Winners and Losers of Opening Weekend of the 2015-16 College Basketball Season

It was supposed to be a quiet opening weekend of college hoops, but March came early in the form of some mid-November madness.

Buy games fell by the wayside as Arizona State, North Carolina State and Wisconsin each lost to one of the 50 active programs that has never participated in the NCAA tournament. Georgetown and UCLA didn't fare much better in losing their respective home openers against minor conference programs.

It wasn't all bad losses, though. Auburn, Belmont and North Florida picked up crucial wins while Butler, Cincinnati and West Virginia made their "competition" look like it had never even seen a basketball before.

Most importantly: We're all winners for having college basketball back in our lives.

Read on for more about the biggest winners and losers from college basketball's opening weekend.

Winner: Auburn Tigers

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There was a lot of under-the-radar action in Friday's deluge of 156 games, and UAB at Auburn just might have been the most noteworthy of them all.

After last year's big upset over Iowa State in the NCAA tournament, UAB is being regarded as one of the favorites to win the Conference USA. The Blazers brought back all six of their leading scorers, including Chris Cokley, the power forward who opened his sophomore season with a very impressive 25 points and 12 rebounds against the Tigers.

However, Auburn was able to eke out a 75-74 win that could legitimately have serious Selection Sunday implications for both teams.

Even without stud freshman Danjel Purifoy—still waiting to be cleared by the NCAA—Auburn won due almost entirely to three new transfers who led the way in scoring.

Former Marshall point guard Kareem Canty had a very impressive Auburn debut with 20 points, five rebounds and four assists. He averaged 16.3 points and 5.5 assists per game as a freshman with the Thundering Herd and should be the leader of this Auburn squad. Former Providence forward Tyler Harris had 14 points and five rebounds, but JUCO transfer T.J. Dunans was the star of the night with 17 points, six rebounds, three assists and three steals.

Banking on transfers didn't work so well for the Tigers last year. Antoine Mason, K.C. Ross-Miller and Cinmeon Bowers ranked top four in scoring with their new team, but it only amounted to a 15-20 record.

Might year two under Bruce Pearl be the charm?

They're certainly off to a good start.

Loser: North Carolina State Wolfpack

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So, about that five-year contract extension for Mark Gottfried...

Just hours before the first game of 2015-16, NC State announced that it had signed its head coach through the 2019-20 season. And hours after the first game of the season, Wolfpack fans are left to wonder if that was such a great idea, as they lost to William & Mary by an embarrassing score of 85-68.

To be fair, some growing pains were to be expected.

NC State lost three of its four leading scorers from last season in Trevor Lacey, Kyle Washington and Ralston Turner, meaning that big sophomore seasons out of Abdul-Malik Abu and Caleb Martin were fairly non-negotiable. And for their part, so far so good. The duo combined for 38 points, nine rebounds, six assists and five steals on opening night while Martin shot 5-of-10 from beyond the arc.

But with West Virginia transfer Terry Henderson leaving after just seven minutes with an ankle injury and Lennard Freeman and BeeJay Anya combining for just three points in 35 minutes of action, NC State was simply over-matched by a team that probably won't even win the Colonial Athletic Association title this year.

The report from ESPN's Jeff Goodman is that Henderson is going to miss six to eight weeks with torn ligaments in the ankle, which only further cements NC State's place as our biggest loser. The starting shooting guard was supposed to be one of the team's leading scorers, but it sounds like he won't play again at least until the start of the ACC schedule. Absolutely brutal news for an already short-handed team.

Winner: Kyle Davis, BYU

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It seems we'll have to wait at least one more game to get photos of Kyle Davis in a BYU jersey, but the Utah State transfer had a phenomenal game in his debut with the Cougars, dropping 17 points and 20 rebounds on Utah Valley.

Like both Auburn and NC State, BYU had some serious holes to address after losing three of its five leading scorers from 2014-15. Chase Fischer shot well en route to 20 points. Kyle Collinsworth (naturally) flirted with a triple-double, finishing the night with 17 points, nine rebounds and seven assists. But as the top returnees, they were expected to be the stars of this team.

Getting that kind of production out of Davis on opening night was both a pleasant surprise and an encouraging sign for the year ahead.

With the addition of Lone Peak star Nick Emery, the Cougars have three perimeter players who can score in bunches. However, interior scoring was a potentially significant concern with neither Corbin Kaufusi nor Nate Austin showing much of any interest in trying to score last season.

