1. Gonzaga (9-0)
So, yeah. We need to talk about Gonzaga.
On Saturday, the Zags played their final marquee nonconference game of the season. The opponent: a Virginia team expected by many to win the ACC, a Virginia team that, even if flawed and figuring itself out, had the profile, at minimum, of a group who could give the Bulldogs a serious game on a neutral floor, a Virginia team that came in with a top-five defense and a well-earned reputation as the nation’s best defensive program for the better part of the past decade, a Virginia team that might as well have been playing a different sport.
The Zags were active and disruptive on defense — Virginia turned the ball over on each of its first three possessions, which never, ever happens — but most of all they were sublime offensively, ruthless and superior in every way. Corey Kispert went 9-of-13 from 3; every time he drifted away from a Virginia defender, usually after a ball-screen action that Gonzaga’s simple, taut execution made look effortless, he buried the shot, from progressively deeper distances. The rest of the attack hummed around him, as did Drew Timme, who had 29 points on 15 attempts. Gonzaga scored 98 points on 69 possessions, or 1.42 per, against a defense that hasn’t allowed 100 points in a game since Nov. 22, 2010 and hadn’t allowed more than 90 since a game against UNC in 2013. The Zags, by the way, were sitting on 93 points when they started to empty the bench with five minutes left, after the lead had grown to 33. Oh, and Gonzaga managed all of this with freshman Jalen Suggs — its foremost player of the year candidate — scoring just eight points. “It was all too much,” Virginia coach Tony Bennett said. “I definitely think a couple of us were scared,” guard Kihei Clark told reporters.
It was terrifying. It was officially time to talk about where Gonzaga might end up if, you know, things keep going this way.
So … after nine nonconference games — including wins over Kansas, Auburn, West Virginia, Iowa and Virginia — Mark Few’s team is averaging 96.2 points per game, most in the sport. It is playing at both the fastest pace (77.5 possessions per game adjusted), and executing at the most efficient per-trip rate (121.9), in Division I. For most programs in this position, it would be easy to dismiss this start as the product of nonconference inflation. But Gonzaga, as a product of the West Coast Conference, has played all of its toughest games already. The WCC is a very good mid-major league, but it is unmistakably a mid-major league. Per KenPom.com’s projections, Gonzaga has less than a 93 percent chance to win in just three of its league games: at Saint Mary’s (86 percent), at San Fransisco (89 percent) and at BYU (88 percent).
How likely is this team to finish the regular season undefeated? No team is ever likely to go undefeated, but it can be done: Kentucky and Wichita State have managed it in the past decade, and Kentucky took its unbeaten 2014-15 season all the way to the Final Four. This Gonzaga team, based on the competition it will face, looks even more likely to manage something like that, at least until we get to March.
Even if it doesn’t — which, hey, no pressure fellas — Gonzaga has a chance to elevate its numbers to completely crazy planes: It’s not hard to imagine this team averaging 100 points per game in league play. No, seriously. With half of its games at home, and most against overwhelmed opponents? After averaging 97 points per game in its four wins against ranked teams? Why not? If it does that, can we call it the best offensive team in … well, how long? Two decades? Longer? Where would it stack up with the likes of 2017-18 Villanova, the best, most unguardable offensive force we’ve seen since the 2008-09 North Carolina Tar Heels, if not longer?
It’s one thing to ask when is the last time we saw a team this good, which is totally in play. It’s another to ask the last time we saw a team this good in a league like the WCC. The 2013-14 Wichita State Shockers, from the Missouri Valley Conference, went 35-0 to start the season, although they weren’t nearly as dominant offensively and faced (stupid) questions all year about their lack of high-quality nonconference wins, which won’t be an issue for the Zags. The 2003-04 Saint Joseph’s Hawks, the Jameer Nelson/Delonte West team that went 27-0 in the regular season (and opened the year with a win over an Adam Morrison-era Gonzaga team that lost two more games all season) are relevant to this discussion, even if these Bulldogs already feel deeper and more well-rounded offensively.
