Ultimate Guide to the 2015-16 College Basketball Season
Are you old enough to remember college basketball?
Friday marks the seven-month anniversary of Duke's win over Wisconsin in the 2015 National Championship Game. An entire Major League Baseball season and postseason were played since we last saw a college basketball game.
You do realize how long the MLB season is, right?
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But we have finally arrived at the doorstep of the 2015-16 season. Whether you have been religiously following or intentionally ignoring college basketball news for the past 200-plus days, we could all use a refresher on the big things to be aware of when Vermont and Eastern Michigan get us started on the road to the 2016 Final Four in Houston at 11 a.m. ET on Friday, Nov. 13.
Who are the title contenders? Which freshmen are going to take the world by storm? What's up with all the scandals? And will we be subjected to another season of "undefeated" talk?
We'll get to all of that, but let's begin this ultimate guide to the 2015-16 season with perhaps the most joyous offseason news in more than a decade.
30 Seconds to Houston
If you're the type of person to ignore all things college basketball during the seven-month offseason, you're going to want to read up on the rule changes going into effect this season.
The most noteworthy amendment is the reduction of the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds. Several changes were made to improve the pace of play—only three timeouts carry over to the second half instead of four, time allowed to replace a disqualified player decreased from 20 to 15 seconds and some called timeouts can serve as media timeouts, etc.—but the shot-clock change is the one everyone will be blathering about early in the season.
Other significant changes include expansion of the restricted-area arc from three to four feet, elimination of the five-second closely guarded rule and a generally reinforced emphasis on freedom of movement for players.
Ideally, the end result will be a faster, less physical game than the rock fights we've been watching for the past decade.
Whatever you do, though, don't expect an overnight change.
Players, coaches and referees will need a lot of time to adjust to the new rules. It might be ugly for a month. It might be ugly for a few years. But as long as the game doesn't (d)evolve into a lite version of the NBA in which defense is seemingly forbidden until the final five minutes, it should eventually be a much better product.
Back in the Saddle
Rather than jumping straight into more changes, let's take a moment to pay our respects to our elders.
Those who claim the one-and-done model is ruining college basketball need to take a serious, annual look at the pool of extremely talented and important seniors around the country. In fact, one could pretty easily argue that all the early jumping to the NBA is the reason many of these seniors even had the opportunity to develop and ultimately shine.
Oklahoma's Buddy Hield and Indiana's Yogi Ferrell both waited until nearly the last possible moment to announce their decisions to return for one final season, immediately cementing the Sooners and Hoosiers as preseason Top 15 teams.
Kentucky's Alex Poythress was just about the only player from last year's roster who didn't jump to the pros, leading to a statement we never dreamed possible during the John Calipari era: How well the senior plays will likely determine whether Kentucky is the favorite to win it all.
"What we do, it will center around Alex, I believe," said Calipari during a Q&A with a few members of the Lexington media in early September, adding, "A lot of what will happen for us and our team is how quickly he can start being who he is. ... If he does what he can do, the rest of the guys will fall into what they are."
Elsewhere, Marcus Paige (North Carolina), Kyle Wiltjer (Gonzaga), Georges Niang (Iowa State), Ron Baker (Wichita State), Fred VanVleet (Wichita State), Caris LeVert (Michigan), Denzel Valentine (Michigan State) and Perry Ellis (Kansas) are all legitimate candidates to win the 2016 Wooden Award as the leaders for their respective AP Top 25 teams.
Fabulous Freshmen
Seniors are great, but freshmen bring people back every November. They're the added assets who will lead your favorite team to new heights—the missing pieces of the puzzle, finally found.
Mostly, though, we love freshmen because they're new and they're the future of basketball.
Even the best senior is a well-maintained iPhone 5, but Ben Simmons is like an iPhone 6S Plus (or whatever model Apple is on by the time you read this): When he finally arrives, there'll be so much hype that it'll be almost impossible for him to live up to it.
After literally years of hearing about how great he's going to be, Simmons could record eight triple-doubles and lead the nation in scoring this season, and it would barely even be a surprise. That's how much is expected from highly touted first-year players these days.
LSU's point forward certainly isn't the only new guy worth mentioning.
Both Kentucky (Skal Labissiere and Jamal Murray) and California (Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb) have a pair of top-10 freshmen who could propel their new teams to the Final Four. Duke's odds of repeating as national champs improved considerably with the addition of Brandon Ingram. And don't be surprised when Mississippi State (Malik Newman) and Marquette (Henry Ellenson) come back from the dead to make some noise this year with their outstanding freshmen.
Cheick, Please?
We're going to see a lot of extremely good freshmen this season, but there's also a great one who still hasn't been cleared to play by the NCAA.
