Saturday was a great day of college basketball, and with the nation preparing to turn its eyes from the Super Bowl and Awards Season towards March Madness, this is a good time to check in on the national picture.
An important thing about college basketball that often goes unsaid is that the best team is rarely the national champion. This is ok. This is how it goes in the NFL, MLB, and NHL as well. Only in college football and the NBA, among major American sports, do we confidently say almost every year that the ultimate champion was also the best team. The real question we should ask is whether the champion deserves their championship, based on their work over the whole of the season. You have to go back a full decade by now to find a time when the answer to that, in college basketball, has been “no.”
Another important thing about college basketball that often goes unsaid is that its AP Poll is approaching total worthlessness. It’s the equivalent of an urban legend by now. Humans swallow ten spiders a year in their sleep, and up until this morning Alabama was only barely among the country’s 25 best teams. Part of this is that the AP Poll was outpaced by better tools. Kenpom tells you how good a team is. SOR tells you how much a team has accomplished. Part of it too, though, is that college basketball has gotten too competitive at the top for the old logic to reasonably apply. We could go on about this. We should go on about this soon. Something needs to change.
We point out both those things because it’s easy to apply your college football brain to college basketball, and college basketball doesn’t work like that. In college football, the better team more often wins. In college football, there are clear, deserving Number Ones. In college football, you don’t get a chance to play for the national championship without being either a national championship-caliber team or doing something only national championship-caliber teams can reasonably be expected to do.
We’re going to break down three categories of national title contenders here, and we wanted to preface it with all of that. The first category is Red Herrings, teams it’s easy to include in the national championship discussion but are unlikely to actually win it all. The second category is Good Enoughs, teams who could certainly win it all but have significant reasons for doubt. These guys could be favorites to make the Final Four, but it’s unlikely they’ll get to a point where they’re favored to win it all unless all the Number Ones bow out. The third category is Number Ones. If this was college football, we would only be talking about the Number Ones. In the college basketball world, sportsbooks imply less than a 25% probability a current Number One wins the NCAA Tournament.
Red Herrings: Marquette, Duke, Illinois, BYU
These four teams are all either ranked in the top ten in the AP Poll, ranked in the top ten on kenpom, or ranked in the top ten in both places. Are they top ten teams? Some are, some aren’t. But there’s nothing which right now indicates they’re a serious title threat. Duke and Illinois have each beaten Michigan State, one other team of note (FAU for Illinois, Baylor for Duke), and nobody else that’s going to land in the top six seed lines. Marquette’s at least beaten Illinois (and they did it in Champaign), but the Golden Eagles haven’t shown the ceiling yet this year that even last year’s team showed, and recent performances haven’t hinted at it. BYU is 2–4 against the Big 12’s tournament teams, and only 2–2 against them at home. These are all good teams, teams who could make a Final Four or even make the national championship. But a lot of teams could make it. That doesn’t make these guys serious threats.
Good Enoughs: Houston, Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, The SEC Three™
We could have included The SEC Three as their own category, but to be fair, I’m not sure Auburn, Tennessee, and Alabama deserve to be below these other four teams. The SEC just doesn’t have a clear pecking order between the trio. Alabama beat Auburn. Tennessee beat Alabama. Auburn and Tennessee haven’t played. Each has baggage—Nate Oats’s style is rightly accused of being great for regular season play, Rick Barnes’s tournament demons probably aren’t real but this team’s offense is one-dimensional enough to allow the mention, and Auburn’s best win came on Saturday against a Mississippi team ranked behind Washington, SMU, and Maryland by our best neutral arbiter of quality. At least one of the three will enter the tournament in this kind of territory, most likely, and they probably don’t get as much individual attention as they deserve because they’re so easy to lump together, but they’re different from the other four in this section. They’re just different. At least, that’s the case right now.
Before we go any further, one more caveat: If we made this list at this time last year, we may have included UConn in this category. It was a very different season—what Number Ones existed were more flawed than the two we’re about to mention—but we want to be clear that if any of these teams wins the national championship, it’s not going to be a big surprise.
The other four, now:
- Houston was a Number One until a few minutes after halftime on Saturday. If we didn’t know Houston so well—if they were new to this 1-seed scene—we’d probably still have them up there, but we’ve seen this too many times from the Cougars. They lay eggs too often and their offense disappears in too many must-win games. It’s different from Purdue. It’s been going on for longer, and the pattern’s too consistent. They are, like Alabama and Tennessee (and probably Auburn), a great regular season team. But college basketball’s postseason doesn’t include seven-game series. For Houston, it’s not so much a consistency question as it’s an ability to show up when necessary. It’s hard to know if that ability exists, but the Cougars got boat raced by Baylor in 2021, scored 44 against Villanova in 2022, and were carved to pieces by Nijel Pack last March. Then, on Saturday, when they had a chance to show it to be different this year, they rolled into their marquee game in Lawrence and watched Kansas run all over them. They let Kansas back into the national picture.
- Kansas, meanwhile, is a bad regular season team. This was the case last year, too. They make easy wins look hard, and they rarely pummel quality competition. (Clearly, it can happen, but Saturday was a surprise.) They have Dudes—at least four, maybe five now that Johnny Furphy’s emerged—but there is no game in which you can confidently and accurately say that Kansas will roll. Even the Oklahoma State games had a “watch out” narrative heading into them, silly though that might have been. This team beat UConn and Tennessee and Houston. It lost to UCF and West Virginia. None of that is surprising, and again, it’s not about consistency. It’s that they, in the inverse of Houston, do show up for the big ones. They just are bad enough when they’re bad that they’re impossible to fully trust.