At Gonzaga’s current trajectory, we might have to go all the way back to 1990-91, when a little Big West program you might have some childhood nostalgia for was averaging 93 points per game and throttling everyone — including the smattering of ranked teams — it met along the way.
That’s the territory we’re entering with Gonzaga: Larry Johnson-era UNLV. It’s just nine games, yes, but these are the comparisons worth talking about. Few would undoubtedly settle for his first, long-awaited, richly deserved national title at the end of this season, without especially gaudy statistics to go with it. But his team has a chance to do it in jaw-dropping fashion.
2. Baylor (8-0)
And having just said all that about Gonzaga, the Zags might not be all that far ahead of Baylor, if they’re ahead of the Bears at all. Even after the Virginia rout, and before Tuesday’s games (when Baylor thrashed Central Arkansas 93-56, the Bears, not the Bulldogs, held firm atop the KenPom.com adjusted efficiency rankings. It was only after Tuesday that Gonzaga retook the top spot, which held fast even after Baylor’s Wednesday night back-to-back blowout victory over Alcorn State. The math between the two teams is, well, marginal: Gonzaga’s adjusted efficiency margin is plus-31.19; Baylor’s is plus-30.77. Villanova, at No. 3, is at plus-26.84. This is not the be-all, end-all, obviously, and we wouldn’t argue that Baylor is the better team. Again, Gonzaga is starting to feel like an epochal squad, the likes of which you see once every few years at most. But Gonzaga’s run of high-profile blowouts, and the cancellation of the early December meeting between the top two teams, has tended to obscure just how good Scott Drew’s group has been early in this season.
3. Kansas (8-1)
The Jayhawks have been on a 10-day break since Dec. 22’s convincing and highly impressive home win over West Virginia. KU players got to go home for a few days at Christmas before returning to Lawrence on Sunday afternoon. Three hours later, they were back in practice: “All our guys were back in town at 4. We started getting after it (Sunday) night with a 7 o’clock practice,” KU assistant coach Norm Roberts said on Bill Self’s radio show this week. “Most guys were pretty winded. It’s amazing how out of shape guys can get so quickly. Just getting up and down the court we had quite a few guys huffing and puffing.”
This is the most relatable thing we’ve read about elite college athletes in a long time. Like, how bad is the first workout after Christmas? And we’re not even talking about 35-year-old us, sweating it out to the dancehall ride on the Peloton after a four-day festival of Christmas-adjacent consumption. We’re talking about teenage us, on the freshman basketball team, coming back after a week or two off for the holidays and having to run deep-sixes in the freezing cold gym at 6 a.m. in dead silence. Lungs hurting, cursing at teammates for missing the free throws that might have prevented another sprint. Ugh. You wouldn’t wish that feeling on your worst enemy. Just terrible.
Anyway, Kansas hosts Texas on Saturday. We’ve been high on the Longhorns all season. That’s going to be a fascinating game.
4. Villanova (8-1)
Villanova is also in the midst of an extended break, this one due to — what else — COVID-19. In this case, two staff members tested positive, including coach Jay Wright. Fortunately, Wright’s symptoms are mild, or at least were mild when he and the school made the announcement a few days ago. The Wildcats got through their nonconference schedule without having to deal with this sort of pause, but this makes them the third team (alongside Gonzaga, Baylor and Houston) among the current top five to have COVID-related downtime. This is just how it’s going to go, we guess. We’re not sure how to feel about that. That’s not euphemistic language either: We’re genuinely not sure how to feel about it. Like 3,700 people died in one day this week. Compartmentalizing that alongside the knowledge that the college basketball season kind of has to go on, and maybe should, and everyone involved with it wants it to, despite everything, is just difficult to get your head around, is all.
