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Zion WilliamsonJoe Robbins/Getty Images
Duke’s Zion Williamson has been one of the biggest winners of the 2018-19 men’s college basketball season. He makes some ridiculous, physics-defying play—usually several of them—in every game and has become the undisputed favorite for all of the national player of the year awards as well as the No. 1 pick in the 2019 NBA draft.
But we knew there was a chance that Williamson would plow through this season like a runaway freight train.
For today’s exercise, we’re more interested in the most surprising winners and losers—the players who have made huge leaps to become surefire lottery picks and the teams that have gone from the preseason AP Top 25 to the bottom half of their respective conference standings. These are the things no one could have seen coming three months ago.
Players, coaches, teams, conferences and even an increased emphasis on a particular officiating ruling were all eligible for inclusion.
These are ranked in no particular order, aside from oscillating between winners and losers.
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Michael Hickey/Getty Images
At the end of last season, Ja Morant was a name that only the diehards knew. He averaged an impressive 12.7 points, 6.5 rebounds and 6.3 assists as a freshman at Murray State, but he took a back seat to seniors Jonathan Stark (21.4 PPG) and Terrell Miller Jr. (15.1 PPG, 8.6 RPG).
It’s one thing to get recognition as the youngest and third-best player at a blue-blood program, but he flew under the radar with the Ohio Valley’s Racers. He didn’t start getting much love until everyone began researching statistics during college basketball’s seemingly endless offseason.
Even then, Morant was a fringe first-round prospect on most draft boards and was No. 78 in CBSSports.com’s preseason ranking of the top 101 players. He wasn’t one of the 50 players on the Wooden Award’s preseason watch list, either.
Suffice it to say, that’s no longer the case.
Morant is this year’s Trae Young as far as video-game-like stat lines are concerned. He’s averaging 24 points, 10.2 assists, 5.6 rebounds and 2.0 steals per game. Even if you reduce those numbers by roughly 25 percent to 18, 7.8, 4.2 and 1.4, respectively, the only player in the past 27 seasons to hit those marks was Oakland’s Kay Felder in 2015-16.
Now, you can’t find a draft board that doesn’t have Morant going in the top five. I’ve even seen several that have him going No. 2 behind Zion Williamson. And most in the business of making college basketball player-of-the-year rankings either have Morant in the top five or at least note that he would be one of the top candidates if Murray State were more nationally relevant.
It’s hard to argue that anyone has been a bigger winner this season.
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Bob HugginsPeter G. Aiken/Getty Images
It doesn’t happen every year, but there often seems to be at least one team in the Nos. 11-15 range in the preseason AP poll that crashes and burns, missing the NCAA tournament without so much as a photo finish. No. 15 Minnesota fit that description last year, and No. 11 Indiana did it in 2016-17.
This year, it’s No. 13 West Virginia.
After four consecutive seasons of earning a No. 5 seed or better, it had gotten to the point where we had little choice but to pencil in “Press Virginia” as one of the top candidates to vie for the Big 12 title and a team that was going to be a threat to make a deep run in the NCAA tournament.
But after losing Jevon Carter and Daxter Miles Jr. as graduates, the Mountaineers devolved from a steal-seeking juggernaut to a bumbling bunch that loses the turnover battle on most nights. And as a result, they are 10-12 with only two quality wins.
WVU was plus-6.1 in average turnover margin last year, with this coming one year after an absurd mark of plus-7.7. Now, the ‘Eers are at minus-2.5 and have already suffered more losses than in any of the past four seasons.
It’s more than just the lack of steals. No one on the team shoots well from three-point range. Sagaba Konate has missed most of the season due to a recurring knee injury. Beetle Bolden’s transition from shooting guard to point guard has been an adventure at times. And for a team loaded with 6’8″ forwards, West Virginia isn’t as dominant on the glass as it probably should be.
Not having the steals and the steady supply of fast-break buckets accentuate those issues, though. Bob Huggins hasn’t missed many NCAA tournaments dating back to 1992 (only two), but barring some miracle run in the Big 12 tournament, he’ll definitely be missing it this year.
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Luke Yaklich (left) and John BeileinDave Reginek/Getty Images
If you don’t already know the name Luke Yaklich, get ready to hear it a lot this offseason if and when any high-profile coaching jobs open up. (UCLA on line one?)