In Davis, it appears Dave Rose has found his workhorse in the paint.

To be sure, Davis didn't exactly come out of nowhere. Two years ago with the Aggies, he averaged 9.1 points and 7.6 rebounds per game. And let's be sure to consider the opponent and to take the numbers with a grain of salt. That said, it was a great start for a power forward who will be crucial to BYU's success.

Loser: Wisconsin Badgers

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Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig combined for more than 50 percent of Wisconsin's points. In typical Bo Ryan fashion, the Badgers committed a total of four turnovers and 15 personal fouls. In atypical Bo Ryan fashion, they dominated the offensive glass, corralling 21 of their own misses. Even Khalil Iverson looked good in his collegiate debut, tallying six points, seven rebounds, three steals and three blocks.

That's supposed to be Wisconsin's formula for success in the Big Ten this season, but it resulted in a humiliating home loss to Western Illinois on Friday night.

Back in mid-October, CBS Sports ranked all 351 teams from top to bottom. As they were in the AP Top 25, the Badgers were slotted at No. 17.

The Leathernecks ranked No. 326 with a note of "They won one of their last 15 games last season, so it's hard to say that momentum is on their side."

This wasn't quite Appalachian State over Michigan in football's opening week in 2007, but it would be hard to overstate how big of an upset this was.

Without a doubt, lack of cohesion on defense was the biggest culprit. Normally one of the most stagnating defenses in the country, Wisconsin looked hopelessly lost on the defensive end of the court all night.

I fully appreciate that this is a young team that will almost inevitably improve as the season progresses. However, Hayes is the most experienced player on the roster, and there were several occasions on which he just casually waved a hand at a Western Illinois driver rather than doing anything to keep him from an easy layup. Defensive switches were a completely foreign concept to the Badgers as Western Illinois seemed to get to the hoop whenever it pleased.

The Badgers did bounce back nicely with a big win over Siena two nights later in a game where Hayes hardly even played because of foul trouble. Still, it was a pretty brutal start to the season for a squad that was in the past two Final Fours.

Winner: Belmont Bruins

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Sometimes it's difficult to draw the distinction between a big win and a bad loss in early season upsets. Wisconsin losing to Western Illinois and Georgetown losing to Radford were pretty clearly awful losses, but Chattanooga over Georgia and Monmouth over UCLA were arguably more impressive wins for programs on the rise than they were horrible losses for middling major conference teams.

Belmont over Marquette, though, is just a straight up impressive win for a very good mid-major team.

However, it was one of those exceedingly rare opening weekend games in which both teams looked really good. Marquette's super frosh Henry Ellenson had 21 points and 16 rebounds while teammate Luke Fischer had a double-double of his own (12 points, 10 rebounds) in a back-and-forth affair with minimal turnovers and impressive ball movement from both teams.

Veterans Craig Bradshaw and Evan Bradds just ended up being too much for the upstart Golden Eagles to handle. Belmont's duo combined for 42 points. Bradds made 10-of-13 field-goal attempts while Bradshaw shot 5-of-10 from three-point range.

Even more impressive were the contributions from sophomore point guard Austin Luke. Reece Chamberlain averaged 6.0 assists and 1.7 steals per game last season before becoming the only member of Belmont's primary six-man rotation to leave the team. Luke only played 4.2 minutes per game as a freshman, but he was great on Friday night, tallying nine assists and a steal against just one turnover.

Once Taylor Barnette starts hitting shots like we all know he can, this Belmont team is going to be extremely difficult to beat. It's never too early to start thinking about potential tournament Cinderellas, and I can already guarantee I'll be strongly considering the Bruins for the role of annual No. 12 or No. 13 seed that makes the Sweet 16—provided they have better luck in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament than Murray State did last year.

Loser: Games Played in Asia

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The idea of playing early season games overseas is nice, but the execution? Not so much.

The Armed Forces Classic between Pittsburgh and Gonzaga was supposed to be the best game of the opening day of the season. The Zags are a preseason top 10 team that has become an annual threat for a tournament No. 1 seed. Pittsburgh is a fine team in its own right, looking to bounce back from its first season with less than 20 wins since 2000-01.