5. Tennessee (7-0)
In the opening minutes of Tennessee’s massive trip to Missouri on Wednesday night — a true road league game against a team that was in these power rankings for the past two weeks — Tennessee made it first seven field goals. When the Vols missed their eighth, they got an offensive rebound. And when they immediately missed their ninth, Yves Pons got another offensive rebound and made the 10th. The score was 18-4. There was 13:30 left in the first half. And the game was basically over, then and there.
That’s how good this Tennessee defense is. Cuonzo Martin’s guys have been really good this year, and there were occasional glimpses of the fluid, intuitive offense the Tigers have been running for much of the campaign. But more often than not that same offense just looked totally overwhelmed, plum out of ideas. The Vols are everywhere. There is nothing they’re not good at. They came into Wednesday night ranked between 10th and 14th in DI in every four factor defensive category; they’re elite at guarding shooters, elite at forcing turnovers, elite at grabbing rebounds, elite at limiting fouls. Most teams trade off among these categories. Most teams can’t force turnovers and limit free-throw attempts; usually you yield more of the latter if you go after more of the former. Sometimes aggressive, turnover-forcing defense leads to easy baskets (and thus high shooting opposition shooting percentages). Not for Tennessee. The Vols do everything well.
Offensively, things are a bit more jumbled, and despite some efficient first-half shooting there were plenty of scrambled sets and less-than-aesthetically pleasing possessions. Missouri got after it on that end too. But no matter what, the Tigers came down the floor and ran into an impenetrable wall of pinpoint rotations and flying limbs, to the point that an early-ish first-half lead was enough to make you think the game was already out of their reach. This UT team is scary.
6. Iowa (8-2)
Thanks in large part to Jordan Bohannon — who made five 3s in a row in the second half and finished with 24 on 6-of-9 from 3 overall — Iowa separated itself from a pesky Northwestern team on Tuesday night. It was, ultimately, another impressive offensive performance from the offensively impressive Hawkeyes, and one that didn’t rely primarily (or really at all) on Luka Garza (18 points, 6 rebounds) being out-of-this-world good.
Still, for as good as Bohannon was, the thing we’ll always remember about that game was when this happened:
It came midway through the second half, when the game was still reasonably within reach for Northwestern, and it has to be the softest technical foul we’ve ever seen. Like, really, what are we doing here? Not only did an Iowa player say it early in the game with no response, but that phrase is universally accepted in every basketball gym in the world as a totally customary thing to say when blocking someone’s shot. It barely qualifies as taunting. It’s practically background noise!
Yes, sure, the gyms are quiet, and the TVs pick this stuff up, and blah blah blah, but maybe, just maybe, refs should focus on making sure they nail down what a charge is before they aspire to guard our nation’s youth from the horrors of mundane trash talk. Just a thought.
Also, on Iowa: The reason the Hawkeyes needed a bounce-back win at home Tuesday night is because they allowed 102 points in 77 possessions (!) in an overtime loss at Minnesota last Friday. This, again, remains the concern. Iowa is great offensively, maybe as good as Gonzaga, or at least not far off. But defensively, this team can still be just average. After three Big Ten games, the Hawkeyes rank 11th in the league in points per trip allowed (1.09). The league is going to be crazy, who knows, etc. etc., but if Iowa wants to win this thing, it has to get that number down.
7. Houston (7-1)
The Cougars lost their first game on Tuesday night, a 65-64 road loss to Tulsa. It was one of those road games where everything feels off, more difficult than it should be; Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said “it felt like we were fighting uphill all night.” Houston was. Tulsa led for much of the second half, by as many as six points, and even when the Cougars closed the lead they could never quite make a run to seal the game. When Caleb Mills made a floater with six seconds left in regulation, he gave Houston its first lead in 13 minutes. Then, naturally, Tulsa’s Brandon Rachal sprinted to the other end of the floor and drew a foul with one-tenth of a second left on the clock. He knocked down both free throws. Game time.
