College basketball is back, and so are the men’s college basketball power rankings. If we’re doing this right, you wouldn’t dream of having one without the other.
For you longtime readers, welcome back. For new folks, come on in, and a heads up: The hope here, as ever, is to provide you with an essential weekly discussion of the best 10 or 12 or 15 teams in college basketball, depending on how many teams we’re interested in ranking that week. That’s sort of the governing vibe: What’s actually interesting at the top of the sport this week? Sometimes, deserving teams will get left out. Sometimes your favorite will be ignored. Sometimes we just won’t have much to add about the putative 13th-best team in the country, so 12 it is. Sometimes we’ll spend a team’s entire blurb talking about some bad chain restaurant food we had, or Elden Ring, or whatever. “Best,” here, is mostly used vaguely — and getting caught up in “but X team beat Y team beat Z, so Y team must be better!!” discussions is entirely beside the point.
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Just, like, roll with it. The numerical rankings themselves have always been, and will always be, the least important part of this column. They are structure, lines on the floor. What matters is what happens in between.
Cool? Cool. Welcome to the 2022-23 men’s college basketball power rankings, and to the 2022-23 season itself — which is off to a flying, fascinating start.
1. Texas (3-0)
Texas at No. 1? Yep. And why not? Have you seen any team play as well against quality opposition this season as Texas did versus Gonzaga Wednesday night? The Longhorns were incredible: connected, physical, tough, totally locked in.
In other words, they were a lot of the things Chris Beard’s first Texas team was not a year ago. Texas was never bad last season. Quite the opposite: The Longhorns finished 22-12, 15th in adjusted efficiency, got a No. 6 seed, won a tournament game. All in all, not a bad year for a first-year head coach who rebuilt huge swathes of his starting lineup with guys from the transfer portal who had never played a minute together.
It was a fine start. But it was also characterized by a certainty that something was always a little off. Texas lost twice to his former team, Texas Tech, a more developed project with a more cohesive style. After Jan. 4, the Longhorns won more than two games in a row just once. The offense was effective enough but not particularly pretty; it was often discordant and ragged. Texas never found a groove. Things were always just a little awkward.
It was striking how much this wasn’t the case Wednesday night. Maybe it helped that the Longhorns were opening their fancy, more intimately arranged new arena, all the better to build communion with their fans. But the basketball did that more than anything else, and man was the basketball great. Throwing sophomore Iowa State transfer Tyrese Hunter into the backcourt is a revelation; suddenly, Marcus Carr’s offensive life looks so much easier. Timmy Allen is still a uniquely capable hybrid player, but the roles around him (five-star prospect Dillon Mitchell, revitalized vet Dylan Disu, Christian Bishop coming off the bench) make more sense. Defensively, Texas is swarming, terrifying, a nightmare for a Gonzaga team without currently confident guards.
Most of all, though, this suddenly feels like a team where everyone is more at ease. That goes for Beard, who is settled in the job (and the new Moody Center) now, and likewise for his players, who have had more time together to congeal, to build a stylistic and cultural foundation. Texas has added elite pieces around them this offseason, including what — judging by Wednesday’s 26-point, 5-of-8 from 3 output anyway — might be one of the best guards in the country in Hunter. The Longhorns looked more complete offensively, and looked like the best defensive team in the country.
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Texas, at least for one night, looked like the best team in the country — full stop.
2. North Carolina (3-0)
The Associated Press’s No. 1 men’s college basketball team was not exactly at its most convincing, high-flying best at the Dean Dome Tuesday night. Playing 0-3 Gardner Webb, which came in ranked (for what it’s worth) 197th in adjusted efficiency, the Tar Heels finished a sleepy first half leading just 26-22. And while they opened up a 16-point lead in the second half, they didn’t sustain it, letting the Runnin’ Bulldogs back into things in the final five minutes and basically needing all of an 18-of-21 free throw night to get by. Carolina finished having scored 1.01 points per possession. It was not exactly inspiring stuff.
