits its first lull before Christmas. Nevertheless, for North Carolina State, Wisconsin, and a few other programs, the college basketball season has already offered a wake-up call.
Cold water must give way to hotter intensity… and better attention to detail.