Yaklich is the architect of Michigan’s elite man-to-man defense. The Wolverines were consistently an OK, top-100 type of defense for John Beilein’s first decade with the program. But after hiring Yaklich as an assistant during the 2017 offseason, Michigan had the third-most efficient defense in the nation last year and ranks No. 1 in that category this year.
“Yaklich doesn’t coach defense; he breathes it,” The Athletic’s Brendan Quinn wrote after a November morning spent watching film with the defensive savant.
Yaklich hasn’t been coaching college basketball for long. After more than a decade as a high school coach and social studies teacher, he took a job on Dan Muller’s staff at Illinois State prior to the 2013-14 season. By the time he left for Michigan, the Redbirds were ranked fifth in the nation in defensive effective field-goal percentage.
The college basketball junkies who know about assistants long before they become trendy head-coaching candidates were already marveling at Yaklich toward the end of last year. And now that the Wolverines are incredible on defense for a second straight season, it’s clear last season was no fluke and that this man is worth a look as possibly the next Tony Bennett.
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John Beale/Associated Press
The actual biggest loser among coaches is Steve Alford, as he got fired before UCLA even played its first Pac-12 game.
But if Penn State cared about basketball as much as UCLA does, Pat Chambers would have already been fired, too. (Actually, if Penn State cared about winning, he would’ve been fired after the 2016-17 season, but I digress.)
The Nittany Lions are 7-14 overall and are 0-10 in Big Ten play. There have been a bunch of close calls and they did inexplicably get a huge win over Virginia Tech, but only after they had already suffered losses to DePaul and Bradley—and they haven’t beaten a KenPom top-150 team since.
This was supposed to be the year that Chambers finally led Penn State to the promised land. This is now his eighth season with the program, and he has yet to get the Nittany Lions into the NCAA tournament. But recruiting has improved drastically, and they finished in the KenPom top 20 last year after winning the NIT. Momentum doesn’t often carry over from one season to the next in college basketball, but Penn State seemed to be in a good place.
However, this team is an outright disaster on offense. In eight of 10 Big Ten games, Penn State has been held to 64 points or fewer. No one on the team shoots 37 percent or better from three-point range, and Mike Watkins (57.0 percent) is the only Nittany Lion shooting better than 53.5 percent from inside the arc. Compare that to co-Big Ten leader Michigan State, which is shooting 38.3 percent from downtown and 56.4 percent on two-point attempts.
There’s no good explanation for it. Both Watkins and Josh Reaves were efficient scorers last year, but their offensive ratings have dropped off a cliff. Lamar Stevens is shooting much worse while taking a higher volume of shots. And with all three veteran leaders playing worse this season, things have spiraled out of control.
Factor in the incident where Chambers was suspended one game for shoving Myles Dread, and you’ve got a clear-cut No. 1 candidate for any hot-seat rankings piece.
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Jordan NworaTimothy D. Easley/Associated Press
There are a bunch of teams exceeding expectations, but none more so than Louisville.
After losing Deng Adel, Anas Mahmoud, Quentin Snider and Raymond Spalding from a 14-loss team—not to mention a second consecutive offseason with a head coaching change—it seemed like the Cardinals would be an NIT team at best.
They didn’t have a single scholarship freshman in this year’s class, and the only particularly noteworthy returning players were V.J. King and Malik Williams. And neither of those players had come close to living up to their hype coming out of high school.
Yet, somehow Chris Mack came in and immediately cobbled together a contender.
Louisville already has wins over Michigan State (at home) and North Carolina (at Chapel Hill), and it put up solid fights in neutral-site losses to Tennessee and Marquette in November. The Cardinals entered February tied with Duke and Virginia for first place in the ACC with a 7-1 record and look like a No. 3 or a No. 4 seed for an NCAA tournament they weren’t expected to make.
Jordan Nwora (17.9 PPG, 7.7 RPG) has had one of the best sophomore-year breakouts in the nation, and transfers Steven Enoch and Christen Cunningham have been even better than advertised.
But the biggest transformation has been a product of the coaching change.