Frankly, Carolina hasn’t yet played well. The good news? It hasn’t lost any of those games. The bad news? UNC should be playing better. This is the nation’s most established, obvious starting five, four-fifths of which nearly won a national title last year, and no less than Hubert Davis himself has been shocked by how casual everybody has been at the start of this season. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Davis said his team didn’t have “red flags” but did have “yellow flags,” including in the areas of “toughness,” “sustained effort,” and “commitment to defense.” None of which is, you know, ideal.
“I am, I am, I really am,” Davis said, as to whether he was surprised by those early shortcomings. “That’s the shocking thing, I am. I really felt like at the beginning of the year there would be a hunger and a thirst. I really felt that. I was excited about it, because I felt like it was coming from different directions, different viewpoints.”
Asked Hubert Davis about UNC's defense, specifically allowing points in the paint. R.J. Davis called it "unacceptable."
Hubert (paraphrased): It's hard to do the exact OPPOSITE of what the coaches tell you.
— Brendan Marks (@BrendanRMarks) November 16, 2022
Instead, his guys look like they could hardly be bothered. It’s a long season, and you can understand why a group of guys who got used to high-leverage games in the NCAA Tournament might find it a bit difficult to get totally up for Gardner-Webb at home. But national title contenders usually look better than this, even this early. It’s something to keep an eye on.
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3. Houston (4-0)
Rest assured, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about Houston this season. The Cougars were in basically every edition of the rankings last year, even in the days and weeks after they lost star guard Marcus Sasser to a season-ending foot injury, because — remarkably, frankly insanely — Houston swallowed that devastating injury and didn’t get the slightest bit worse. By March, they were one of the two or three best teams in the sport. It was a stunning microcosm of what Houston has become under Kelvin Sampson: extremely good by default. Lose guys to the draft, to graduation, to injury, whatever, change seasons, doesn’t matter: Houston just keeps getting better.
And, yes, the early results suggest this Houston — now with a five-star prospect in Jarace Walker mixed in with Sampson’s usual mix of unheralded players with unfathomable levels of dog in them — is as good as ever. Then again, they’ve beaten Northern Colorado, St. Joe’s, Oral Roberts and Texas Southern. Yes, they’ve beaten them all by a million, in that ruthless way that Houston at its best does, but still: It remains very early. Let’s see how Sunday’s true road trip to Oregon pans out.
4. Kansas (3-0)
Even as someone who has traditionally not covered a ton of the nuts and bolts of recruiting, and has typically taken a “let’s just see what they look like when they step onto a college floor when they’re like 18 and not literal kids under a guardian’s care and protection” attitude toward obsessively touted incoming prospects, even we can’t deny the thrill of being there before the rest of the world.
So it was Tuesday night, watching the Champions Classic, a very minor and marginally emotionally satisfying journey that began in the summer of 2021, at the Under Armour UAA event at the Lake Point Champions Center in Cartersville, Ga., when we wandered over to a centrally located floor in the warehouse-sized gym and a colleague pointed out, so we would know who to most closely observe, the kid wearing the KC Run jersey who was long since committed to play for Kansas.
It made immediate sense: A Wichita, Kan., native who emerged as one of the top players in his class as a freshman, Gradey Dick was a 6-foot-8, lanky wing with handle, feel and an obvious confidence in his ability to shoot from deep. Of course he signed with Kansas. A couple minutes of game time was enough to see the deal, but his performance in the ensuing contest against a highly competitive D.C.-based squad was enough to remind us, post-pandemic, of our deep love of live, in-person basketball.
And it came full circle Tuesday night. Facing Duke at the Champions Classic, Dick took the floor as a freshman starter for the reigning national champs and more than acquitted himself. Jalen Wilson is this team’s new star — you can actually see him walking differently now, like he knows it — and Dajuan Harris is the intelligent heartbeat of it all, but Dick’s ability to slot in seamlessly as an efficient wing option is a continuation of the ability we saw him display against occasionally overmatched high school players more than a year ago. You never know precisely how that translation will happen. For Dick, defensively, it will take a while longer. (Duke targeted him more than a few times.) But he is instant offense that Kansas needs; he was vital in the narrow win over the Blue Devils Tuesday night, and rarely do you see a player that screams “Kansas basketball” more than him. Even this early, you can already see him barely scratching the surface of what is likely going to be a very productive KU hoops career. It’s fun to observe that possibility when it’s still only just that.
