Denzel Valentine's Injury Pushes College Basketball into State of Extreme Parity

It was finally starting to look like there might be one team that could rise above the fray to put an end to the incessant argument that there are no great teams in men's college basketball this season.

But then this news broke Monday afternoon, via the Detroit Free Press' Joe Rexrode and the Detroit News' Matt Charboneau:

Michigan State—already in possession of wins over teams ranked No. 2, No. 10 and No. 16 in the latest AP Top 25—has been one stubborn voter away from a unanimous No. 1 in the last two polls.

The Spartans on Saturday were the closest they have been to fully healthy all year and won at Northeastern by 20 points as Gavin Schilling finally made his 2015-16 debut after missing 11 games with turf toe.

Had the NCAA tournament started 24 hours ago, Michigan State would have been the overwhelming favorite to win it all.

Winslow Townson/Associated Press

Now, the Spartans are just the latest team to face adversity while adding credence to the argument that parity is going to win the 2016 national championship.

The good news is that it doesn't sound like Denzel Valentine will be out for very long, and if he had to miss two or three weeks, he picked a pretty good point in the season to do so.

Michigan State's game at Iowa on Dec. 29 immediately becomes even more of a challenge than originally thought, and the Spartans had better not overlook Tuesday's neutral-site game against Oakland. With four major-conference transfers and the nation's most underappreciated point guard (Kahlil Felder), the Golden Grizzlies could pull a fast one on Michigan State if it's too busy licking its wounds.

"We're just going to have to learn," head coach Tom Izzo told Kyle Austin of MLive. "This will be a new challenge, a new chapter for us."

There's still more than enough talent on this roster to win those games—as well as the following three against Minnesota, Illinois and Penn State—but it seems almost inevitable that the Spartans will drop at least one of those contests while playing without Valentine, a nightly triple-double threat.

If or when they do fall back to the pack, there's going to be a mad scramble to settle on a new favorite for the 2016 title.

Kansas and Oklahoma are next in line for the throne, but Big 12 teams have been highly unreliable for anything other than early exits in the NCAA tournament in recent years. Not to mention, it feels like each of those teams is still trying to figure out what it's going to do at power forward this season.

Are you really going to trust a squad with only three or four consistent producers to win six straight neutral-site games?

If not the Jayhawks or Sooners, is Maryland ready to answer the bell?

Before Valentine's injury and Purdue's loss to Butler, it wasn't at all unreasonable to think the Terrapins were the third-best team in the Big Ten. How can they now be the best team in the country?

There are cases to be made for Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona, but that's also getting into Xavier, Butler and Providence territory.

It's still quite surreal that all three of those Big East teams are now ranked in the Top 10, considering most experts had Villanova and Georgetown as the two best teams in the conference before the season began.

The point is there's a good reason the Spartans were almost unanimously No. 1, even though ESPN.com's Joe Lunardi argued just two weeks ago that "in the case of Michigan State, the odds are not only that the Spartans won't be the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament, but that they won't be among the four No. 1 seeds at all."

Given the pool of options and our constant need to believe that there is a de facto best team in the country, Michigan State made the most sense. That might not be the case in the immediate future, and it'll be interesting to see who takes the Spartans' place.

Even more intriguing than the murky situation atop the national hierarchy of teams is the sudden availability of the John R. Wooden Award.

It was already shaping up to be a weird season for the most prestigious National Player of the Year award.

Kris Dunn has missed the past two-and-a-half games for Providence while dealing with a stomach bug. Ben Simmons is putting up great numbers for an LSU team that might not make the NIT, let alone the NCAA tournament. Kyle Wiltjer isn't even the best player on his own team; that honor goes to Domas Sabonis.

Skal Labissiere and Jaylen Brown have gotten off to disappointing starts as freshmen for teams that have been relatively disappointing as well. Fred VanVleet and Marcus Paige each missed a handful of games with injuries.

And Nigel Hayes has been drastically less efficient for a Wisconsin team that has already lost more games than it did all of last season.

Throw in Valentine missing the next few weeks, and there's a pretty big negative working against nine of the top 15 guys from CBSSports.com's preseason ranking of the top 101 players.

Had POY ballots been submitted this morning, Valentine probably would have been No. 1 on at least 95 percent of them. But with his name just the latest on a pile of fallen stars, where do we turn next?

It's got to be either Buddy Hield, Melo Trimble or Wayne Selden now, right? Not only are they the best players on top teams, but each is putting up mind-boggling numbers through the first six weeks of play.

But can you really pick a favorite from that trio? And how many games is Valentine allowed to miss before we can't put him back in the conversation? What about Dunn? How many games does LSU have to win for Simmons to make a real push for the award?

These weren't arguments that we were having yesterday, when Valentine and MSU were firmly entrenched on top of the respective debates.

Get well soon, Denzel, but know that you'll probably return to a swirling pit of parity.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.