Louisville’s self-imposed postseason ban reduced coach Rick Pitino to a March spectator this season, which under typical settings would make him an ideal forecaster. He will be a neutral observer come tournament time, he intimately knows the country’s best teams and he brings decades of expertise. Of anybody, Pitino could identify the best team in the country. Problem is, even he has no earthly idea.
“This is the first time in a long time, I really can’t make a pick,” Pitino said. “From a coaching standpoint, I cannot make a pick for who’s going to make a Final Four. Usually you can point to a Kansas or a Duke or a Carolina or whoever is good that year. This year, I cannot do it.”
Pitino is not alone. One year after Kentucky came within two victories of an undefeated season and Duke won the national title with three freshmen who became first-round picks, college basketball is bereft of a singular team or dominant force.
“There’s not a big disparity in college basketball right now,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said.
Every team in America has at least three losses, and all but six have at least four. With Selection Sunday looming a month away, this year’s NCAA tournament could be the most unpredictable in recent memory.
In every instance a team has emerged as a front-runner, it has quickly receded back into the pack. Rankings mean little in college hoops, but they have been instructive in describing a topsy-turvy season. Never before has a season passed without a team holding the No. 1 ranking for at least five consecutive weeks. This year, only one team, Michigan State, held the top spot for four weeks. Six teams have been held the top spot, including current No. 1 Villanova, and none for more than six games.
Last Saturday, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams — Oklahoma and North Carolina — both fell to unranked foes. This Saturday, teams ranked 2, 7, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21 and 25 all lost to unranked foes. Not all were upsets, exactly — Duke was a slight home favorite as it edged No. 7 Virginia on guard Grayson Allen’s buzzer-beating bank shot. Still, Saturday’s schedule epitomized this anybody-can-beat-anybody season.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Pitino said. “You’re going to see a lot of the 10, 11 and 12 seeds upsetting the 4, 5 and 6s. It’ll be a crazy year in the NCAA tournament.”
With the tournament on the horizon, the bubble has begun to form. The blind resumes of Team A and Team B will be compared endlessly for the next month or so. In that spirit, here’s one resume to consider, using the RPI rankings from CBS Sports:
Overall record: 20-6
Road: 6-6
Neutral: 3-0
Home: 11-0
Vs. top-100 RPI: 7-6 (3-6 road)
Vs. top-50 RPI: 5-3 (2-2 road)
Other notable performances: One loss against the No. 100 RPI team and one home win against the No. 2 RPI team.
Patrick Stevens, The Washington Post’s resident bracket expert, declared that resume would be worthy of about a four or five seed at present. The resume, though, doesn’t actually belong to a team. It’s the combined record of whatever team has been ranked No. 1 in the country.
Villanova rose to the No. 1 ranking for the first time in school history last week and twice defended it with victories of DePaul and St. John’s. Whereas Kentucky made the No. 1 ranking a stamp of dominance a year ago, this season it has conferred ambiguity. When Villanova ascended to the top of the poll, five other teams received first-place votes.
“Although Villanova is having a spectacular year and head coach Jay Wright is as good as it gets, I couldn’t say they’re a Final Four team,” Pitino said.
“Our league is reflective of the national landscape competitively right now,” ACC commissioner John Swofford said. “We’ve got a lot of good teams. We’re in my opinion probably the deepest conference in the country this year. But we don’t have a dominant team. And I don’t think there’s a dominant team anywhere in the country. I expect our tournament, and probably the NCAA tournament, to be probably the most unpredictable that we’ve seen in a number of years.”
North Carolina coach Roy Williams likened Kentucky’s unquestioned status last season to Tiger Woods’s reign in golf. When one player, or one team, is so clearly dominant, it tends to draw in more casual fans. It provides a standard and the fascination of whether it can be topped.
“When there’s an obvious great team out there, people want to see that,” Swofford said. “When there are a lot of very good teams without a dominant team, more people will think they really have a chance to win the thing. I think both are good. They’re just different.”
Connoisseurs, Williams believes, will find excitement in interchangeability, too.
“There’s so many good players,” Williams said. “I think Kentucky’s dominance is something that was extremely unusual. What we have now is the norm.”
How the college basketball world became so flat is open to interpretation. Pitino theorized dominant teams typically occur when dominant big men populate the sport.
“There’s not that type of big man out there,” Pitino said. “If you look at great backcourts, you can probably come up with the answer. But there’s probably quite a few of those.”
The one-and-done system adds uncertainty to the texture of a season. Kentucky’s juggernaut formed around an elite recruiting class. But Kentucky lands that caliber of class every season; that one happened to jell more quickly and fulfill its potential better than most. This year had a unique wrinkle: Ben Simmons, the nation’s top recruit and presumptive first overall NBA draft pick, could have made a traditional power a one-season powerhouse. Instead he chose to play at LSU.
The vulnerability surrounding the country’s best teams may just be standard. Many believe seasons like this one will occur more frequently than a team like Kentucky lording over the sport.
The norm, then, will mean any of perhaps 20 teams could win the national championship. It means no one, not even the players and coaches, will have any idea which one it will be.
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