16 men's college basketball questions to ponder, less than a month before Selection Sunday – NCAA.com

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College basketball is on the clock. The Super Bowl is over, Major League Baseball camps are open, the NBA just held its All-Star Game, with defense that strictly followed CDC social distancing guidelines. The Next Big Thing is the NCAA tournament. So now that March is growing larger on the horizon — the first conference tournament is 14 days away, and only three more Sundays until the one with the word Selection is in front of it — do we find clearly defined trends, do we find emerging answers, do we find order?
Are you kidding?
What we find with each passing week, including the most recent, are more WTMO cases. You know, What to make of . . . ? So while the NCAA men’s basketball committee just revealed its view on the top 16 seeds at the moment, here are 16 WTMOs coming off the weekend.
What to make of . . . The top-16 reveal itself? The committee released it Saturday afternoon as a glimpse of its up-to-the-minute gauging of the landscape. Then, four teams on the list were beaten in the next 26 hours. It just proved that old college basketball adage: In February, write everything down in pencil.
What to make of . . . Connecticut? Are the No. 1 Huskies really the steamroller they appear to be?
It’s not just how they flattened No. 4 Marquette 81-53 Saturday, running up the largest winning margin in a top-5 conference matchup in the history of the AP poll. UConn has not lost since just before Christmas and won 30 of its past 32 games going back through the national championship run. Twenty-four of those 30 victories have been by double digits. The Huskies have won their past three league games by 28, 36 and 25 points, a streak never seen before in the Big East. They are in the top 14 in the nation in field goal shooting, field goal percentage defense, scoring defense, assist-turnover ratio, assists per game and rebound margin. In other words, almost everything it seems. In the Marquette rout, they had 24 assists on 29 field goals. In the past three games, they have had 72 on 98.
Bottom line: Florida’s reign as the last repeat national champion in 2007 has never looked more endangered.
What to make of  . . . Purdue? The Unstoppable Boilermakers — which is most nights — have wins over six top-11 opponents. But the Vulnerable Boilermakers — infrequent but still occasionally spotted — give up too many open looks outside and struggle with turnovers. Every Purdue fan haunted by the ghosts of tournaments past understands the danger of that. In the Boilermakers’ three defeats this season, their turnover differential was 45-18 to the bad and they were outscored in points off turnovers 60-18. That might ring an alarm bell. In being infamously bushwhacked by Fairleigh Dickinson and Saint Peter’s in the past two NCAA tournaments, Purdue was on the wrong side of a 31-17 turnover margin with a 26-11 gap in points off turnovers.
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Problem is, when the Boilermakers have one of those error-prone games they can’t make it up at the other end. They’re 329th in the nation in turnovers forced. But Zach Edey is still 7-4 and it takes a village to stop him, so this is a different season and a different team, right? Right?
What to make of . . . Houston? The Cougars roll on at 22-3 without a lot of fanfare, which is standard operating procedure. They keep winning, people somehow keep talking about other names at the top of the polls. Making a living by giving up 55 points a game and forcing brick after brick from opposing shooters is highly effective, but maybe not aesthetically compelling. Life in the Big 12 has not always been peachy their first go-around, but this is the week Houston can show it really means business in its new neighborhood, at home against Iowa State Monday night and at Baylor Saturday. The rematch with Kansas is still out there, too. Plenty of time for the outside world to catch on to how hard these guys are to beat.
What to make of . . . Alabama? The Tide are putting up 90.7 points a game to share the national lead with Arizona and have hit 100 eight times. They lead an SEC that has had 10 different teams ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 this season. If they finish the job, that’d be three regular-season conference titles in four years for Alabama, which is positively Kentuckian. One other thing. This time last year, the Tide were on their way to the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament but were caught up in the turbulence of the Brandon Miller firearm incident and washed out in the Sweet 16. The ride has been much quieter this season. Maybe it’ll last longer.
What to make of . . . Virginia? The Cavaliers have emerged as the solid No. 3 ACC contestant for March behind North Carolina and Duke, but this team’s resume is truly baffling. Included in the 20-6 record are six wins decided by one possession or in overtime, but also six losses by 24, 23, 22, 19, 16 and 11 points. They beat Wake Forest last weekend despite scoring only 49 points and going 1-for-11 from the free throw line, not entirely out of character since they’re 343rd in the nation in free throw percentage.
Can it really be five years since Virginia’s national championship? Yep. And the Cavaliers are 0-2 in the NCAA tournament since, losing to Ohio University and Furman.