In other words, we’re not going to penalize Houston for that kind of loss. These things happen. That said, it will be interesting to see if Houston — which won at UCF, 63-54, on Saturday — will find itself in these types of games more often than it should, due simply to the fact it doesn’t shoot the ball all that well, and thus don’t really bury teams under a barrage of buckets in the way you might expect of an ostensibly elite team. Houston likes to grind things out, but fine margins can catch up to you over time. Something to watch.
8. Michigan (8-0)
And so we come to the Wow, The Big Ten Sure Is Going To Be Crazy™ section of the power rankings, where we’re now going to use Michigan’s blurb to talk about the league as a whole, infuriating both Michigan fans and fans of every other top Big Ten team that takes the concept of power rankings remotely seriously. Fun!
Another sign of the season’s hottest trend: that time Maryland beat Wisconsin in Madison. It happened Monday night, and now we find ourselves in a place where we have to consider the possibility that Maryland will also be tournament-level good, which is just … like … how many Big Ten teams are going to make this NCAA Tournament anyway? Indiana is 5-4 and still ranked in the top 25 in adjusted efficiency. Rutgers was here last week, and beat Purdue this week, the first time since it joined the Big Ten that it has beaten another conference team three straight times. Ohio State is looking top-20 good. If Northwestern had won at Iowa, the Wildcats would have started 4-0 in the league.
The Big Ten has three teams (Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois) in the top six in adjusted efficiency. It has three more in the top 18 (Michigan, Ohio State and Rutgers). It has four more in the top 37 (Minnesota, Purdue and Maryland). The only team outside the top 55 is Nebraska.
Michigan is still unbeaten; granted, it hasn’t played a tough schedule, but the underlying numbers look pretty good, particularly on the defensive end, where the Wolverines are tops in the Big Ten through just two games (against Penn State and Nebraska). There’s only so much to be said about the Wolverines at this point. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about them, and the rotating cast of B1G programs that will pop in and out of this page all season, in much greater detail. Most of all, we can say that Michigan is in first place in a league that is going to be insane, and whose coaches are going to rhetorically make sure you know that fact pretty much nonstop between now and March. By the end of the season, they’ll be arguing for 13 bids. Buckle up.
9. Minnesota (9-1)
Speaking of which: Well, that happened fast. On Dec. 15, Minnesota lost at Illinois, 92-65, which felt about right. The Golden Gophers were a decent team that was nonetheless headed for a difficult Big Ten season, a team not quite good enough to survive the rigors of a brutal top-to-bottom league. They’d probably end up ranked in the 40s or 50s in adjusted efficiency, and a few games below .500 in the league, or whatever, and that would be that. And look now. Since then, Minnesota has beaten a good Saint Louis team, outscored Iowa 1.32 to 1.25 points per trip in an overtime win, then destroyed Michigan State, 81-56. All of a sudden, Marcus Carr looks like he has made an all-league leap, Richard Pitino’s team is 9-1, and that trip to Champaign is the only thing between them and a hugely impressive unbeaten start to the season.
10. Clemson (7-1)
If Maryland’s win at Wisconsin helped crystallize the competitive flatness of the Big Ten, it also did its fair share to burnish Clemson’s reputation. After all, the Tigers beat Maryland on Dec. 9, and easily, a 67-51 win in 62 possessions, a dominant defensive performance. After Tuesday night, when Clemson’s defensive pressure helped limit Florida State to 67 points in 73 possessions, the Tigers now have a score of impressive-seeming (if not totally elite) wins.
Most of all, though, their numbers look great. This is the second-best defensive team in the country, per adjusted efficiency, and one that is combining both a big-time turnover rate — part of Brad Brownell’s much more aggressive defensive scheme — with top-10 first shot defense. In other words, Clemson opponents are less likely than all but a few teams’ to get shots off in the first place, and when they do, Clemson usually guards those shots extremely well.
It sounds simple, but it’s an excellent recipe for elite defense, which is exactly what the Tigers are offering up.
