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College basketball rankings: Purdue claims top spot, FAU and Villanova return – The Athletic
In this week’s Top 25: Zach Edey is drawing fouls, Oso Ighodaro has an elite runner game, Cam Spencer’s passing is a bonus, Florida Atlantic is BACK, BYU is running and Colorado State isn’t letting anyone run!
Reminder: The setup of this season’s Top 25 is that I’ll give nuggets on an unspecified number of teams each week. So if a team appears in the table but not the text below, that’s why.
It’s hard enough trying to keep Zach Edey from scoring, but simply trying to guard him without fouling is proving just as difficult. Edey leads college basketball in fouls drawn per 40 minutes (10.4) — up from 7.0 per 40 last season. He shot 47 free throws in the last four games, all against high-major programs. Edey’s ability to get opposing big men in foul trouble was one main reason Purdue beat Marquette in the Maui Invitational championship game. Oso Ighodaro was limited to 26 minutes because of fouls; Marquette outscored Purdue by 10 points with him on the floor but was minus-23 in his 14 minutes on the bench.
GO DEEPER
Hawaii 3-0: Purdue’s November title raises hopes for a longer March run
In Purdue’s four games against high-majors, the opposing starting center has committed 18 fouls in 76 minutes. That’s 9.5 fouls per 40 minutes. If you combine the minutes played for those four centers for the rest of their season, they’re fouling 3.6 times per 40 minutes. The game is drastically different when you’re playing Purdue.
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The floater is one of the least efficient shots in basketball. Former Belmont coach Rick Byrd even forbid his players from taking them. Byrd likely would have lifted that rule if he had coached Ighodaro. Marquette’s starting center is already a unicorn with everything else he does. In addition to being able to initiate offense as a point center, he’s also mastered a running push shot in the lane that is unguardable. It’s not really a floater since he’s 6-foot-11 and doesn’t have to float it over anyone because his release point is so high. Ighodaro was good at that shot last season (54.5 percent) and is even better so far this year. He made 5-of-6 runners against Purdue and is 9 of 14 (64.2 percent) on shots categorized as runners by Synergy so far this year. That’s 1.29 points per possession. That’s efficiency!
Connecticut brought in Cam Spencer to play the Jordan Hawkins role. The Huskies are running Spencer off a bunch of screens and getting 3s like they did for Hawkins, and he’s doing that exceptionally well, knocking down 19 of 39 3s so far. A bonus: Spencer can really pass.
The Huskies set a ton of screens and force you to make decisions on where you’re helping, and eventually there’s going to be a breakdown. Spencer is good at taking advantage of that breakdown. Watch how he controls the bottom defender with his eyes:
The super senior is averaging 3.8 assists compared to 1.3 per game last season for Hawkins. He has a 145.0 offensive rating. He was the perfect addition.
Kansas leads the country in assist rate, assisting on 76.3 percent of its field goals. Auburn ranks second at 71.2, so it’s not close. The main reason KU’s is so high is Hunter Dickinson. The Jayhawks have assisted on 44 of his 50 field goals.
But that awesome assist number comes with a caveat. KU’s turnover rate — 19.2 percent against Division I teams — is high for a Bill Self team. Kevin McCullar Jr. has the highest turnover rate he’s ever had — he had 18 turnovers just at the Maui Invitational — and one reason is that sometimes feeding the big fella comes with risk. As Dickinson improves at creating the angle for passes and continues to build chemistry with the guards, the turnovers should decline. Better shooting helps there too because it creates more spacing to deliver the passes. It’s not a bad thing if the Jayhawks’ assist rate stays high, but the turnover rate needs to go down.
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Baylor’s best two shooters this season are wings with quick releases in Ja’Kobe Walter and Jalen Bridges. The Bears once again have one of the best offenses in college basketball, but it looks different than how they did it last year. They’re shooting it better from 3 (41 percent and 45.7 against D1 opponents) because of the quality of looks. Last season, they shot 47.7 percent of their jump shot attempts off the dribble, per Synergy. This season only 32.9 percent of their jumpers are coming off the bounce. RayJ Dennis and bigs who are vertical lob threats get the credit. Dennis is awesome reading the tag:
Baylor also has some nifty designs like this Spain action (back screen for the ball-screener) that opens up windows for great looks:
Virginia Tech coach Mike Young is in his fifth season, and he’s coached 81 games in the ACC. He’s never lost a game by 30-plus in that time. That’s some perspective for how good Florida Atlantic was on Sunday. FAU’s 84-50 win over the Hokies in the championship of the ESPN Events Invitational was one of the most complete performances I’ve watched this season. The Owls are back to playing the kind of ball that captured our hearts last season.
Let’s go ahead and give FAU a pass for the Bryant loss. It’ll likely be a weird outlier in another awesome season for the Owls.
