10 Things That Every College Basketball Fan Wants for the Holidays
Regardless of which holiday you celebrate at this time of year, all college basketball fans should have a few particular things on their wish lists.
We need more production out of freshmen and fewer players sidelined by injuries.
We need more TV time for Monmouth's bench mob and fewer bad losses for Ben Simmons' LSU Tigers.
We need someone—anyone—to establish themselves as the favorite to win it all, and we certainly wouldn't mind a mid-major to emerge as a viable Final Four candidate.
Most of all, though, we need SMU to stay undefeated for as long as the Mustangs possibly can.
We'll provide the rationale for those wishes and more on the following slides.
First and foremost, though, happy holidays to you and yours. You guys not only make this job possible, you make it fun—yes, even the irrationally angry commenters. Be sure to enjoy these next few days with your loved ones, because if you adore college hoops as much as we do, you won't see them much again until April. These next few months are going to be wild.
Healthy Stars
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Ideally, no one would ever get injured, but we know that's far too much to wish for. Instead, we're just asking that the big-name guys actually get and stay on the court after a tumultuous nonconference portion of the season.
We were spoiled by a lot of things last year, but injury luck was a big one. Caris LeVert missed half of the season with a foot injury, and Frank Kaminsky and Jahlil Okafor missed one game each, but pretty much everyone else in the preseason top-50 lists had a happy and healthy season.
Already this year, Kris Dunn, Marcus Paige, Fred VanVleet and now Denzel Valentine have missed multiple games due to injury or illness.
And those are just the guys who opened the season as legitimate candidates for the Wooden Award. We've also seen Kennedy Meeks, Przemek Karnowski, Kaleb Tarczewski, Markus Kennedy, Amile Jefferson, A.J. English, E.C. Matthews, Naz Long, Mangok Mathiang, Jalan West, Terry Henderson, Phil Forte, Amida Brimah and seemingly Oregon's entire roster hit the shelf for significant lengths of time.
Forget about which teams are playing their best in March. The national championship might just be decided by who is actually healthy a few months from now.
Some Marquee Wins for LSU and Ben Simmons
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One star who has stayed healthy is Ben Simmons, but his team's NCAA tournament chances need to be nursed back to health.
The Tigers have nothing resembling a marquee win and are 0-4 away from home against Marquette, NC State, Charleston and Houston. There aren't very many teams who appear to be deserving of an at-large bid this season, but this is definitely a resume fit for Santa's "naughty" list.
That said, LSU will have plenty of opportunities in January to make a good impression on the selection committee. Its first three conference games are at Vanderbilt, vs. Kentucky and at Florida. The Tigers will also play at Texas A&M in mid-January before a huge home game against Oklahoma on the 30th. Four wins in those five games would go a very long way toward erasing the four losses already suffered.
With Keith Hornsby and Craig Victor in the lineup, the Tigers should be considerably more competent than they were for the first month of the season. Still, going 4-1 against that slate of opponents is a tall order for any team.
As Adam Zagoria of SNY.tv noted last week, if LSU does miss the tournament, Simmons could become the first college player since Michael Olowokandi in 1998 to be selected No. 1 overall in the NBA draft immediately after missing out on March Madness.
But at least Olowokandi participated in the tournament in a previous season. You have to go back two more decades to Minnesota's Mychal Thompson in 1978 to find the last time a college player was taken No. 1 overall without ever appearing in the NCAA tournament.
After just 11 games, it's too early to call Simmons a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but he is on the verge of doing something that hasn't happened yet in my lifetime.
More Stud, Less Dud from Top Freshmen
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Ben Simmons has been sensational from day one. Brandon Ingram and Caleb Swanigan have been great in December. And it would be pretty tough to complain about the jobs that Henry Ellenson, Diamond Stone and Jamal Murray have done for their respective teams.
But there sure have been a lot of disappointing 5-star guys.