So, yeah. We need to talk about Gonzaga.
On Saturday, the Zags played their final marquee nonconference game of the season. The opponent: a Virginia team expected by many to win the ACC, a Virginia team that, even if flawed and figuring itself out, had the profile, at minimum, of a group who could give the Bulldogs a serious game on a neutral floor, a Virginia team that came in with a top-five defense and a well-earned reputation as the nation’s best defensive program for the better part of the past decade, a Virginia team that might as well have been playing a different sport.
The Zags were active and disruptive on defense — Virginia turned the ball over on each of its first three possessions, which never, ever happens — but most of all they were sublime offensively, ruthless and superior in every way. Corey Kispert went 9-of-13 from 3; every time he drifted away from a Virginia defender, usually after a ball-screen action that Gonzaga’s simple, taut execution made look effortless, he buried the shot, from progressively deeper distances. The rest of the attack hummed around him, as did Drew Timme, who had 29 points on 15 attempts. Gonzaga scored 98 points on 69 possessions, or 1.42 per, against a defense that hasn’t allowed 100 points in a game since Nov. 22, 2010 and hadn’t allowed more than 90 since a game against UNC in 2013. The Zags, by the way, were sitting on 93 points when they started to empty the bench with five minutes left, after the lead had grown to 33. Oh, and Gonzaga managed all of this with freshman Jalen Suggs — its foremost player of the year candidate — scoring just eight points. “It was all too much,” Virginia coach Tony Bennett said. “I definitely think a couple of us were scared,” guard Kihei Clark told reporters.
It was terrifying. It was officially time to talk about where Gonzaga might end up if, you know, things keep going this way.
So … after nine nonconference games — including wins over Kansas, Auburn, West Virginia, Iowa and Virginia — Mark Few’s team is averaging 96.2 points per game, most in the sport. It is playing at both the fastest pace (77.5 possessions per game adjusted), and executing at the most efficient per-trip rate (121.9), in Division I. For most programs in this position, it would be easy to dismiss this start as the product of nonconference inflation. But Gonzaga, as a product of the West Coast Conference, has played all of its toughest games already. The WCC is a very good mid-major league, but it is unmistakably a mid-major league. Per KenPom.com’s projections, Gonzaga has less than a 93 percent chance to win in just three of its league games: at Saint Mary’s (86 percent), at San Fransisco (89 percent) and at BYU (88 percent).
How likely is this team to finish the regular season undefeated? No team is ever likely to go undefeated, but it can be done: Kentucky and Wichita State have managed it in the past decade, and Kentucky took its unbeaten 2014-15 season all the way to the Final Four. This Gonzaga team, based on the competition it will face, looks even more likely to manage something like that, at least until we get to March.
Even if it doesn’t — which, hey, no pressure fellas — Gonzaga has a chance to elevate its numbers to completely crazy planes: It’s not hard to imagine this team averaging 100 points per game in league play. No, seriously. With half of its games at home, and most against overwhelmed opponents? After averaging 97 points per game in its four wins against ranked teams? Why not? If it does that, can we call it the best offensive team in … well, how long? Two decades? Longer? Where would it stack up with the likes of 2017-18 Villanova, the best, most unguardable offensive force we’ve seen since the 2008-09 North Carolina Tar Heels, if not longer?
It’s one thing to ask when is the last time we saw a team this good, which is totally in play. It’s another to ask the last time we saw a team this good in a league like the WCC. The 2013-14 Wichita State Shockers, from the Missouri Valley Conference, went 35-0 to start the season, although they weren’t nearly as dominant offensively and faced (stupid) questions all year about their lack of high-quality nonconference wins, which won’t be an issue for the Zags. The 2003-04 Saint Joseph’s Hawks, the Jameer Nelson/Delonte West team that went 27-0 in the regular season (and opened the year with a win over an Adam Morrison-era Gonzaga team that lost two more games all season) are relevant to this discussion, even if these Bulldogs already feel deeper and more well-rounded offensively.