One reason for Tennessee fans to be optimistic even after going 1-2 at the Maui Invitational: Zakai Zeigler clearly isn’t himself yet. It’s remarkable that Zeigler is even playing. He tore his ACL on Feb. 28 last season and somehow was ready for the regular season. You can tell by how he moves — the starts and stops, mainly — that he’s not back to who he was before. Last season, he was averaging 11 points per game before he got injured. He also had a 36.9 assist rate and just a 20.7 turnover rate. This season he’s averaging 4.2 points with a 24.7 assist rate and a 30.4 turnover rate.
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My buddy Kyle Tucker with a gem: No team since 2010 has had at least 120 assists and less than 49 turnovers. Until Kentucky just did it.
It’s still pinch-me stuff with John Calipari and his team playing at a warp speed and shooting a ton of 3s. The latest who needed pinching was Marshall coach Dan D’Antoni, lover of pace-and-space:
Dan D’Antoni on Kentucky’s coach: “I’ll give him his due. Came into the modern time.”
Whipping passes around and shooting 3-pointers?
“Who was that?”
Joked that he didn’t know that was John Calipari.
— Ben Roberts (@BenRobertsHL) November 25, 2023
Anton Watson had 32 points on 14-of-15 shooting in the fifth-place game at the Maui Invitational against UCLA. That’s a UCLA team with the 14th-best adjusted defense in America, per KenPom. There have been 21 players since 2010 who have scored at least 32 points and shot better than 93 percent, but Watson is the only one to do it against a high-major opponent.
Villanova is winning by keeping teams out of the paint. The Wildcats are allowing only eight baskets at the rim per game — seventh-best in the country, per Synergy — and opponents are shooting only 50.8 percent on those shots at the rim. Kyle Neptune built a roster of big, switchable wings who can keep the ball in front of them. Then he’s playing center Eric Dixon in a drop and making it so there’s never a need to tag the roller:
Villanova’s 2-point defense — 41.8 percent, 13th-best nationally — appears to be the biggest improvement from last season to this season on the defensive end. With the influx of transfer talent, the offense is drastically better as well.
The difference between Hubert Davis having a good offense and an OK offense in his three years as coach is basically as simple as this: his teams with 3-point shooting are good, and his teams with lousy 3-point shooting are mediocre.
There’s hope the Tar Heels can get even better too. Cormac Ryan shot 36.4 percent from 3 in three seasons at Notre Dame; he’s at just 28.6 percent as a Heel.
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Creighton was averaging 17.2 points in transition going into the Colorado State game, and the Rams held the Bluejays scoreless in transition on Thanksgiving. Colorado State sacrifices offensive rebounding for getting back and setting its defense, and it worked to perfection in a 69-48 beat down. The Rams’ defense has allowed only 4.8 points per game in transition all season, per Synergy. That’s third-best in college hoops.
Creighton’s worst efficiency game before scoring 0.719 points per possession against Colorado State was 1.226 against Iowa. The loss to the Rams was the second-worst offensive game for the Bluejays in the last five seasons. Dropping Creighton this low might be an overreaction, but Colorado State deserves to be ranked higher after such a dominant performance.
Porter Moser has a winner again by going into the transfer portal and recruiting some athleticism and speed to go with the two athletic sophomores he had returning in his backcourt, Milos Uzan and Otega Oweh. The Sooners’ athleticism is at Big 12 levels for the first time under Moser, and it’s helped them improve in almost every area. One drastic improvement is on the offensive glass, where they’ve gone from 323rd in offensive rebounding rate to 27th. The biggest one to date was this game-winning putback from Oweh against USC on Friday:
Uzan was expected to be the breakout star, but Oweh has been that guy, going from averaging 4.8 points as a freshman to 15.0 so far this season.
Using Bart Torvik’s sorting tool that takes out preseason bias, BYU has been the fourth-best team in college basketball this season. The Cougars are scoring 127.3 points per 100 possessions.
Seven players averaging better than 9 points per game. Eighth-highest assist rate. Elite floor spacing with a ton of shooters and firing a bunch of 3s — more than half their field-goal attempts.
BYU is at its best getting out in transition and sprinting to the 3-point line:
The Horned Frogs remain in these rankings because I was high on them in the preseason, but I’m not moving them up until they play someone. I apologize for letting them inch up the last few weeks. TCU’s strength of schedule ranks 362nd. Their best opponent so far is Nebraska-Omaha, No. 264 at KenPom. The next two Saturdays, TCU faces Georgetown and Clemson. Win those two games, and I’ll consider moving the Frogs up.
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Dropped out: USC, Virginia, Alabama, Iowa State, UCLA, Memphis
Keeping an eye on: James Madison, San Diego State, Liberty, Clemson, Wisconsin, Florida, Bradley
(Photo of Zach Edey: Darryl Oumi / Getty Images)
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C.J. Moore, a staff writer for The Athletic, has been on the college basketball beat since 2011. He has worked at Bleacher Report as the site’s national college basketball writer and also covered the sport for CBSSports.com and Basketball Prospectus. He is the coauthor of “Beyond the Streak,” a behind-the-scenes look at Kansas basketball’s record-setting Big 12 title run. Follow CJ on Twitter @cjmoorehoops
