Football fans, please accept my condolences. Now that the Super Bowl confetti has been swept away, you’re faced with the harsh reality that your season has come to an end. The February sports doldrums you’ve been dreading have officially arrived.
The good news is that while you were consuming all the blocking and tackling and endless commercials featuring Kansas City Chiefs, an entire college basketball season was unfolding behind the scenes, awaiting your arrival.
This is a safe space, so don’t even pretend that you’ve paid any attention to college hoops this season. It’s okay! We know how you operate.
Passion is your thing. The pageantry, the parades, Pat McAfee. You love with your whole heart and hate with your whole heart. So I’m going to explain what you’ve missed in college hoops so far in terms you’ll understand.
Here are a few things you’ll love and a few you’ll hate as you finally sink your teeth into the 20224-25 college basketball season.
You’ll Love This: The Bluebloods Are Struggling. Other than Duke (more on them later), the usual suspects have been absent from the top tier of college hoops this year. Kansas has lost seven games and sits in fifth place in the Big 12. Kentucky is 5-5 in conference and is languishing in eighth place on the crowded SEC leaderboard. When the Super Bowl kicked off, UCLA and Indiana weren’t even ranked! If you are more Team David than Team Goliath, there’s a lot to love this year.
You’ll Hate This: The SEC is Great. I am sorry to break this news but the Southeastern Conference is dominating college basketball right now. Thirteen SEC schools have been ranked this season and have legitimate cases to be included in March Madness and five of them currently sit in the AP top 10. You may have thought that being forced to listen to southerners ramble on about their conference’s dominance was reserved for football season, but unfortunately it’s becoming a year-round thing.
Bracketology 2025: Men’s NCAA Tournament Projections
Selection Sunday has arrived as Texas, UNC, Indiana, Boise State and Xavier are all on edge
You’ll Love This: Auburn. The Tigers have been the nation’s undisputed best team, although they finally lost their first SEC game on Saturday against Florida. They have perhaps the nation’s best player in Johni Broome, a 6-foot-10 force of nature who has shrugged off injuries and double teams to position himself as one of the front runners for National Player of the Year.
But forget all that – you’re going to love this: in November, while football was dominating the headlines, Auburn’s hoops team brawled during a team flight to Houston. Seriously! In-flight fisticuffs. Details are sketchy, but we do know that the pilot had to alert the authorities and turn the plane around and everything. They landed in Auburn, booted the combatants off the plane, then flew back to Houston and won the game. The Auburn Tigers are the most footballish basketball team in the country and you’re going to love them.
You’ll Hate This: Duke is really good. Again. College basketball’s perennial villain is once again a serious title contender. They have the best true freshman in years, Cooper Flagg, who has somehow outperformed his hype. In fact, Flagg and Broome are in a two-horse race for Naismith Player of the Year honors.
But the worst part isn’t that Duke is great again — we’re used to that. No, the worst part is that for reasons I can’t fully explain, Duke is much less hateable than usual. Maybe it’s that three of its top four scorers are freshmen and we don’t know enough about them to resent them yet. Maybe it’s that Coach K continues to fade into the background, having been relegated to the stands to mutter to his wife all the things that Coach Scheyer is doing wrong. Whatever the reason, we will need to work harder than usual to hate these Blue Devils before tournament time. But hate them we must; it is our duty as American sports fans.
You’ll Love This: UConn Isn’t UConn. The Huskies swaggered into the 2024-25 campaign eyeing a threepeat, but promptly dropped three games at the Maui Invitational in November, nearly causing Coach Hurley’s head to explode. (Side note: Hurley has introduced four new maniacal facial contortions this season. Collect them all!) And they haven’t fully recovered. On Saturday they lost their fourth Big East game at home to St. John’s. Speaking of which …
You’ll Love-Hate This: Pitino and Calipari Are Back. Rick Pitino and John Calipari have been staples of the college basketball landscape for decades, staking out colorful careers involving plenty of championships, scandals and job-hopping. And they are very much part of the mix this year, too. Whether we’ve loved them or hated them, we’ve always needed them.
Pitino is in his second year at the helm of St. John’s and has the Red Storm rolling. They sit on the top of the heap of the Big East and seem primed for a deep March run.
My Day With Rick Pitino: Get Up, Show Up, Try to Keep Up
The Hall of Fame coach, now 72 and in his second season at St. John’s, hasn’t slowed one bit
Opposing Coaches on John Calipari and Arkansas: “Outdated.” “None of Their Pieces Fit.”
Jeff Goodman diagnoses what’s gone wrong at Arkansas, which remains winless in the SEC
Meanwhile, Calipari is in his first year at Arkansas after Kentucky ran out of patience and encouraged him to find employment elsewhere. When he arrived in Fayetteville in April Calipari famously declared, “I met with the team…there is no team.” There hasn’t been much of a team since then, either, although the Razorbacks did provide their coach a delicious upset of Kentucky in his return to Lexington last week.
Welcome back, football fans. It’s only a month until the conference tournaments, with the Big Dance following right behind. As usual, college basketball is here to help you in your time of need.