Because he was supposed to be Simmons' biggest competition for the No. 1 overall pick, Skal Labissiere has become the poster boy of disappointing freshmen. In Kentucky's four games against major-conference opponents, this is Labissiere's average stat line: 15.8 minutes, 3.8 points, 2.5 rebounds, 1.5 blocks, 3.8 personal fouls.
For a guy who had a 247Sports rating higher than Jahlil Okafor last year, those are downright embarrassing numbers.
He certainly isn't alone, though.
Malik Newman has done nothing to improve Mississippi State and is actually one of the Bulldogs' least efficient players. Ditto Jaylen Brown at California, who's doing a fair amount of scoring, but only because he's taking a ton of shots.
Cheick Diallo was ineligible for Kansas' first five games, but he hasn't exactly hit the ground running since then. Isaiah Briscoe can't shoot. Chase Jeter can't get on the court. And those are just guys 247Sports had rated in the top 15 of this year's batch of freshmen.
NBA scouts have taken notice as well, writes CBS Sports' Sam Vecenie:
"From speaking to people around the league and from having personally scouted this class pretty extensively, this class does seem to lack the star power of the last two drafts, and it certainly lacks the excitement of the 2017 draft class, one that already has scouts drooling.
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The irony here is there have been some really good 4-star freshmen. Deyonta Davis, Tyler Davis, Tyler Dorsey, Donovan Mitchell, Jawun Evans, Dedric Lawson and Malik Beasley all fell a bit short of that 5-star rating, but those top-50 guys have been playing much better than some of their top-15 counterparts.
However, because much of the supposed cream of the crop has fallen flat on its face, the narrative has been that this is the weakest class of freshmen in recent history. That might be true, but it's not quite the "Ben Simmons and a mountain of disappointment" that they want you to believe. And if guys like Labissiere and Newman start performing during the conference portion of the season, perhaps that national mindset will change a bit.
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No More Mid-Week, Midnight Retirement Announcements
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After what he did for Wisconsin's basketball program over the past two years—let alone the past two decades—Bo Ryan deserved to go out like a champion. Whether he wanted a banquet, a parade, a key to the city or a new holiday established in his honor, the man had earned it. And if he had retired shortly after the end of last season, he would have gotten all that and more.
Instead, he came back for one final season and called it a career after five losses in less than five weeks.
We knew it was coming soon. Ryan announced over the summer that he would be retiring after this season. However, it wasn't supposed to happen like this: late on a Tuesday in December after most of the East Coast had already gone to bed.
The sad part is that rather than recognizing Ryan did this to give longtime assistant Greg Gard a legitimate audition for the job, some people woke up to the news and decided that he quit on Wisconsin, including Fox Sports Radio hosts Andy Furman and Mike North.
He deserved better, and we deserve better than losing legendary coaches in our sleep. Here's hoping there aren't any other midseason retirements.
More Nationally Televised Monmouth Games
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This is a wish that we're actually getting, as there are 10 Monmouth games scheduled to air on ESPN3 and a 11th in late February that will either be on ESPN2 or ESPNU.
If you've grown tired of the Monmouth bench mob's shtick, maybe college basketball isn't for you. Perhaps you should just suffer in silence, while the rest of us try to enjoy a good thing as often as we can.
But regardless of how you feel about Daniel and Louie Pillari—the cousins who have been the faces of the bench mob—you need to watch this team play. The Hawks have gone 8-3 against a very challenging schedule and possess a better quintet of wins (at UCLA, at Georgetown, at Rutgers and vs. USC and Notre Dame on neutral courts) than just about any other team in the country can boast.
Junior guard Justin Robinson is pretty much already a lock for MAAC Player of the Year and needs to at least get onto the fringe of the National Player of the Year discussion.
He's averaging 19.8 points, 3.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 2.4 steals per game while shooting 42.9 percent from three-point range and 90.5 percent from the free-throw line. Those aren't quite Buddy Hield, Kris Dunn or Ben Simmons numbers, but good luck finding 10 more impressive stat lines at this point in the season.