But the quality of the temporary court in Okinawa, Japan, wasn't nearly on par with the quality of teams playing on it. Players slipped and slid all over the place in the first half. Panthers starting point guard James Robinson got the worst of the awful conditions, gashing his face when he slipped on transition defense and nearly destroying both of his knees while trying to make a break on offense. Thankfully, they cancelled the game at halftime before anyone suffered a season-ending injury, but it never should have taken that long.

Thus, the first game of the season on ESPN was very hard to watch and technically never happened.

Game No. 2 on ESPN wasn't much better. In Shanghai, China, Texas and Washington played perhaps the ugliest game of the opening day of the season. They shot a combined 31 percent from the field, perhaps partially because there was no rhythm whatsoever to a game that "featured" 62 fouls and 88 free-throw attempts. Seven players fouled out of the game, only one of which played more than 18 minutes.

The silver lining of the game between the Longhorns and the Huskies was that it brought Bill Walton back into our lives with such gems as "The guy's been growing like a weed. If he was a weed, they'd spray Roundup on him."

Never change, Bill.

Winner: North Florida Ospreys

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It's hard not to feel bad for Illinois for having one of the most injury-plagued four-month stretches in college basketball history.

When I posted Big Ten projected standings in late July, I listed each team's five projected starters and top three reserves. Of those eight players for Illinois, two (Tracy Abrams and Darius Paul) are already done for the year, two others (Leron Black and Kendrick Nunn) missed the season opener and a fifth (Jaylon Tate) suffered an open dislocation in the first half of the opener.

(The healthy three played well, though. Charlotte transfer Mike Thorne Jr. had 25 points and 14 rebounds, Malcolm Hill had 20 points, 10 rebounds and five assists and Maverick Morgan made all three of his field-goal attempts.)

Though the Illini were shorthanded, North Florida played well enough to beat a whole lot of teams on Friday night. Stud point guard Dallas Moore had 26 points, 10 assists and no turnovers in the 93-81 win over Illinois. Beau Beech has been one of the best shooters for the Ospreys over the past three years, and he certainly didn't disappoint by hitting 7-of-8 triples, pacing the team to a night of shooting 17-of-33 from downtown.

This is most certainly the team to beat in the Atlantic Sun—the same conference that produced upset-minded Florida Gulf Coast and Mercer in the past three years. We'll have plenty of other early season chances to check in on the Ospreys, as they will also face Louisville, LSU, Dayton, Arkansas and VCU in the next seven weeks.

Loser: Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks

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Over the past few years, it has not been easy for Stephen F. Austin to schedule quality nonconference opponents. In fact, in the last three seasons, the Lumberjacks have faced a total of nine non-D-I programs and just six nonconference opponents that finished the season ranked in the KenPom Top 100.

Long story short, they need to take advantage of the limited chances that they have to prove themselves, because that 88-13 record since the start of the 2012-13 season loses a ton of luster once strength of schedule is taken into consideration.

Losing the season opener to Baylor by a 42-point margin isn't exactly our idea of seizing the opportunity.

Defense has been Stephen F. Austin's forte in recent years. The Lumberjacks have ranked in the top 50 in turnover percentage in each of the past six years and ranked in the top seven in each of the past two years.

They had a total of three steals against Baylor while the Bears recorded an absurd 31 assists in the game.

Granted, Baylor is a very good team, but is there anything Stephen F. Austin can really do to grab our attention again before the tournament? Its best remaining opponent is either UAB, Arizona State or Northern Iowa—each of which lost its season opener this weekend.

Heck, the Lumberjacks might enter the NCAA tournament with a 33-1 record, but it's going to be very difficult to forget how ugly that one loss was.

Winner: Southwestern Athletic Conference

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SWAC basketball is usually a complete and utter disaster.

Last year, the SWAC had a combined record of 12-98 against D-I nonconference opponents. Through the first two weeks of the season, the 10 teams were a combined 2-42 against D-I opponents, and those wins over Jacksonville and Cal St. Bakersfield didn't exactly scream "Excellence!"

It only took two days to surpass that win total this season.

Led by 22 points from likely SWAC Player of the Year Ladarius Tabb, Alabama A&M won in overtime at Tulane on Friday night. About an hour after that, Arkansas-Pine Bluff eked out a two-point win at Seattle. The big one, though, came on Saturday evening when Alabama State won 85-82 at Virginia Tech.

Granted, not a whole lot is expected out of Virginia Tech this year, but Year Two of the Buzz Williams Project wasn't supposed to start anywhere near this poorly. The Hokies even got 26 points and 15 rebounds out of South Florida transfer Zach LeDay, but the major conference program was unable to keep Alabama State's offense in check.

