The start of the 2024-25 men's college basketball season is always a bit of a slow burn. Sure, we've already seen a few marquee matchups unfold over the past few weeks (North Carolina-Kansas, Auburn-Houston and Kentucky-Duke come to mind), but things feel like they really start to heat up around Thanksgiving -- or as we call it around here, Feast Week.
So with a full serving of basketball finally on offer, now is the perfect time to look at what the biggest storylines in the sport mean and what comes next. In each column, we'll look at the Bubble Watch ramifications of recent games -- plus we'll break down trends, highlight key individual players and plays, and focus on the stats that could lead each team to the 68-field NCAA tournament.
This week, we'll look at Kentucky's hot start under Mark Pope, handicap Rutgers' bubble chances and dive into the NCAA tourney hopefuls with the easiest -- and toughest -- remaining schedules.
Jump to a section:
The Big Dance: Kentucky finds continuity
Bubble Watch: Rutgers feeling pressure
Future Focus: Teams' strength of schedules
The Big Dance: Who needs continuity? Not Kentucky
This column will always tip off with one wide look at a key team, player or trend from men's college hoops. What does it mean for the rest of the season?
After 15 seasons and 533 games for John Calipari at Kentucky, there was little doubt by last spring that the coach's era there had run its course. The Wildcats' first-round loss to 14th-seeded Oakland was the second time in three seasons the Wildcats had exited the tournament in a massive opening-round upset, and no team had underperformed its seed expectations more than Kentucky over that span.
But even if Calipari's departure from Lexington was due, the Wildcats had to step into the unknown of their post-Cal era with a new coach -- they hired former Kentucky player Mark Pope, who'd previously coached at BYU -- and a new roster. Literally so: Among teams who were in Division I last season (so, excluding new D-I members Mercyhurst and West Georgia), only nine of them have zero percent roster continuity from a year ago, according to KenPom.com. Kentucky is one of those teams -- and, by far, the one with the greatest pedigree and expectations with eight national championships since 1948.
In a previous era of college basketball, team continuity was a key building block for success. Teams who brought back more minutes and more points from the previous season's roster tended to perform better at both ends of the court, and particularly on offense, all else being equal.
Of course, that was before the transfer portal, which can both give and take away players. When Calipari left for Arkansas, seven players transferred away from Kentucky ... but the Wildcats eventually added nine others -- including a starting five of Otega Oweh, Jaxson Robinson, Lamont Butler, Amari Williams and Andrew Carr, plus a super-sub from Dayton (Koby Brea) who might be their best player early this season, in addition to being the one ranked highest in ESPN's Top 100 of 2025 NBA draft prospects.
In some ways, Kentucky fans are no strangers to learning new names and numbers from the program. Under the famously freshman-friendly Calipari, the Wildcats had a few seasons where they had single-digit continuity percentages, such as in 2012-13 and 2020-21. But going back to 2007-08, the earliest season of Pomeroy's dataset, they never had a roster with zero continuity between seasons until 2024-25:
We should also note that, while some of Kentucky's lower-continuity seasons yielded Final Four trips (see 2010-11), both of those single-digit seasons mentioned earlier ended with Kentucky missing the NCAA tournament entirely. So it was understandable for judgment to be reserved about the new-look Wildcats until they actually hit the court on Nov. 4 (a lopsided win against Wright State).
Six games in, though, the early returns are looking stronger than expected. For one thing, Kentucky passed its first big test, coming back from a second-half deficit to defeat Duke in Atlanta with the help of some key late-game defensive stands. And it has taken care of business against its lower-rated foes so far as well, including Tuesday's 87-68 win against Western Kentucky.
Oweh, the former Oklahoma guard who came up big against the Blue Devils, leads the team in scoring. Meanwhile, Brea leads the Wildcats in Box Plus/Minus -- at +15.4, seventh best in the country -- despite coming off the bench each game and using a comparatively small 13.9% share of possessions while on the court. It's quite early, but there might not be a player in the country who is making a greater impact while commanding fewer touches than Brea, which makes him a great part of Pope's team. (It's also nothing new; Brea was hyperefficient on sub-15% possession usage with the Flyers last year, too.)
Among teams currently among the Top 25 in Pomeroy's rankings, only Tennessee and Gonzaga have improved their adjusted efficiency rating more since preseason than Kentucky -- and both of those teams started the season among the top 15 anyway (Kentucky, on the other hand, was outside the top 40).