And if he's putting up those numbers against Notre Dame and UCLA, just wait until you see what he does against the likes of Quinnipiac and Fairfield.
Another Tip-Off Marathon
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To make up for a Monmouth wish that's already going to come true this season, here's one that won't: We need more tip-off marathons.
It's easily one of the best things that any sport does. I don't care what the ratings are for the 3 a.m. games played in Hawaii; there's just something intrinsically beautiful about knowing that for more than 24 hours, there's always the option of watching a live college basketball game.
The real value is in those morning and early-afternoon games on a Tuesday.
The CBB junkies soak up every minute of the marathon we can, but for the average "punch the clock" Joe, it provides frequent respites from an otherwise boring day.
On Nov. 17, 9-to-5 folks were able to catch part of East Tennessee State vs. Green Bay while getting ready for the day with a morning cup of coffee. And when the caffeine wore off and they couldn't possibly submit another TPS report before lunch break, they could tune in for the final few minutes of Valparaiso vs. Rhode Island. If they needed a pick-me-up while waiting for the clock to hit 5 p.m., the end of Auburn vs. Colorado was a fine option.
Doing it every day would obviously be way too much, but would it kill college basketball to give us weekday morning and afternoon games once a month? Major League Baseball has what feels like 10 daytime games a week to help us survive the summer afternoons, and we require a similar courtesy during the frigid months of the year.
And there may be an East Coast bias in college basketball, but it's totally unfair that fans on the West Coast get to watch the first half of games on their phones at work and listen to the second half on the radio in rush-hour traffic. The occasional CBB marathon allows us all to experience those same perks, regardless of time zone.
Less Mindless Banter Comparing This Year to Last Year
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OK, Jay Bilas, we get it. Not one of this year's teams is as good as any of last year's top five teams. You can seriously stop making that point at least once in every single game you broadcast.
The Bilastrator certainly isn't the only offender of oft-recycled soliloquy. Phrases like "freedom of movement," "pace of play" and "new rule changes" are uttered almost as frequently during every televised game as "talk about" is heard in the postgame pressers.
And good luck getting through any 10-minute stretch of a Kentucky game without hearing some sort of commentary about how this year's team doesn't even hold a candle to last year's version.
No kidding! 2014-15 Kentucky nearly accomplished something that hasn't been done in 40 years and proceeded to lose all seven of its leading scorers to the NBA draft. You're bringing no new or surprising information to the table by reminding us that a team that already has two losses isn't quite on par with its 38-1 predecessor.
Bill Walton rambling about bike riding, China and the Grateful Dead is more useful than the majority of the repetitive "just make sure there isn't any dead air" banter that's been prevalent so far this season.
Every season is different, and, sure, last season was a little more special than usual. But this season has had and will continue to have plenty of magic of its own. Let's just agree to focus on the year at hand rather than reminiscing about what used to be.
A Polarizing Powerhouse
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In most college basketball seasons, one team winds up ruling the airwaves.
Last year, it was Kentucky. Could the Wildcats go 40-0? Would they have beaten the 2011-12 Kentucky team? Where did that 2014-15 team rank among the all-time great rosters in college basketball history? There was no shortage of arguments to keep the conversation going all season long.
The two years before that, it was the heated discussion over whether Wichita State (2014) and Gonzaga (2013) deserved a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Everyone had an opinion on the matter, as you really had no choice but to pick a side if you spent more than five minutes tuned into any sort of national college basketball news.
Who are we fighting about this year?
As Reid Forgrave of Fox Sports tweeted Monday, "Can you remember more up-in-air college hoops season than this one? Denzel Valentine knee injury (out 2-3 weeks) muddies picture even more."