It was in early August that the national outlets first caught wind of the NCAA's investigation into Our Savior New American School, and we have been waiting with bated breath for a ruling on Cheick Diallo ever since.
High school teammate Damon Wilson was cleared in September, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Kobie Eubanks also attended OSNA and was recently cleared to play in the second semester, according to SNY.tv.
According to Gary Parrish of CBS Sports, though, Diallo still hasn't been cleared as of the morning of Nov. 3. ESPN's Jay Bilas—the unofficial leader of the crusade against the NCAA's hypocrisies—was none too pleased with the latest news:
As ESPN.com's Eamonn Brennan wrote in October, "Kansas will be the deepest team in the country no matter what." But for the sake of Diallo's present and future, here's hoping we'll see him on the court much sooner than later.
You Must Be New Here
College basketball doesn't technically have free agency, but with the transfer rate as ridiculously high as it is, that might as well be what we call all this movement of players between teams.
Graduate transfers are the ones who make the biggest waves. Everyone works on their way-too-early Top 25 rankings before the NCAA tournament even ends, and then, out of thin air, teams add veterans who will make major impacts.
Very early in the offseason, Louisville added both Damion Lee and Trey Lewis in an effort to combat a ton of attrition. Connecticut also picked up a pair of noteworthy seniors in Shonn Miller and Sterling Gibbs. Wichita State remains a Top 10 team thanks to incoming big man Anton Grady. And Maryland just might be the best team in the country after getting Rasheed Sulaimon.
But let's not forget the guys who were forgotten long ago—the transfers who had to sit out a season and haven't been seen on the court in nearly 20 months.
We're talking about guys like Eron Harris (Michigan State) and Terry Henderson (NC State) who bolted from West Virginia after putting up great numbers for a 17-16 team, or players like Cole Huff and Mo Watson Jr. who will make Creighton much, much better than the version that lost 16 of its final 21 games last season.
Mostly, though, we're talking about Ryan Anderson (Arizona) and Robert Carter Jr. (Maryland)—a pair of big men who will likely start at power forward for legitimate contenders for the national championship.
"I've been gone for a whole year, so people tend to forget," Carter told Don Markus of the Baltimore Sun in June. "Once I start playing, they'll be able to see all the hard work I've put in, and my game will speak for itself."
Most transfers amount to very little in their new threads, but there are quite a few familiar faces in new places who will very much impact the entire season.
Critically ACC-laimed
Though the formula for our preseason conference power rankings spit out the Big 12 as the best conference in the country, the ACC is where it's at this year.
North Carolina, Duke and Virginia all open the season ranked in the top six of the AP Top 25, meaning the ACC has a legitimate chance to repeat what the Big East did in 2009 by earning three of the four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament.
If the Tar Heels can stay healthy this year—Marcus Paige's missing the beginning of the season isn't a great start—they should be the best team in the country. Duke is attempting to do what has been all but impossible for the past 20 years by repeating as national champions. And yet the most intriguing thing about these top teams might be getting to see if Virginia becomes even more impossible to score against with the aforementioned shot-clock reduction.
With second-tier teams as strong as Miami, Notre Dame, Florida State, NC State and Louisville, the ACC could continue duplicating the Big East's efforts in that 2009 season by sending four teams to the Elite Eight.
Throw in Pittsburgh and Syracuse as teams with realistic expectations of bouncing back from disappointing 2014-15 seasons, and the ACC has 10 very capable teams, as well as a few potential sleepers in Wake Forest, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech.
Basically, if there is an ACC game on television that doesn't involve Boston College, you're going to want to watch it.
Why So Scandalous?
Of course, the ACC is also very much at the forefront of what has been the most scandalous offseason in memory.
We went into the summer expecting some sort of hammer to come down on the Tar Heels for nearly two decades' worth of academic fraud in the form of "paper classes." However, aside from people screaming "What about North Carolina?!" in the comments sections of articles covering other scandals, that remains a non-issue for the 2015-16 season.
Louisville and Notre Dame, however, are under all sorts of scrutiny amid their respective sex scandals.
For those of you who have been willfully ignoring those storylines, the "TL;DR" versions of the allegations are that the Cardinals had a former graduate assistant who used prostitutes to entice recruits to join the basketball team and the Fighting Irish fired an academic coach who was coercing basketball and football players into having sex with her daughter. To say the least, it has been a disturbing month of following college basketball news, and it's unlikely either of those stories will be going away anytime soon.
Elsewhere, SMU took a 2016 postseason ban, and Larry Brown is suspended for the first nine games of the season for, among other things, academic fraud and unethical conduct. San Diego State is under investigation for possible rules violations. Pacific is also under investigation amid allegations of academic misconduct by a former assistant.