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, ESPN Analytics still only gives Kentucky a 10.1% chance to win the SEC for the first time since 2017-18, as there is stiff competition in the form of Alabama, Tennessee, Auburn and even conference newcomer Texas.
But it already, even in a small sample size, looks like the Wildcats have calmed some of the uncertainty that had clouded the post-Calipari era before the season.
The Wildcats put up a strong defensive front and go to the free-throw line 49 times to secure an 87-68 victory over the Hilltoppers.
Bubble Watch: Rutgers already under pressure
It's never too early to worry about which teams could be on the outside looking in and which teams need to notch a few more wins to make themselves tournament eligible. Here we'll feature one team and why that team is on Bubble Watch now:
It's never easy to get Rutgers onto the dance floor in March. When coach Steve Pikiell's team went in back-to-back seasons in 2021 and 2022 -- even winning a game in the first of those seasons -- it represented the Scarlet Knights' only NCAA tourney appearances in the past three decades, a huge accomplishment for the program.
But after a couple of years away from the brackets, expectations for 2024-25 were about as high as they tend to get in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Rutgers had the nation's second-ranked recruiting class, according to ESPN colleague Jeff Borzello, adding coveted 5-star forward Ace Bailey out of Georgia, to go with do-everything guard -- and local product -- Dylan Harper, big man Lathan Sommerville and others. What the Knights lacked in experience and, yes, continuity, they would make up for with pure talent. The AP ranked Rutgers 25th in the preseason poll, only the second time the Scarlet Knights were ranked before a season since 1978-79.
Check out this eye-catching slam from Rutgers' Ace Bailey off an inbounds pass.
However, anyone who thought this season wouldn't still be a struggle doesn't know Rutgers basketball.
That's why they're our Bubble Watch focus of the week: ESPN's Joe Lunardi listed them as one of the first few at-large teams to not make the tourney in his most recent edition of Bracketology, which squares with the 32% probability of an at-large bid assigned to Rutgers by Bart Torvik's statistical model (which also considers them one of the first teams out of the tourney field). Other models, such as those found at TeamRankings (24%) and ESPN Analytics (7%) are even further down on Rutgers' tourney chances, especially after they came out flat and were upset by Kennesaw State on Sunday.
The Scarlet Knights rebounded with a one-point overtime win against Notre Dame Tuesday. Not to be overlooked in Rutgers' win was Harper's performance (36 points, 6 rebounds, 6 assists). The top 2025 draft prospect became just the third Big Ten freshman in the past 20 seasons to have 30 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists in a game.
Rutgers has an extraordinarily difficult remaining schedule -- the second hardest in the nation, by BPI's accounting -- so every win counts, especially in games where the Scarlet Knights are favored. While they will likely lose a game or two more in the next week-plus, with tough matchups coming up against teams like Alabama and Ohio State, the following set of games, against Penn State, Seton Hall, Princeton and Columbia, are surprisingly important to win with the Big Ten schedule looming. Torvik's model increases Rutgers' bid probability to 75% if it sweeps those four contests, but those odds fall below 25% if the Scarlet Knights lose even one of them.
Future Focus: The toughest bubble-team schedules
The last part of our column features a rotating cast of items with a lookahead on what's coming up:
Finally, we'll leave you with a look at other teams just like Rutgers -- those who find themselves facing the pressure of the bubble while also fending off a difficult set of future opponents. Among teams who are in either Lunardi or Torvik's set of 16 schools squarely in bubble territory, here's which ones have the most difficult rest-of-season schedules:
This doesn't necessarily mean that the teams with the lower remaining schedule strengths have a greater chance to escape the bubble, since the committee obviously accounts for the quality of a team's wins when making its tournament selections.
A better way to think about this might be in terms of risk and reward: Teams on the bubble with tougher schedules have more upside -- if they beat enough of the tough opponents, they can play themselves into the tournament easily, but they're also in more danger to pile up costly losses. Those at the other end of the list might face less stress in terms of tough games, but that also means fewer chances to distinguish themselves in the eyes of the committee.
Which would you rather be? It's unclear. Both groups have their advantages and disadvantages, which is probably why there's no correlation between a team's remaining SOS ranking and their odds of an at-large bid according to Torvik's model.
Of course, it's best to not be on the bubble at all. So we'll be monitoring all season who plays their way out of this group, versus who has to stay worried about their status for months to come.