- Arizona is a little bit of a darling, but Stanford and Oregon State are cumulatively a meaningful amount worse than UCF and West Virginia. Unlike with Houston, it really is probably consistency that’s the question for Arizona. They still turn the ball over a whole bunch, too. They’re in the middle of a mediocre Pac-12 in turnover rate (credit: kenpom).
- Last, UNC, some hybrid of Kansas and those Wichita State teams that used to roll through the MVC. UNC had plenty of tests in nonconference play, but those didn’t all go well, and they were a long time ago now. Within the ACC, it’s just the Duke games. UNC’s saving graces are that RJ Davis is probably, nationally, the player you most want bringing the ball up the floor with a game on the line, and that Armando Bacot Playing His Best is a very effective big. UNC is well-constructed, much like Kansas, but with a little more depth. They have fewer studs than the Jayhawks., though.
Number Ones: UConn, Purdue
And here, at last, is the point we really want to make: If this was college football in the BCS Era, we’d have a clear national championship matchup.
There’s a lot of noise being made about all the top-ten upsets every week. UConn hasn’t lost since December 20th. Purdue hasn’t lost since January 9th. Combined, these teams have lost four games, all of them on the road, three of them against teams likelier than not to make the NCAA Tournament field (Seton Hall is aimed towards the bubble). Combined, these teams have beaten UNC, Arizona, Tennessee, Alabama, Marquette, and Illinois. The last five-sixths of that list is just what Purdue’s done. UConn is proven, with rotating health but an underappreciated rock in Tristen Newton. Purdue has the best player in college basketball and a reinforced backcourt shooting with loads more confidence. Turnovers are still an issue for the Boilermakers, and UConn’s perimeter defense is sometimes questionable. That’s nitpicking, though. These are the two best teams in the country. After Houston’s loss to Kansas, there isn’t any room for debate. Will one of them win it all? Probably not. But whoever does will have gotten away with something.
Will the Big Ten and SEC Rule Mercifully?
Late last week, the Big Ten and SEC announced they’ve formed a “joint advisory group,” a committee of school executives set to work together on…issues. What issues? They didn’t spell them out. But I think we can guess: NIL. Transfer rules. The College Football Playoff. How to navigate a world where one college sport is as popular as the NBA but other college sports are almost universally amateur in their nature.
I’m not sure what the advisory group will ultimately advise, and I don’t know on what. I’m not sure the advisory group knows its specific tasks at this early stage. To place a guess, though, I think this is much more an action parallel to two global powers establishing conversation than some sort of formal alliance. This is an opening of phone lines directly between the two groups that have, through winning and fan interest, accumulated the most power in college sports. There are two superpowers. They are now talking to one another directly, without regional powers in the room.
There are other fragmented significances to this, of course. A few:
- The big one is that the Power Five is dead, and that a Power Four will not replace it. The ACC and the Big 12 are in a middle category now in college football. This is ok—the FCS functions mostly fine with an informal power structure like this, and acknowledging that not all “power” conferences are the same would have done a lot to improve this past college football season’s discourse—but it’s a significant step. It used to be that conferences didn’t confidently know how good they were or how good they would be in the near future. The six BCS conferences got themselves organized in a roundabout way. There’s no question anymore. The SEC and the Big Ten are the most powerful, and they also will very likely have the best football teams every year in the foreseeable future.
- This wouldn’t be necessary if the NCAA was working flawlessly. Instead, the NCAA failed to adapt for too long, and even if the current trajectory seems rather positive, the Big Ten and SEC are saying to one another, “Why do we need to include all these other schools in the conversation?” An imperfect comparison: It’s like the USA and China engaging in diplomacy outside of the United Nations apparatus.
- Michigan winning the national championship and going through Alabama to do it might have earned the Big Ten some respect in the SEC’s eyes. I don’t know if this is true or not, and I don’t know how meaningful it is if it’s true, but it’s a possibility.
Is the advisory group good for college sports? Bad? There’s no clear answer. It increases the probability of meaningful change happening, but at face level, all it immediately does is point out a lot of things we already knew were true.
The Rest
We’ll catch up on a few other things tomorrow, but…
Other college basketball:
- Iowa State almost stole one in the biggest way in Waco, but it wasn’t to be, and that’s probably fair. The Cyclones didn’t deserve that win. Still, holy Keshon Gilbert, and how wacky that it was Scott Drew of all people who finally received the long-awaited coaching box crackdown. The Cyclones are still alive in the Big 12 race, but I don’t know whether I feel better or worse about the chances after Kansas beat Houston like that.
- Kansas has a quick turnaround from the big win, heading into Manhattan tonight to play a desperate K-State who just lost their fourth straight, this one on the road against last-place Oklahoma State.
- Virginia hosts Miami, and don’t look now but with their win at Clemson, the Cavaliers are sneaking closer to the bubble again. They have a lot of unimpressive wins in their 17–5 record, but that’s the deal with the ACC right now.
Chicago:
- The Bulls lost to the Kings on Saturday right after it was announced that Zach LaVine will have season-ending foot surgery, something which closed the door on any seeming possibilities of LaVine being traded before the deadline. It was already looking like the Bulls would only be able to move him as a salary dump, so it’s not a loss of potential value as much as it’s the loss of future flexibility and a reminder that Artūras Karnišovas and Marc Eversley have done a terrible, terrible job.