At Gonzaga’s current trajectory, we might have to go all the way back to 1990-91, when a little Big West program you might have some childhood nostalgia for was averaging 93 points per game and throttling everyone — including the smattering of ranked teams — it met along the way.
That’s the territory we’re entering with Gonzaga: Larry Johnson-era UNLV. It’s just nine games, yes, but these are the comparisons worth talking about. Few would undoubtedly settle for his first, long-awaited, richly deserved national title at the end of this season, without especially gaudy statistics to go with it. But his team has a chance to do it in jaw-dropping fashion.
2. Baylor (8-0)
And having just said all that about Gonzaga, the Zags might not be all that far ahead of Baylor, if they’re ahead of the Bears at all. Even after the Virginia rout, and before Tuesday’s games (when Baylor thrashed Central Arkansas 93-56, the Bears, not the Bulldogs, held firm atop the KenPom.com adjusted efficiency rankings. It was only after Tuesday that Gonzaga retook the top spot, which held fast even after Baylor’s Wednesday night back-to-back blowout victory over Alcorn State. The math between the two teams is, well, marginal: Gonzaga’s adjusted efficiency margin is plus-31.19; Baylor’s is plus-30.77. Villanova, at No. 3, is at plus-26.84. This is not the be-all, end-all, obviously, and we wouldn’t argue that Baylor is the better team. Again, Gonzaga is starting to feel like an epochal squad, the likes of which you see once every few years at most. But Gonzaga’s run of high-profile blowouts, and the cancellation of the early December meeting between the top two teams, has tended to obscure just how good Scott Drew’s group has been early in this season.
3. Kansas (8-1)
The Jayhawks have been on a 10-day break since Dec. 22’s convincing and highly impressive home win over West Virginia. KU players got to go home for a few days at Christmas before returning to Lawrence on Sunday afternoon. Three hours later, they were back in practice: “All our guys were back in town at 4. We started getting after it (Sunday) night with a 7 o’clock practice,” KU assistant coach Norm Roberts said on Bill Self’s radio show this week. “Most guys were pretty winded. It’s amazing how out of shape guys can get so quickly. Just getting up and down the court we had quite a few guys huffing and puffing.”
This is the most relatable thing we’ve read about elite college athletes in a long time. Like, how bad is the first workout after Christmas? And we’re not even talking about 35-year-old us, sweating it out to the dancehall ride on the Peloton after a four-day festival of Christmas-adjacent consumption. We’re talking about teenage us, on the freshman basketball team, coming back after a week or two off for the holidays and having to run deep-sixes in the freezing cold gym at 6 a.m. in dead silence. Lungs hurting, cursing at teammates for missing the free throws that might have prevented another sprint. Ugh. You wouldn’t wish that feeling on your worst enemy. Just terrible.
Anyway, Kansas hosts Texas on Saturday. We’ve been high on the Longhorns all season. That’s going to be a fascinating game.
4. Villanova (8-1)
Villanova is also in the midst of an extended break, this one due to — what else — COVID-19. In this case, two staff members tested positive, including coach Jay Wright. Fortunately, Wright’s symptoms are mild, or at least were mild when he and the school made the announcement a few days ago. The Wildcats got through their nonconference schedule without having to deal with this sort of pause, but this makes them the third team (alongside Gonzaga, Baylor and Houston) among the current top five to have COVID-related downtime. This is just how it’s going to go, we guess. We’re not sure how to feel about that. That’s not euphemistic language either: We’re genuinely not sure how to feel about it. Like 3,700 people died in one day this week. Compartmentalizing that alongside the knowledge that the college basketball season kind of has to go on, and maybe should, and everyone involved with it wants it to, despite everything, is just difficult to get your head around, is all.
