Another day, another No. 1 team losing. This time it was Kansas, falling to Villanova 56-55 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on Saturday.
When the No. 1 team loses, people tend to react by saying this season is really wild. But is it?
The hot take here is that yes, pretty much, it is.
This Top 25 is losing more games than any Top 25 in years
Let's start with what you've doubtless already heard, courtesy of the excellent ESPN Stats & Information group. We have already had five different No. 1 teams this season: Michigan State, Kentucky, Duke, Louisville and Kansas. With the Jayhawks having lost their second game, the conventional wisdom says Gonzaga will become this season's sixth No. 1 team when the next AP poll is released.
The record for number of different No. 1 teams in any entire season is seven (in 1982-83). So, we're already approaching a record (again, assuming a new No. 1) as of Week 8 of the AP poll. That could qualify as wild, certainly.
Fair enough, but what about the teams below the top spot? As it happens, the Week 7 Top 25 recorded a collective win percentage of .857 (as of the time the poll was released). That is, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible.
The average win percentage of the previous 10 years' worth of Week 7 AP polls was .899. In half of those years, the Top 25 was winning 90% or more of its games.
True, maybe teams are just putting together tougher schedules now. Or perhaps pollsters aren't as good at rating teams as they used to be. It could even be some combination of all of the above.
For that matter, schedules could be tougher, pollsters could be more erroneous and teams really could be weaker. None of these are mutually exclusive, but the fact that Top 25 teams are losing games at higher rate means people draw the conclusion that this is a wild season.
Those people might not be wrong.
The Pac-12 isn't 'back,' but it is improved
Oregon's N'Faly Dante shows off his skills in his first game of the season, throwing down a pair of high-flying alley-oops in a span of 30 seconds.
It was just about three years ago that Arizona, Oregon and UCLA were seeded on the Nos. 2, 3 and 3 lines, respectively, in the 2017 NCAA tournament. I like to think of that as representing a total of seven "seed points." (A No. 1 seed is worth four points, a No. 2 earns you three, a No. 3 nets you two and a No. 4 is worth one.) In fact, you have to go all the way back to 2001 to find a bracket where the league recorded a better showing in terms of seeds.
Fast-forward to this season and one encounters a good deal of talk to the effect that the Pac-12 is "back." Certainly, with Oregon, Arizona and Washington all represented in the Top 25, things are looking up. There's still a good deal of basketball to be played.
Just keep in mind going forward, however, that things are looking up relative to what was one historically poor showing by the conference in 2018-19 (zero seed points). No other major conference has been shut out of top-four seeds since the SEC was in 2009 -- yet the Pac-12 has suffered that fate no fewer than five times in the past 11 brackets. Moreover, in the present tense, the Pac-12 is still the weakest of the six major conferences at kenpom.com, and the league still holds this distinction by a significant margin.
Now the good news. The league's rating at KenPom has improved markedly since last season. Furthermore, the news that possibly the conference's best team, Oregon, now has highly-rated freshman N'Faly Dante in uniform is one more promising development.
The Pac-12 still has a way to go and Arizona's loss to St. John's in San Francisco on Saturday night was a timely reminder of that fact. But the league is moving in the right direction.
'Preseason All-Americans who actually played' might have zero overlap with 'lottery pick' this season
You might have heard that James Wiseman decided to withdraw from Memphis and focus on preparing for the NBA. Not only was the freshman a key element in the Tigers' postseason plans, he also happens to have been a first-team preseason AP All-American.
Wiseman was joined on the first team by four far more experienced performers: Michigan State's Cassius Winston, Marquette's Markus Howard, Seton Hall's Myles Powell and Louisville's Jordan Nwora. None of those four are currently projected as lottery picks by ESPN's Jonathan Givony and Mike Schmitz, and, indeed, only Nwora is envisioned as a first-rounder.
This is actually not that unusual. The voters on preseason honors tend to be somewhat suspicious of freshmen. The NBA, conversely, is not at all suspicious of that particular population. In 2018-19, the only preseason All-American to go on to be a lottery pick was RJ Barrett.
Then again, the previous season the AP voters scored something of an impressive two-fer. That year's preseason player of the year, Michigan State's Miles Bridges, was selected at No. 12 in the ensuing draft, and fellow first-teamer Michael Porter Jr. of Missouri went at No. 14.
Porter, like Wiseman this season, saw but a glimpse of the floor. Therefore, depending on how Winston, Howard, Powell and Nwora fare on draft night, we might look back and say Barrett and Bridges were rather unusual preseason honorees who actually played and then went on to be lottery picks. Well done, sirs.