It certainly wasn't all green grass and high tides for the SWAC. The rest of the conference went a combined 0-7 with an average margin of defeat of 25.3 points. Yet, it has already been one of the best starts to the season that the SWAC has ever had.

5 More Losers

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Rhode Island Rams

Talk about winning the battle but losing the war. Rhode Island comfortably won its season opener against American but lost potential A-10 Player of the Year E.C. Matthews for the rest of the season with a torn ACL. Not only did the Rams lose a star, but they were the one projected tournament team that could probably least afford to lose anyone to injury. Lack of depth was always going to be a concern for this team, and now it becomes a very serious problem.

NCAA Eligibility Center

Kansas beat Northern Colorado by 37 points in the season opener, but Cheick Diallo wasn't eligible to appear in the game because the NCAA Eligibility Center apparently sometimes investigates kids who get good grades in high school and college. Monmouth's freshman forward Pierre Sarr also did not play on opening night, as he wasn't cleared until Friday afternoon and thus didn't even travel with the team out to UCLA. Forget about #FreeTacko. Let's just free everyone accepted into college.

Georgetown Hoyas

Really Georgetown? Losing in double overtime to Radford? In a game where Bradley Hayes did one heck of a Rakeem Christmas impersonation by putting up 19 points and 12 rebounds after entering his senior season with a career total of 30 points and 42 rebounds? Don't you usually wait until March to suffer completely inexplicable losses?

Next up for the Hoyas is Maryland on Tuesday before facing Wisconsin and either Duke or VCU in the 2K Sports Classic. Has a team ever made the tournament as an at-large after opening the season with four straight losses?

Pac-12

Aside from Ryan Anderson, Arizona did not play well at all against Pacific. Utah's guards went a combined 0-of-18 from the field in a close win over Southern Utah. Arizona State lost at home to a Sacramento State team that lost both of its leading scorers from last year. UCLA lost in Pauley Pavilion to Monmouth. Stanford needed overtime to survive against Green Bay. All in all, it wasn't a great opening night for the Conference of Champions.

Northeast Conference

The Pac-12 struggled, but the NEC was a train wreck. A Sacred Heart win over Quinnipiac was the only thing separating the conference from entering play on Monday without a single victory. Of their 12 combined losses, 11 were by a margin of at least nine points and seven of the losses came by a margin of at least 22 points.

5 More Winners

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Cincinnati Bearcats

This team had exactly zero games last season with 85 or more points. So, of course, the Bearcats scored 97 against East Carolina on opening night and 106 against Robert Morris on Sunday. Gary Clark reigned supreme in the opener with 21 points, eight rebounds and three blocks, but it was a full team effort against Bobby Mo with eight players scoring in double figures in the 62-point rout.

Butler Bulldogs

Speaking of absolutely insane scoring outputs, Butler dropped 144 points on The Citadel on Saturday night. It was 34 more points than any NBA team scored that day. Granted, The Citadel might be the worst team in the entire country and was playing its very first game under notoriously breakneck-paced coach Duggar Baucom, but 144 points in regulation is just unfathomable.

Kris Dunn

On the one hand, it was an incredible individual night for Dunn. He had 32 points, eight steals, six rebounds, five assists and two blocks, reassuring everyone's faith in him as a Wooden Award favorite. On the other hand, even with Dunn's Herculean effort, Providence only beat a rebuilding Harvard team by 12 points, as Rodney Bullock was the only other Friar to show up to play. Don't expect this to be the last time Dunn attempts 26 shots in a game.

Grayson Allen

Duke's defense wasn't very good as Siena and Bryant combined to shoot 20-of-42 from downtown against the reigning champions, but the Blue Devils won both games comfortably, thanks in large part to a completely unstoppable Allen. A lot of experts were skeptical about his ability to be "the guy" in Durham, but he is already dunking his way to some ACC Player of the Year votes.

West Virginia Mountaineers

No Juwan Staten? No problem. Jevon Carter led the Mountaineers in points, assists and steals on opening night with 24, six and five, respectively. Jonathan Holton and Devin Williams both recorded double-doubles as West Virginia picked up right where it started last season by grabbing 23 offensive rebounds and forcing 30 turnovers against Northern Kentucky. It may be a few weeks before anyone remotely challenges Press Virginia.

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