This is always the weirdest time of the season in college basketball. On one hand, you have teams that, for the most part, have a quarter of their seasons done. Yet, there's also been a dearth of conference games, giving the accurate impression that we haven't seen a whole lot yet.
As fans of sports, we need organization in some way, or multiple ways. This is why every website that covers any or all major sports has to have about three sets of polls or power rankings every week, despite the fact that all of those said sports have standings. In college basketball right now, with the exception of a few conferences (kudos to the conferences that do), there are no standings.
The other bit of organization that has yet to fall into place is the RPI. There's no rule where fans can only start looking at the RPI after New Year's, but taking too much of it into account now could lead to very dangerous assumptions like Northwestern being a Top 10 team. So, the only thing left, then, to do at this point is to actually look at teams and how they've been performing.
In my season preview, I almost dismissed how great North Carolina could be, and quietly thought that surely they couldn't live up to the hype and absurd undefeated season predictions some gave them. They've somehow exceeded those expectations thus far. This was seen especially in the Maui championship game a few weeks ago, a 15-point win over Notre Dame that is also the Tar Heels' closest contest of the year.
In that game, you got the feeling like the Irish were doing just about as well as they could offensively, and sometimes defensively. Yet, when the Notre Dame defense slacked off for a couple possessions, North Carolina took advantage and kept taking advantage well after the Irish got their bearings back on. It also helps for the Heels that Luke Harangody plays possibly the worst defense of any top player in the nation and was absolutely eviscerated by Tyler Hansbrough.
Seeing as how I am a skeptic when it comes to the topic of potential greatness in this sport, you have to wonder if it's a case of too much, too soon. I usually am of the opinion that Roy Williams takes an unfair amount of blame for not having more titles, but his record with teams that look similar to this in the early stages of a season (Kansas in '97 and '98, Carolina last year) speaks for itself. And if there's one thing 2008 has shown us in sports, it's that nowadays, you absolutely can not afford to peak early and then hope that your 80 percent is better than the 100 percent everybody will be throwing at you.
(By the way, let's put aside the whole undefeated thing. If they win at Wake Forest on January 11, and then at Duke a month later, let's talk.)
One team I didn't expect to be nearly as good as the Tar Heels, or even their 2007-08 selves, is Xavier. Last season, Stanley Burrell, Josh Duncan, and Drew Lavender were all seniors for the X-Men in their Elite Eight run. Guard C.J. Anderson, as well as forwards B.J. Raymond, Derek Brown, and Center Jason Love were all part of the team that was a game away from San Antonio, and have all stepped up to fill the void.
Last year's Musketeers were an excellent offensive team, averaging 1.12 points per possession (the national average is right around 1). This year, though, Xavier is really getting it done on the defensive end, allowing just 0.84 per possession. And the part reason for that comes from the team's size. With the exception of freshman guard Terrell Holloway, every player that gets significant minutes on the Musketeers is 6'5" or taller.
The way that Sean Miller (and to a degree, Thad Matta before him) has been able to turn the Crosstown Shootout with Cincinnati into not only an annual Xavier win, but the far and away better program as well has been remarkable. Everyone remembers how good Cincinnati used to be, but it's been over half a decade since the Bearcats were as good as Xavier is now. Of course, it couldn't have helped when Cincinnati had that disastrous period of PR that culminated in having three head coaches in just over a year.
December 17, 2008
mannix:
Nice that you didn’t add that Luke Harangody was sick with pneumonia. Not that his defense is suspect at times, but damn dude, give the guy credit for playing. But you knew that right, okay, way to go journalist.