5. Baylor (3-0)
We watched the very first game of the men’s hoops season — Baylor’s 117-53 win over Mississippi Valley State on Nov. 7 — from a basically empty Buffalo Wild Wings in Alexandria, Va. We had to take the car into the shop, and it was the only nearby restaurant with TVs, and there was something profoundly funny to us about being in B-Dubs on a Monday afternoon watching Baylor-Mississippi Valley State. We requested the game specifically. They put it on the TV in front of us. We watched it with real interest. We wondered what the wait staff — one dude when we got there, a couple of people by the time we left — made of us. Did they think we were a degenerate hoops gambler? A die-hard Baylor fan? Just a profoundly lonely remote worker who wanted to watch a blowout while he had some boneless wings and tater tots?
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Oh, speaking of which, it was the first time we’d had Buffalo Wild Wings food in a very long time. Five years, at least; we haven’t had it even semi-regularly for a decade, if not longer. Question: Didn’t that place used to have decent food? Was it always this bad? Are we remembering too fondly? What happened there?
Anyway: Baylor scored 45 points in the final 10 minutes of that first half. Baylor is extremely good. More on this as it develops.
6. Gonzaga (2-1)
Wednesday night at Texas was the first time in a very long time that Gonzaga didn’t look like the most talented team on the floor.
Maybe the last time was the 2021 national title game, when the Zags got rolled by a brilliant Baylor. But even then, with Jalen Suggs and Corey Kispert and Drew Timme, it was hard to argue unbeaten Gonzaga was less talented than Baylor. The Bears gave them a very difficult time for a variety of reasons on the day, but raw, uncut talent wasn’t really among them.
That gulf in pure talent was always there last season, too. How many teams could look as gifted as one with Chet Holmgren playing alongside Timme in the frontcourt? Holmgren was a legit 3-point shooter and interior finisher at his unimaginable size; he also erased every defensive mistake with generational movement and length as a shot-blocker around the rim. He made college basketball look easy, and Gonzaga usually made its opponents look simple in the exchange. And Andrew Nembhard ran the show, and Gonzaga’s layup-devouring uptempo offense, as well as any guard in the country.
This is no longer the case. Gonzaga’s guards were the big question mark coming into this season; Gonzaga’s guards remain so after Wednesday night. Nolan Hickman is a nice enough player, but he was overwhelmed by Texas’s backcourt pressure. Malachi Smith, ditto, but going from Chattanooga to Tyrese Hunter and Marcus Carr is a lot to ask. Hunter Sallis and Julian Strawther couldn’t come close to matching UT’s length or strength at the wing positions. The river of easy looks and transition layups dried up. Timme was good, as ever, but that was about it. Around him, Gonzaga suddenly looked very normal.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It would be weird if Gonzaga was a national title favorite-type juggernaut every single season. Sometimes you’re just a plain, old-fashioned, normally good team. But after two years of dominance, the regression is jarring to witness all the same.
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7. Michigan State (2-1)
Hey hey, it’s Michigan State! OK, yes, sure, this is probably high. Maybe way too high! This is, essentially, the same team that was a No. 7 seed last year, albeit with one more offseason of collective improvement and cohesion. Three games in, we’re not exactly willing to entirely toss out our preseason understanding.
