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College basketball rankings: FAU, a Final Four team last season, loses to Bryant and falls in Top 25 And 1 – CBS Sports
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FAU played 39 games last season, finished 35-4 and never once lost to a team ranked lower than 122nd at KenPom.com even though the Owls played 21 times against teams ranked lower than 122nd at KenPom.
FAU was as reliable as anybody last season. On Saturday night, though, the Owls were not. A crazy upset was the result for this program that returned all five starters from a team that made the 2023 Final Four.
Final score: Bryant 61, FAU 52.
Yes, Florida Atlantic — the preseason favorite in the AAC — lost at home to a Bryant team that entered ranked 275th at KenPom and with a 1-3 record featuring losses to Boston University (293) and Manhattan (322). FAU closed as a 22.5-point favorite against Bryant, making what happened inside Eleanor R. Baldwin Arena the biggest upset any ranked team has suffered this season.
“Hats off to Bryant,” said FAU coach Dusty May. “They played determined. They played well. They made plays when they needed to make them.”
Florida Atlantic did not.
The Owls were outscored 35-23 in the second half while becoming the third preseason top-15 team to lose to an unranked mid-major opponent in the first 13 days of the season. In those upsets, a pattern is easy to identify — specifically that all three preseason top-15 teams shot terribly from the perimeter when they were upset at home. To wit: Michigan State was 1-of-20 (5.0%) from 3-point range in its 79-76 loss to James Madison. Arkansas was 4-of-23 (17.4%) from 3 in its 78-72 loss to UNC Greensboro. FAU was 5-of-30 (16.7%) from 3 in its 61-52 loss to Bryant.
Bad 3-point shooting is a recipe for upsets.
As much as it might feel appropriate to completely eliminate Florida Atlantic from the Top 25 And 1 after such a lousy loss, what I realized a while back is that removing highly ranked teams from the Top 25 And 1 after one head-scratching loss this early typically proves to be an overreaction. With that in mind, years ago I developed a 10-spot auto-drop for highly ranked teams that lose weird games early. It allows me to punish without overreacting to what often proves to be little more than one bad outing.
That means Florida Atlantic is No. 15 in Sunday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, down 10 spots from No. 5. Over the next eight days, we should learn whether FAU’s loss to Bryant was an anomaly or something more significant because the Owls will next play in the ESPN Events Invitational, which gets started Thursday at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida.
FAU will open with Butler and then play either Texas A&M or Penn State. Iowa State, Virginia Tech, VCU and Boise State are on the other side of the eight-team bracket, meaning the Owls could get games with the schools ranked 11th (Texas A&M) and 24th (Iowa State) in the Top 25 And 1 next Friday and Sunday. The schedule breaking that way would give FAU an opportunity to either add quality wins that would help offset this ridiculous defeat or stack more losses and further push itself toward a place where building an at-large resume for the 2024 NCAA Tournament could be challenging coming out of an American Athletic Conference where Memphis is the only school besides FAU currently ranked in the top 85 at KenPom.
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