Last year, Louisville was not a good rebounding team, and it struggled to get to the free-throw line. Basically, the Cardinals shied away from contact for four months. But that timidity doesn’t fly under Mack, as his teams at Xavier always rebounded at a high level and earned a ton of trips to the charity stripe. With that newfound mentality of toughness, Louisville is back to its usual role as a borderline top-10 team.
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Clayton CusterMatt Marton/Associated Press
One episode after the successful Harvest Festival on the TV show Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) stresses over what her next big project is going to be by saying: “You only get one chance to make a second impression.”
Unfortunately for Loyola-Chicago, that second impression hasn’t been a great one.
As you may recall, Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt and the Ramblers became an overnight sensation during the 2018 NCAA tournament, reaching the Final Four as a No. 11 seed with all sorts of buzzer-beaters and last-second theatrics along the way. Despite losing three key seniors from that roster, we had faith that head coach Porter Moser and now-senior leaders Clayton Custer and Marques Townes could remain relevant.
The Ramblers opened the season at No. 25 in the preseason AP poll and were the heavy favorites to win the Missouri Valley Conference.
While Loyola-Chicago is in first place in the MVC, this is nowhere near the mid-major powerhouse we were anticipating.
The Ramblers lost home games to Furman and Ball State in nonconference play, but at least they scored a decent amount of points in those games. They’ve also had losses to Maryland, Saint Joseph’s, Evansville and Missouri State in which they were held to 48 points or fewer. In the most recent of those losses, Missouri State doubled them up by a final score of 70-35.
The weird thing is the Ramblers are statistically similar to what they were last season. They don’t shoot quite as well, but they are still in the top 25 nationally in effective field-goal percentage, they protect the defensive glass as well as anyone, and they rarely commit fouls. But when they aren’t hitting shots, they go colder than a polar vortex.
So if they do make the NCAA tournament—even though things haven’t been going well this season—it’s feasible that they could flip the script and repeat history with a few more 63-62 sort of wins. Instead of a No. 11 seed, though, the Ramblers would likely need to start this run as either a No. 14 or No. 15 seed, given their less-than-stellar play thus far.
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Brad Tollefson/Associated Press
Similar to Murray State’s Ja Morant, Jarrett Culver was overshadowed last year as a freshman. Keenan Evans was Texas Tech’s star and Zhaire Smith was a slightly more intriguing NBA prospect than Culver was. Plus, elite team defense was the biggest talking point when it came to the Red Raiders.
But now that he’s “the man” for Texas Tech, Culver has become one of the most valuable players in the country and one of the most coveted prospects for the 2019 draft.
Culver is one of those rare breeds of players who has gotten more efficient with more volume. For most players, it’s a supply-versus-demand graph where one goes down as the other goes up. But he has improved in both departments, similar to when Buddy Hield became a Wooden Award winner as a senior.
Outside of a slight uptick in turnover rate and a marked decrease in block percentage, Culver has been better across the board.
He is taking 52 percent more field-goal attempts per game than last year, but he has improved his field-goal percentage from 45.5 to 50.7. Culver is a more assertive driver now that he’s a ball-dominant guard. His rate of two-point attempts, free-throw attempts and assists have all roughly doubled from last year.
Because of his evolution into a star, Texas Tech has been way better than expected. The Red Raiders were not in our preseason bracket projection, but they’re looking like a No. 4 or No. 5 seed.
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Luguentz Dort (0) and Jalen Hill (24)Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press
About a month ago, I dedicated an entire article to the possibility that this year’s Pac-12 is the worst major conference of the past four decades. Rather than rehashing some of those notes of conference-wide historical ineptitude, let’s just call out a couple of the teams that have most failed to live up to expectations.
At the top of the list is Oregon.
Injuries have played a big role in the Ducks’ suffering. Bol Bol lasted nine games before he was lost for the season. Louis King missed the first seven games, and Kenny Wooten’s brief absence was largely to blame for the close home losses to Oregon State and UCLA. Nevertheless, Oregon was supposed to be the cream of the Pac-12 crop, being ranked 14th in the preseason AP poll. Injuries or not, the Ducks lost a home game to Texas Southern and only have one win against a team even remotely in the at-large conversation (Syracuse).
UCLA (No. 21) was also in the preseason poll, but some good that did the Bruins. They lost home games to Belmont and Liberty before firing Steve Alford at the end of December. All but one of their 10 losses have come by a double-digit margin, and they have not won a game against a projected NCAA tournament team.