On the other hand, though? Tom Izzo scheduled a strong start to the season, and so far it has massively paid off. The Spartans have played three games as of this writing; two of them came against Gonzaga and Kentucky on neutral courts. Michigan State lost the first, but only barely, and had a chance to win its visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln against the Zags last Friday night down to the final possession exchange. Then, on Tuesday, the Spartans outlasted Kentucky in double-overtime at the Champions Classic in Indianapolis, uncorking two of the most impressive late-clock out-of-bounds plays you’ll ever see, leading to game-tying dunks in high-leverage situations en route to the win:
Michigan State | EOG Full Court Special
COACHING MASTERCLASS FROM TOM IZZO pic.twitter.com/Cm7DTtxKSw
— Half Court Hoops (@HalfCourtHoops) November 16, 2022
As impressive as those plays were, though, the biggest thing that stuck out to us about Michigan State’s performance (particularly relative to Kentucky, which we’ll get to below) was its fluidity. Faced with a team that seems pretty clearly more talented in all sorts of ways, Michigan State made up for it not just by being more prepared in key moments but also just being more comfortable with each other, and with its understanding of where the ball needed to be. Guards A.J. Hoggard and Tyson Walker were decisive. They have a feel for each other. The spacing is smart. Mady Sissoko is a revelation. The ball moves, it swings, it swings again. Joey Hauser has figured out what his best shots are in this system, and how best to hunt them down. Michigan State quickly puts questionable defenders (C.J. Fredrick on Tuesday) into mismatches and then runs quick, easy little plays — simple stuff like an elbow pindown that got Hauser a wide-open look late — that maximize those brief advantages.
Michigan State didn’t put on some crazy offensive clinic Tuesday night, but it was by far the more fluid of the two teams. Fluidity matters. It illuminates skill; it multiplies the collective application thereof. It allows teams to become more than the sum of their parts. That’s Michigan State, at least right now.
GO DEEPER
Michigan State's Tom Izzo does more with less, gets the best of John Calipari
8. Kentucky (2-1)
And that fluidity stood in stark contrast to the performance Kentucky produced, which most of the time was … well, not fluid. Stagnant. Occasionally broken. Not particularly fun to watch, in any case.
Here’s some quick upside for Kentucky fans: The team attempted 25 3s last night. That was a major point of complaint last season, and for a few years now, about John Calipari’s offensive preferences — that Kentucky, so averse to perimeter shooting, had become stuck in the stylistic past. Tuesday night had some clear signs of evolution, including some fast break and secondary break quick-hitters that led to open 3s, which were clearly designed and not just some talented kid freewheeling while Cal convulses in agony on the sideline. The Wildcats didn’t shoot it well (they only made seven of those 3s) but still, if they’re genuinely shooting the 3 more, that will pay dividends over time. It’s a good thought, anyway.
Unfortunately, the underlying bones of the Kentucky offense were still rickety and stiff. The talent is always so obvious. Freshman Cason Wallace is an incredible player (not least of which on the defensive end, where he was a steal machine, freelancing and anticipating things no one else could see). Oscar Tshiebwe, making his return from a preseason injury in what was supposed to be uncertain circumstances, looked as good as ever: 22 points, 18 rebounds, flashes of improved agility and movement on both ends. Sahvir Wheeler knocked down some perimeter shots, and also made a handful of brilliant interior passing plays and finishes; he can be frustrating to Kentucky fans at times but brings more to the table than he takes off. (He is also a short, lefty true point guard, a throwback to the aesthetically appealing southpaw guards of my childhood — Spurs-era Avery Johnson particularly.)
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But far, far too often, Wheeler, Tshiebwe, and/or Wallace were asked to rescue dire UK offensive possessions through sheer force of will. Far too often UK would run a couple of perfunctory, predictable actions to get Fredrick open on the baseline, got shut down, then either dumped the ball in the post to Oscar or had Wheeler/Wallace play drive and kick while everybody else stood around and watched. Michigan State was able to very easily neutralize the first couple of things Kentucky wanted to do, at which point the possession had to slow down, start over, and be ground out. Jacob Toppin was only so involved; Antonio Reeves, UK’s leading scorer through two games, was not involved at all.
Often, Wheeler or Wallace did something really good. Or Tshiebwe bowled someone over the low block. Or he rebounded one of his teammates’ misses and gave UK another crack at the possession. Or whatever. Kentucky is extremely individually talented. That talent provides an extremely high floor.
GO DEEPER
Kentucky fizzles to ugly ending in double OT loss to Michigan State
But for Kentucky to hit its potential this season — for it to be, as we suspect it could, the best team in the country, maybe even by some distance — it will have to execute down the stretch of games, of course, but most of all it will have to get more fluid on the offensive end throughout. It has to find some flow.
It shouldn’t be this much of a struggle for a team this talented to put the ball in the net, or this onerous to watch it attempt to do so.