5. Tennessee (7-0)
In the opening minutes of Tennessee’s massive trip to Missouri on Wednesday night — a true road league game against a team that was in these power rankings for the past two weeks — Tennessee made it first seven field goals. When the Vols missed their eighth, they got an offensive rebound. And when they immediately missed their ninth, Yves Pons got another offensive rebound and made the 10th. The score was 18-4. There was 13:30 left in the first half. And the game was basically over, then and there.
That’s how good this Tennessee defense is. Cuonzo Martin’s guys have been really good this year, and there were occasional glimpses of the fluid, intuitive offense the Tigers have been running for much of the campaign. But more often than not that same offense just looked totally overwhelmed, plum out of ideas. The Vols are everywhere. There is nothing they’re not good at. They came into Wednesday night ranked between 10th and 14th in DI in every four factor defensive category; they’re elite at guarding shooters, elite at forcing turnovers, elite at grabbing rebounds, elite at limiting fouls. Most teams trade off among these categories. Most teams can’t force turnovers and limit free-throw attempts; usually you yield more of the latter if you go after more of the former. Sometimes aggressive, turnover-forcing defense leads to easy baskets (and thus high shooting opposition shooting percentages). Not for Tennessee. The Vols do everything well.
Offensively, things are a bit more jumbled, and despite some efficient first-half shooting there were plenty of scrambled sets and less-than-aesthetically pleasing possessions. Missouri got after it on that end too. But no matter what, the Tigers came down the floor and ran into an impenetrable wall of pinpoint rotations and flying limbs, to the point that an early-ish first-half lead was enough to make you think the game was already out of their reach. This UT team is scary.
6. Iowa (8-2)
Thanks in large part to Jordan Bohannon — who made five 3s in a row in the second half and finished with 24 on 6-of-9 from 3 overall — Iowa separated itself from a pesky Northwestern team on Tuesday night. It was, ultimately, another impressive offensive performance from the offensively impressive Hawkeyes, and one that didn’t rely primarily (or really at all) on Luka Garza (18 points, 6 rebounds) being out-of-this-world good.
Still, for as good as Bohannon was, the thing we’ll always remember about that game was when this happened:
It came midway through the second half, when the game was still reasonably within reach for Northwestern, and it has to be the softest technical foul we’ve ever seen. Like, really, what are we doing here? Not only did an Iowa player say it early in the game with no response, but that phrase is universally accepted in every basketball gym in the world as a totally customary thing to say when blocking someone’s shot. It barely qualifies as taunting. It’s practically background noise!
Yes, sure, the gyms are quiet, and the TVs pick this stuff up, and blah blah blah, but maybe, just maybe, refs should focus on making sure they nail down what a charge is before they aspire to guard our nation’s youth from the horrors of mundane trash talk. Just a thought.
Also, on Iowa: The reason the Hawkeyes needed a bounce-back win at home Tuesday night is because they allowed 102 points in 77 possessions (!) in an overtime loss at Minnesota last Friday. This, again, remains the concern. Iowa is great offensively, maybe as good as Gonzaga, or at least not far off. But defensively, this team can still be just average. After three Big Ten games, the Hawkeyes rank 11th in the league in points per trip allowed (1.09). The league is going to be crazy, who knows, etc. etc., but if Iowa wants to win this thing, it has to get that number down.
7. Houston (7-1)
The Cougars lost their first game on Tuesday night, a 65-64 road loss to Tulsa. It was one of those road games where everything feels off, more difficult than it should be; Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said “it felt like we were fighting uphill all night.” Houston was. Tulsa led for much of the second half, by as many as six points, and even when the Cougars closed the lead they could never quite make a run to seal the game. When Caleb Mills made a floater with six seconds left in regulation, he gave Houston its first lead in 13 minutes. Then, naturally, Tulsa’s Brandon Rachal sprinted to the other end of the floor and drew a foul with one-tenth of a second left on the clock. He knocked down both free throws. Game time.