Even in years where there isn't an overly polarizing high-ranking team, it's at least fun to argue over who deserves to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft. However, we can't even have that debate this year, as anyone who doesn't have Ben Simmons at No. 1 right now clearly doesn't follow basketball.
If they can get to No. 1 in the AP poll, the Oklahoma Sooners might give us the best debate: Can their Golden State Warriors-esque deadliness from three-point range actually work in the NCAA tournament? Or perhaps we'll once again get to argue over whether Virginia's style of play is conducive to the Big Dance.
For now, though, it seems we're all just quietly sitting around and waiting to see which teams will even be in the discussion for a No. 1 seed before we start arguing over their merits.
A Mid-Major Team to Believe In
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Gonzaga's guards have been dreadfully ineffective, resulting in losses to Texas A&M, Arizona and UCLA, as well as near-losses to Connecticut, Montana and Tennessee. The Bulldogs aren't exactly in danger of missing the tournament just yet, but they could be if their 17-season streak of winning at least 78 percent of their West Coast Conference games is snapped.
Wichita State already has five losses, including a "can't blame them all on Fred VanVleet's bad hammy" defeat at the hands of Seton Hall last Saturday. Despite the wins over Utah and UNLV, the Shockers are probably two Missouri Valley Conference regular-season losses away from needing to win the conference tournament to make the Big Dance.
The Mountain West Conference is a toxic wasteland very much trending toward sending just one team to the NCAA tournament, according to KenPom.com rankings, and the Atlantic-10 isn't nearly as strong as it has been in recent years, either.
Even minor-conference teams pegged in the preseason as potential Cinderellas have really disappointed.
Stephen F. Austin lost three of its first five games, including a brutal neutral-court loss to Tulane. UAB and Old Dominion were supposed to give Conference USA two potential bids to the tournament, but they're a combined 4-9 against teams in the KenPom Top 200. Likewise, Iona is 0-5 against the KenPom Top 200. Belmont is 7-6 and has looked pretty bad since that season-opening win over Marquette.
With a very limited number of exceptions, the state of the "mid-major" is brutal right now, and Valparaiso might be its only saving grace.
Their offense hasn't started to click yet, but the Crusaders are No. 3 in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency. They have wins over Oregon State, Rhode Island, Iona and Belmont and nearly knocked off Oregon. Were it not for that one disappointing loss to Ball State, Valparaiso would almost certainly be ranked right now.
Monmouth, Arkansas-Little Rock and South Dakota State are also quality candidates, but the college basketball world desperately needs a "little school" to rally around.
All of the Wins for SMU
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In lieu of a nationwide argument over the legitimacy of a title contender or a mid-major capable of making a run to the Final Four, we should at least be able to join hands in rooting for SMU to go undefeated—unless you're a fan of a team that still has the Mustangs on its schedule, of course.
These kids got an extremely raw deal in being ruled ineligible for postseason play just six weeks before the beginning of the season. It's not the fault of Nic Moore, Markus Kennedy or Jordan Tolbert that Larry Brown failed to report a fraudulent grade that made Keith Frazier eligible several years ago, but those seniors are the ones paying the price by not being allowed to compete in what would have been their final NCAA tournament.
Plain and simple: The NCAA really punished the wrong people here.
Fine Larry Brown or force him to resign. Fine the university and the administrators involved. Do whatever you have to do to let SMU know that it failed to live up to its responsibility as an institution.
But don't penalize the kids.
If a professor was caught doing something unethical that his students didn't know about, you wouldn't ban those kids from walking at graduation, right? So why prohibit these student-athletes from reaching their ultimate goal?
It's hypocritical and nonsensical, and as SMU continues to win games, more people with opinions that actually matter will have negative things to say about the way the NCAA handled this case. It might not help the 2015-16 Mustangs, but it could help future teams that otherwise would have been dealt the same, unfair hand.
Stats are courtesy of KenPom.com, unless noted otherwise. Recruiting information is courtesy of 247Sports.
Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.
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