USC was not ranked to open the season, but it was supposed to be one of the four best teams in the league, loaded with proven upperclassmen and a trio of top-100 freshmen. But similar to UCLA, the Trojans can’t buy a quality win, and most of their losses have been blowouts. They also have an awful loss to Santa Clara, in case you were wondering.
Even Washington—the lone realistic at-large candidate in the conference—hasn’t been anything special. The Huskies did not get a single Quadrant 1 or Quadrant 2 win in nonconference play, so they could be a bad loss or two away from slipping to the wrong side of the bubble.
Assuming Washington gets the automatic bid, though, this seriously might be a one-bid league.
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Cassius Winston (5) and Carsen Edwards (3)Michael Conroy/Associated Press
While the Pac-12 has been a disaster, the Big Ten is picking up the slack with possibly its best season ever.
This conference has never sent more than seven teams to the NCAA tournament, but it has been projected for 10 bids for more than a month.
Several of those tickets to the Big Dance—the ones reserved for Indiana, Ohio State and Nebraska—are much less of a sure thing than they were in December. Excluding two games played against each other, the Hoosiers, Buckeyes and Cornhuskers went 2-17 in January. Those wins were home games against Penn State and Illinois. And each of the three lost a game to Rutgers.
That is…not great. Even 2017-18 Oklahoma and Arizona State didn’t implode that spectacularly.
But even if all three of those teams fail to make the NCAA tournament, it’s still shaping up to be a banner year for the Big Ten.
Both Michigan and Michigan State are right in the thick of the race for No. 1 seeds and are arguably the top two non-Duke candidates to win the national championship. Purdue and Wisconsin are both surging and may well give the Big Ten four teams on the top three seed lines. Maryland and Iowa aren’t far behind and would likely be No. 5 or No. 6 seeds if the tournament started today. And Minnesota—in spite of not-great KenPom and NCAA Evaluation Tool rankings—has enough good wins to get in with room to spare.
Of course, none of it will much matter unless the Big Ten finally breaks its title drought. It has had 13 teams reach the Final Four in the past 18 years—seven of which made it to the championship game—but the conference has not cut down the nets since Michigan State did so in 2000. You’ve got to like the Big Ten’s odds this year, though.
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Isaac HaasElsa/Getty Images
“So this is a rule that nobody likes, but the referees have been told that if they don’t call this, they’re not going to get assigned to games until they do call it.”
There aren’t many things that Bill Walton succinctly and eloquently sums up in one sentence, but during the Jan. 3 game between Stanford and UCLA, that was his perfect description of the NCAA’s newfound emphasis on the hook-and-hold ruling.
For those who haven’t yet seen this ridiculous call in action, it’s when two guys are battling for position—most often two frontcourt players trying to box out for a rebound—and one player hooks the other’s arm with his elbow and holds onto it, trying to deceive the ref into calling a foul.
It’s the type of harmless thing that went uncalled for decades until it was no longer harmless.
Purdue’s Isaac Haas suffered a fractured elbow on a hook-and-hold play in the first round of last year’s NCAA tournament. And rather than accept that sometimes fluke injuries happen or try to gradually get that type of physical play out of the game, the NCAA swooped in and decided to make the hook-and-hold ruling a flagrant-1 foul—much to the chagrin of everybody involved with college hoops.
In a December game between Northwestern and Michigan, Northwestern’s Dererk Pardon was called for a foul on Michigan’s Jon Teske. After looking at a monitor review, though, the officials determined Teske had committed a hook-and-hold penalty. So instead of being Michigan’s ball, Pardon was given two free throws and Northwestern got the ball.
In that instance, nothing actually changed. Pardon missed both free throws and Northwestern failed to score on its bonus possession. But that easily could have been a four- or five-point swing in a game that ended up being decided by two points.
Take it to the bank that this thing is going to rear its ugly head in the tournament, impacting the outcome of a game and leading many fans (and commentators, probably) to scream, “They called a flagrant foul for that?!”
It won’t be as bad as missing a blatant defensive pass interference call in the final few minutes of an NFC Championship Game, but it’s going to cause a ruckus.
Advanced stats courtesy of KenPom.com.
Kerry Miller covers men’s college basketball and college football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @kerrancejames.
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