What to make of . . . Kansas? The Jayhawks have had massive trouble away from Allen Fieldhouse, starting 1-5 on the road in the Big 12, but maybe the win at Oklahoma last weekend suggested better traveling days ahead. The depth is not great and the lineup is hobbled, and Kansas has often not looked like the juggernaut that was once 13-1. But when right, the Jayhawks can be matched by few, and could claim the remarkable feat of having four different players leading the Big 12 in four different major offensive categories — Kevin McCullar Jr. in scoring, Hunter Dickinson in rebounding, K.J. Adams Jr. in shooting and DaJuan Harris Jr. in assists. Harris is now a close second. One other thing; Kansas won’t have to play any Big 12 road games in the NCAA tournament.
What to make of . . . Kentucky? What do you call three consecutive Rupp Arena losses — not to mention another back in December to UNC Wilmington — in Big Blue Nation? A state of emergency. But just when things were getting really dire, the Wildcats beat Ole Miss at home and then went to Auburn, where the Tigers had won 16 in a row and bashed three recently ranked visitors by 23, 18 and 40 points. Kentucky never trailed a second and won by 11. The Wildcat crisis hotline operators can stand down. For now. A lot depends on the defense, given that Gonzaga recently scored 89 on Kentucky, Tennessee 103 and Florida 94. But Auburn only 59.
What to make of . . . Tobacco Road? Duke has won 15 of 17 and Jared McCain just had as productive a scoring night — 35 points — as any Blue Devil freshman ever had. Armando Bacot is back to getting double-doubles for North Carolina — five in a row have run his career total to 81, seventh most in NCAA history. This was after not having one in his last five games in January. The Tar Heels have been alternating wins and losses for three weeks, but still are hanging around the top 10. Both these teams are capable of making considerable noise next month but neither might be a No. 1 seed. If that happens, it’ll be the fourth consecutive tournament without a No. 1 from the ACC,  something that has never happened since seeding began in 1979.
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What to make of . . . Tennessee? One of the nation’s best defenses to go with Dalton Knecht’s 20 points a game. Yeah, that’ll work. And as the Vols stay in the upper crust of everything from the NET ratings to the AP poll to the KenPom rankings, a familiar February question hangs in the air. Is it time at last for Tennessee’s first Final Four? Come to think of it, the same thing could be asked about the Alabama team they’re chasing for the SEC lead.
What to make of . . . The final Pac-12 season? No surprise that Arizona is among the national elite, No. 3 in the latest NCAA NET ratings. But then what? The next member on the NET list is Washington State at 31. The Cougars have been Arizona’s most stubborn pursuers in the league race and are but a half-game back, this after being picked 10th in the preseason poll. Oregon is next but has gone 4-5 in its past nine games. UCLA had surged from 6-10 to 12-11 but was just beaten at the buzzer at home by Utah, who had lost five of six, In other words, the lame duck league seems a little fluid.
What to make of the . . . Big Ten? Plenty of screwball storylines to carry this conference to the end. Wisconsin is still securely in the field for bracketologists with a solid seeding but is also a loser of five of six. The Badgers are going to need to win again one of these days, aren’t they? The Nebraska Jekylls-and-Hydes are 8-0 at home in Big Ten play and 0-7 on the road. If Nebraska needs at least one league road victory on the resume to keep the selection committee happy, the trip to Indiana on Wednesday is a big one. Michigan State’s resurgence is as expected as the tide tables. Then there’s Michigan, two years removed from five consecutive Sweet 16 appearances, and now alone in last place.
What to make of . . . Baylor? Houston, Iowa State and Kansas draw a lot of the Big 12 attention but say this about Baylor; the Bears aren’t boring, even when they lose. A three-game skid in January involved overtime to TCU and Kansas State and by two points to Texas. Later came a three-point defeat at Kansas. How much trouble could this team make? They have the balance to do it. Six players average at least 10.7 points a game.
What to make of . . . The Mountain West? Most crystal balls have six members getting an NCAA tournament bid, conceivably more than the ACC, Big East or Pac-12. There are 32 teams as of Monday with 20 wins and the Mountain West has five of them, or 16 percent. Can those boffo numbers translate to March?  This league has only had one Elite Eight appearance in 32 years. Matter of fact, it was last March with San Diego State. So yeah, they could translate.
What to make of .  . . The American Athletic Conference race? Matters were a lot simpler when Houston was around to muscle everyone into line. But the Cougars are gone and at the top is a traffic jam of upstarts. South Florida leads the league and Charlotte is second. One was picked to finish ninth in the AAC and the other 13th.
What to make of . . . The individual scoring race? Looks like it’s Tommy Bruner’s to lose, with his 25.3 average. The 40-point threshold has been crossed only 13 times this season in Division I. Bruner has two of them for Denver. His sister Ashley was all-SEC at South Carolina and his brother Jordan was all-Ivy League at Yale. Hope there’s room on the family trophy mantle.
Mike Lopresti is a member of the US Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, Ball State journalism Hall of Fame and Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. He has covered college basketball for 43 years, including 39 Final Fours. He is so old he covered Bob Knight when he had dark hair and basketball shorts were actually short.
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