Stunning UNC Upset Caps Wild Opening Week for College Basketball's Elite Teams

When North Carolina scheduled Saturday's early-season road game against Northern Iowa, it was intended to be a nice homecoming gesture for (currently injured) senior guard Marcus Paige. Instead, the No. 1 Tar Heels put one heck of a bow on a crazy start to the college hoops season by suffering a 71-67 loss to the unranked Panthers.

Obviously, Paige's absence was a pretty big problem. The Tar Heels shot 27.8 percent from three-point range and forced a grand total of six turnovers. And with Theo Pinson and Joel Berry both getting into early foul trouble, the lack of depth in the backcourt was particularly poignant.

After the game, North Carolina head coach Roy Williams told reporters, "(Paige is) our best player offensively and defensively and as fine a young man as I've ever been around in my life, so I'd like to have him on the court. But North Carolina still plays."

The twofold silver lining for UNC is that Paige should be back in a week or two from his hand injury, and sophomore wing Justin Jackson finally decided to show up for a game. Jackson entered the day averaging a paltry 6.7 points and 1.3 rebounds, but he more than tripled both of those numbers with 25 points and four rebounds.

Unfortunately, his offensive breakout was about all that went right for the Heels.

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Berry and Nate Britt came into the game averaging a combined 28 points per contest, but they had just nine points on 13 field-goal attempts Saturday. Much more disturbing for this team's future, Brice Johnson and Kennedy Meeks were quite ineffective against a Northern Iowa frontcourt that got a grand total of 40 minutes, five points and six rebounds out of players taller than 6'6".

And yet, the strangest part of the No. 1 team losing to a rebuilding, unranked Missouri Valley Conference squad that already lost to Colorado State earlier this year is that it didn't create nearly the amount of hubbub one might expect such an upset to cause.

Without a doubt, the general lack of commotion surrounding the stunner can be heavily attributed to the pigskin dominating the airwaves. However, even the roundball diehards tracking the Tar Heels' eventual demise could only shrug their shoulders at the latest evidence suggesting parity will reign supreme in 2015-16.

Aside from Kentucky, are we sure anyone is elite this year? Based on his tweet from minutes after North Carolina's loss, CBS Sports' Jon Rothstein doesn't seem to think so:

Sure, No. 11 Villanova has beaten the tar out of the cupcakes on its schedule, and No. 13 Michigan State will probably jump into the Top Five after Denzel Valentine single-handedly slayed Kansas last Tuesday, but what about the teams that actually opened the season ranked in the Top 10?

Less than 24 hours before North Carolina's loss, No. 3 Maryland was down by 14 in the second half at home against Rider before mounting an impressive, Diamond Stone-fueled comeback—this coming just three days after needing to rally from a late seven-point deficit at home against Georgetown.

No. 4 Kansas and No. 5 Duke both lost in the Champions Classic, and neither one looked particularly good in the process.

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No. 6 Virginia lost at George Washington on Monday, and No. 9 Wichita State lost at Tulsa on Tuesday.

No. 7 Iowa State had its hands full with Colorado in its season opener, as did No. 8 Oklahoma with Memphis—neither of those opponents was expected to do much of anything this year.

No. 10 Gonzaga is the only non-Kentucky Top 10 team that hasn't looked bad in a game, and that's only because its battle with Pittsburgh in the Armed Forces Classic was cancelled at halftime. With the Bulldogs down by two at the time, it was very much looking like a contest Gonzaga might lose.

But, hey, that's college basketball, right? Good teams struggle early before eventually turning things around?

Not exactly.

Last year, the 10 teams at the top of the preseason AP Top 25 played a combined 36 games within the first 10 days. All but three of those were wins by double-digit margins. (The exceptions were Kansas' 32-point loss to Kentucky, Florida's loss to Miami and Florida's subsequent close call against Louisiana-Monroe.)

The year before that was more of the same. The top 10 teams in 2013-14 went a combined 29-3 through the first 10 days of the season. Two of those losses came in the incredible Champions Classic that pitted No. 1 Kentucky vs. No. 2 Michigan State and No. 4 Duke vs. No. 5 Kansas. The third was No. 7 Michigan losing at unranked Iowa State—but succumbing to Hilton Magic is hardly unique to the Wolverines.

Two years in a row without any chaos in the Top 10 could be a coincidence, but reflecting back on a third year reveals a trend. Other than the two games in the Champions Classic, the preseason Top 10 teams in 2012-13 started a combined 25-1, with the one exception being No. 6 North Carolina State's blowout loss to Oklahoma State—before we really knew how good Marcus Smart was going to be.

Maybe there just aren't any elite squads outside of Lexington this year.

Maybe there are a few elite teams, but they aren't who we thought they would be. (What's up, Cincinnati, Miami and Xavier?)

Or maybe this was to be expected because elite teams were substantially more adventurous in their early schedule-making than their predecessors were.

Too many times over the past decade, we have collectively griped about schools like Duke, Louisville and Syracuse spending virtually the entire first two months of the season refusing to play a true road game. But North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma and Wichita State flipped the script by agreeing to true road games against significantly above-average non-major programs.

(Based on the results of those games, you can bet we won't see nearly as many elite teams playing mid-November road games in 2016.)

The good news is this means there's still plenty of reason to hope that presumed elite programs will turn things around to put up a fight against Kentucky before March Madness comes to fruition.

They just made the rookie mistake of starting their campaigns at too high a difficulty level.

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