9. Duke (2-1)
It was hard to be too discouraged by Duke’s Champions Classic loss to Kansas Tuesday night. Yes, the Blue Devils were the inferior team on the night, but not by much, and that’s considering an opponent that brought back two vital starters from a national title team. The Blue Devils, meanwhile, are leaning on Jeremy Roach for any semblance of Durham-acquired experience, and with all due respect to Jeremy Roach, it’s not exactly bringing back Tre Jones for Year 2, you know?
No, the Blue Devils are brand new. They’re so brand new that Derrick Lively II has played just 35 minutes to date working back from injury, and Dariq Whitehead, arguably the best of Duke’s ridiculous incoming class, hasn’t yet played at all. It is understandable (in a way that maybe doesn’t make as much sense for Kentucky, given how much experience it returned at various positions) to be occasionally broken and turnover-prone offensively. Which, to be clear, Duke was. If this is still the way the Blue Devils look in December, smash the panic button. But for now let’s see how they look at the PK85, one way or the other.
10. Arkansas (3-0)
So, this happened Wednesday night:
📞 Hello, 911? pic.twitter.com/zOR0O3R01b
— #10 Arkansas Razorbacks Men’s Basketball 🐗 (@RazorbackMBB) November 17, 2022
We’re not remotely above throwing up a preposterous highlight and calling it a day. And that *is* a preposterous highlight. It’s pure filth, practically samizdat, and would be enough for us to end Arkansas’s blurb right here and now. But no — there is a deeper meaning here too.
You can always tell when coaches are especially high on guys. Their tone changes. So it was in the summer with Arkansas associate head coach Gus Argenal, when we asked about Trevon Brazile: a change in affect, a sudden excitement, a genuine unpracticed enthusiasm for how good this kid might be. It was a little disorienting: Brazile was a freshman who played in 25 games for a dire Missouri team last season, who played just 41.7 percent of a bad team’s available minutes. But Brazile was injured, and he was a late developer, and Arkansas had seen something in him, not least the ball skills combined with a H.R. Geiger-designed frame.
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Which is how you get what Brazile did to that South Dakota State defender Wednesday night, an interaction created with pure, raw, unadulterated talent. All of a sudden, a lot more people are going to be paying attention to Trevon Brazile — who might be the fourth or fifth most talented player on this team.
Arkansas has a ton of guys, is the point. We remain as high on them as ever, if not higher. Nick Smith Jr. hasn’t played a minute yet, and Brazile is already doing stuff like that. Sheesh.
Also thinking about: Iowa, for whom Kris Murray (29 points, 11 rebounds) looked like a genuine player of the year candidate (heh), leading his team to a hugely impressive double-digit win at Seton Hall, where the Pirates pushed and pushed and really never closed the gap on the Hawkeyes; UCLA, which has an interesting test against Illinois Friday; Creighton; Indiana, who get their first real test Friday night at Sean Miller’s Xavier; Arizona; Virginia, where top freshman Isaac Traudt has decided to take a redshirt year, the type of long-term roster-building decision that has been a trademark of UVa’s success and also makes you think this team is going to be better than we expected; TCU’s preseason excitement petering out by the end of week one, but also maybe let’s wait until the guards get back on the floor before we totally bury the Horned Frogs; Florida State 0-3 with losses to Stetson, UCF, and Troy (!!!); Colgate beating Syracuse for the second time in a row, LOL; Prairie View A&M beating Washington State — which played a true road game in Prairie View, Tex. as part of the Pac-12’s extremely admirable agreement with the SWAC for true road nonconference contests — and showing up as high as 10th in Bart Torvik’s unweighted rankings Wednesday; Colorado, which also lost to a SWAC team on the road (Grambling State) before winning by double digits at Tennessee (???); Elden Ring, though, for real; Victoria 3; The Long Parliament; Saint Louis finally having its breakthrough year; Dayton (albeit banged up) losing to UNLV; Louisville being 0-3 with three one-point losses, which is as unlucky as it gets sure but then again losing three games of any margin to Bellarmine, Wright State and Appalachian State at home is … not good; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander; Twitter; The Sopranos.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo of Michigan State’s Malik Hall: Andy Lyons / Getty)