One month into a college basketball season, a lot of teams and conferences will remain mysterious, as much of a puzzle as they were when the campaign began in the middle of November. To some extent, a college basketball season is supposed to be a study in uncertainty in the days before Christmas.
This season feels unusually chaotic. Saturday’s results showed why.
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To be sure, a simple scan of outcomes on Saturday reveal a turbulent picture in college basketball. Four top-10 teams bit the dust, headlined by No. 4 Kentucky and No. 7 Duke. No. 5 Iowa State and No. 9 Purdue also fell, further undercutting any notions of stability or calm in college basketball.
A few unbeaten teams remain, and Michigan State inspires complete confidence that it will answer the bell in March because of the man who coaches the Spartans, Tom Izzo.
After that, is there a single team which screams, “likely Final Four team” at this stage of the game?
Oklahoma and Kansas are going to beat each other up in the Big 12. North Carolina has its flaws. So does Maryland, though the Terps might be the second-best team in the country before it’s all said and done. On a broad scale, though, this is a season of grays, of cloudy forecasts and heavy fog rolling in from the shore.
To trace this back to Saturday’s results, it’s not even the final tallies which demand the biggest banner headlines. The way in which these results occurred is what grabs the eye and leaves a large imprint.
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For Duke, losing to Utah — a team which doesn’t appear to be quite as good as it was a season ago — is moderately concerning. The game probably indicates more about the Blue Devils (being deficient in comparison with last season’s national champions) than the Utes. However, even if you’re inclined to turn the game into a referendum on Duke, the absence of an injured Amile Jefferson and the presence of a flu-ridden Grayson Allen makes it hard to read too much into Mike Krzyzewski’s team.
Iowa State lost to Northern Iowa while wearing home whites, but the Cyclones didn’t fall in their home building, Hilton Coliseum. They lost in Des Moines in a neutral-site game. Should that take away from what Northern Iowa did, however? Not in the slightest. The Panthers, without centerpiece frontcourt star Seth Tuttle, have now beaten North Carolina and Iowa State in the same season. This result probably says more about UNI than ISU, but in March, just how high a seed will Northern Iowa be? It seems harder, not easier, to peg each of the teams which created high drama inside Wells Fargo Arena on Saturday night.
The plot thickens with the other two top-10 losers on Saturday.
Kentucky was very spotty against Ohio State in Brooklyn. The Wildcats had their moments at each end of the floor, but they couldn’t combine quality on both offense and defense in long-enough stretches to prevail. If Duke is clearly a diminished version of last season’s version, the same is true for Kentucky. That much can be said with confidence about these two giants of college basketball. The extent to which each team has declined this season? That’s just about impossible to call.
What makes the task of assessing Kentucky that much more difficult is that Ohio State — which has struggled as a jump-shooting team this season — uncorked a 9-of-18 afternoon from three-point range. An aberrational statistic such as that one can skew all sorts of perceptions. Downgrade Kentucky at your own risk.
Then consider Butler’s win over Purdue in a top-20 tilt in Indianapolis. The result itself isn’t shocking at all. Butler is a quality team, one which has demonstrated an undeniable degree of staying power in college basketball, a few years removed from the transformative tenure of Brad Stevens.
Yet, if you were to tell Purdue that Butler star Kellen Dunham would score only two points, the Boilermakers — up and down the line — would have told you they’d win, perhaps by a lot. Instead, even with a core Butler cog enduring a miserable evening, the Bulldogs prevailed over Purdue.
Again, it’s not just the results; it’s how they happened, under a given set of circumstances, which matters most.
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The NBA season has placed a few teams — Golden State first, with San Antonio second and Cleveland third — at the top of the mountain. Yet, after that, the rest of the league is a cluttered and confused mess. No other teams (with the possible exception of Oklahoma City) have separated themselves from the herd.
In college basketball, it’s much the same.
This is a season in which pronounced hierarchies and copious quantities of elegant play are in short supply on the basketball court — both in the college game and the pros. It’s just that kind of journey, at least to this point.
Check back in February to find out if order has been established. It certainly doesn’t exist right now.