And don't forget Jim Boeheim is suspended for nine games this season as Syracuse continues to pay the price for its lack of institutional control.
If a few more reports come out, it might actually be easier to just list the schools that aren't in any sort of trouble.
The Tortoise and the Bear
Enough with the scandals, though, right? It was "fun" to read about all that misconduct while we writhed in agony for the actual game to return, but it's November now. That means it's time to turn our attention back to the hardwood, where there are two very strong title contenders who haven't even remotely fit that description in the past decade.
Maryland is the one in which just about everyone has bought stock. The Terrapins earned a No. 4 seed last season and will bring back such key players as Jake Layman, Damonte Dodd, Jared Nickens, Dion Wiley and, most importantly, lead guard Melo Trimble.
But it's the new players who push the Terps over the top. Diamond Stone will challenge Skal Labissiere for the title of best freshman center in the country. Rasheed Sulaimon might be the best graduate transfer in the country. And Robert Carter Jr. might be the best sat-out-a-year transfer in the country. It's going to be tough to find an opponent that won't be dealing with at least one serious individual mismatch when facing Maryland.
California is the contender that people have been a little more hesitant to trust. As previously mentioned, though, the Golden Bears picked up two of the 10 best freshmen in the nation in Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, and they already had a very strong returning backcourt made up of Tyrone Wallace, Jordan Mathews and Jabari Bird.
The X-factor for Cuonzo Martin's club is whether Kingsley Okoroh is ready for a much bigger role as a sophomore. Last year, the 7'1" center averaged just 6.1 points and 6.7 rebounds per 40 minutes and finished the season with one more point than fouls committed. But as ESPN's Jeff Goodman noted in early October, Okoroh could be a big piece of the puzzle:
Okoroh originally committed to Tennessee just hours before Martin's decision to take the job at Cal. He quickly decommitted on Twitter to follow the coach across the country. It only seems fitting that he play such an important part in Martin's attempt to bring the Golden Bears back to national relevance.
Surprise! Kentucky's Still Good
For Maryland and California to jump into the Top Five and Top 15, respectively, some former member of that club is mathematically required to take a bit of a tumble.
Don't expect it to be Kentucky.
The Wildcats are ranked in the top three of the first AP Top 25 poll of the season for a fifth consecutive year. Sure, they lost to Robert Morris in the NIT in one of those seasons, but they have also advanced to the Final Four in four of the past five years.
At one point or another, more than half of the projected starting five has already been mentioned in this column. In addition to Murray, Labissiere and Poythress, they'll have an extremely talented seven-man rotation rounded out by Tyler Ulis, Isaiah Briscoe, Charles Matthews and Marcus Lee. They also have a couple of X-factors in JUCO transfer Mychal Mulder and Australian big man Isaac Humphries, who could crash the party to make a solid nine-man rotation.
Yes, seven Wildcats declared for the draft after last season.
No, Kentucky is not in any danger of dropping from its perch among the nation's elite.
The 40-0 Trilogy
Like any self-respecting trilogy, the main character from the first movie will play a prominent role in the third (and final?) act of The Quest for Perfection.
Two years ago, Wichita State opened the season with 35 consecutive wins before falling to Kentucky in arguably the most enthralling round-of-32 game ever played.
But the Shockers still have Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet and a schedule that in no way befits their strength as a program. Save for a home game against Utah and likely showdowns with Xavier and Notre Dame in the AdvoCare Invitational, Wichita State plays exactly zero games against teams that received a single vote in the preseason AP Top 25.
If we wake up on Dec. 13 and the Shockers are undefeated, there's a pretty good chance that will still be the case on March 13.
Of course, the hero/villain from Part 2 is the other top candidate for the lead role in Part 3 of the trilogy.
Kentucky has two extremely challenging games this season: neutral court vs. Duke on Nov. 17 and at Kansas on Jan. 30. Aside from those games, though, nothing stands out as particularly difficult.
The SEC is a bit deeper, with Texas A&M and Vanderbilt presumably contending for a tournament bid this year and LSU potentially being very good with Ben Simmons, but the gap between No. 1 and No. 2 in the SEC is still quite wide. Kentucky also has a couple of potentially tough nonconference games against Louisville and UCLA, but prospects for their season are pretty much right on par with those of A&M and Vandy.
It's very far from likely that either the Shockers or Wildcats will go undefeated, but it's at least remotely possible.
For the time being, though, there are 351 undefeated teams. Buckle up for a chaotic few weeks of watching them drop like flies.
Recruit rankings courtesy of 247Sports.
Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter at @kerrancejames.
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