In other words, we’re not going to penalize Houston for that kind of loss. These things happen. That said, it will be interesting to see if Houston — which won at UCF, 63-54, on Saturday — will find itself in these types of games more often than it should, due simply to the fact it doesn’t shoot the ball all that well, and thus don’t really bury teams under a barrage of buckets in the way you might expect of an ostensibly elite team. Houston likes to grind things out, but fine margins can catch up to you over time. Something to watch.
8. Michigan (8-0)
And so we come to the Wow, The Big Ten Sure Is Going To Be Crazy™ section of the power rankings, where we’re now going to use Michigan’s blurb to talk about the league as a whole, infuriating both Michigan fans and fans of every other top Big Ten team that takes the concept of power rankings remotely seriously. Fun!
Another sign of the season’s hottest trend: that time Maryland beat Wisconsin in Madison. It happened Monday night, and now we find ourselves in a place where we have to consider the possibility that Maryland will also be tournament-level good, which is just … like … how many Big Ten teams are going to make this NCAA Tournament anyway? Indiana is 5-4 and still ranked in the top 25 in adjusted efficiency. Rutgers was here last week, and beat Purdue this week, the first time since it joined the Big Ten that it has beaten another conference team three straight times. Ohio State is looking top-20 good. If Northwestern had won at Iowa, the Wildcats would have started 4-0 in the league.
The Big Ten has three teams (Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois) in the top six in adjusted efficiency. It has three more in the top 18 (Michigan, Ohio State and Rutgers). It has four more in the top 37 (Minnesota, Purdue and Maryland). The only team outside the top 55 is Nebraska.
Michigan is still unbeaten; granted, it hasn’t played a tough schedule, but the underlying numbers look pretty good, particularly on the defensive end, where the Wolverines are tops in the Big Ten through just two games (against Penn State and Nebraska). There’s only so much to be said about the Wolverines at this point. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about them, and the rotating cast of B1G programs that will pop in and out of this page all season, in much greater detail. Most of all, we can say that Michigan is in first place in a league that is going to be insane, and whose coaches are going to rhetorically make sure you know that fact pretty much nonstop between now and March. By the end of the season, they’ll be arguing for 13 bids. Buckle up.
9. Minnesota (9-1)
Speaking of which: Well, that happened fast. On Dec. 15, Minnesota lost at Illinois, 92-65, which felt about right. The Golden Gophers were a decent team that was nonetheless headed for a difficult Big Ten season, a team not quite good enough to survive the rigors of a brutal top-to-bottom league. They’d probably end up ranked in the 40s or 50s in adjusted efficiency, and a few games below .500 in the league, or whatever, and that would be that. And look now. Since then, Minnesota has beaten a good Saint Louis team, outscored Iowa 1.32 to 1.25 points per trip in an overtime win, then destroyed Michigan State, 81-56. All of a sudden, Marcus Carr looks like he has made an all-league leap, Richard Pitino’s team is 9-1, and that trip to Champaign is the only thing between them and a hugely impressive unbeaten start to the season.
10. Clemson (7-1)
If Maryland’s win at Wisconsin helped crystallize the competitive flatness of the Big Ten, it also did its fair share to burnish Clemson’s reputation. After all, the Tigers beat Maryland on Dec. 9, and easily, a 67-51 win in 62 possessions, a dominant defensive performance. After Tuesday night, when Clemson’s defensive pressure helped limit Florida State to 67 points in 73 possessions, the Tigers now have a score of impressive-seeming (if not totally elite) wins.
Most of all, though, their numbers look great. This is the second-best defensive team in the country, per adjusted efficiency, and one that is combining both a big-time turnover rate — part of Brad Brownell’s much more aggressive defensive scheme — with top-10 first shot defense. In other words, Clemson opponents are less likely than all but a few teams’ to get shots off in the first place, and when they do, Clemson usually guards those shots extremely well.
It sounds simple, but it’s an excellent recipe for elite defense, which is exactly what the Tigers are offering up.
