Biggest Winners and Losers from Men's College Basketball with 1 Month to Go

The calling card of men's college basketball is unpredictable madness in March.

However, complete disregard for the script begins long before Selection Sunday.

Teams or even entire conferences end up being way better (or worse) than expected in the preseason.

Players hit career milestones.

Programs set all-time records for futility.

And we've summed up some of the biggest surprises and developments of the first three months of the 2022-23 season in a winners and losers format.

Selections are presented in no particular order, aside from oscillating between winners and losers.

It's a win that Keyontae Johnson could even play this season, two years removed from his terrifying collapse on the court with the Florida Gators.

But it would've been almost incomprehensible three months ago to suggest Johnson would be named one of the 20 late-season candidates for the Wooden Award while serving as the leading scorer for a Kansas State team with national championship aspirations.

Let's not forget, the Wildcats entered the 2022-23 season as the anticipated worst team in the Big 12.

Last in the preseason coaches poll.

Worst-ranked Big 12 team on KenPom.com.

Not even mentioned in our preseason bracket projection.

The whole shebang.

Yet there sit the Wildcats at No. 7 in the AP poll, with Johnson averaging 18.2 points and 7.9 rebounds per game, having scored at least a dozen points in every game.

If anything, he's gaining steam as we hit the rigors of the February slate. After recording two double-doubles in his first 18 games, Johnson has reeled off four in a row, including going for 22 points and 12 rebounds Tuesday at Kansas (albeit in a loss).

One of those double-doubles came in an emotional game against his former team as Johnson put up 13 and 11 in last weekend's 64-50 victory over Florida.

We'll see where this story goes, but Kansas State is undefeated at home with the next four in Manhattan against Texas, TCU, Iowa State and Baylor. If the Wildcats can win all four of those games, the first No. 1 seed in program history is a possibility.

Earlier in the week, we put out a "Hot Seat Ranking" article, and one of the first comments on it was, where's the Louisville coach?

If you're going to clamor for a man to get fired, at least learn his name.

It's Kenny Payne.

And you almost never see a coach fired after just one season for futility.

Payne inherited a great big mess from the previous regime, and he'll get at least one more year to try to turn things around.

Make no mistake about it, though: It has been a disaster of a season in Louisville.

The Cardinals are 3-19 overall and 1-10 in ACC play. They started the year with three consecutive one-point losses at home against Bellarmine, Wright State and Appalachian State. But it has been blowout city since then.

Bless El Ellis for doing all he can as basically the only guard on the roster. He's averaging 17.0 points, 4.7 assists and 1.1 steals per game.

It doesn't matter, though, because no one else is scoring in double figures, and the defense is a train wreck.

Fun fact: You can add up Louisville's year-end KenPom ranking for all 16 seasons that Rick Pitino was the head coach, and you would still get a smaller number (276) than its current KenPom rank (292).

Technically, this won't be the worst season in Louisville history. The Cardinals went 0-3 in 1911-12 and had one-win seasons in 1921-22 (1-13), 1938-39 (1-15) and 1939-40 (1-18).

But since the end of World War II, Louisville's worst record in a season was going 12-20 in 1997-98. It would have to win every game between now and the second round of the ACC tournament to avoid setting a new low point.

That ain't happening.

Drastically exceeding preseason expectations isn't anything new. Virtually every season, multiple teams end up at least 100 spots higher on KenPom than where they started.

But 200 spots higher?

That's a new one.

KenPom has daily ratings archives for every season dating back to 2011-12. For instance, we can see that in 2011-12, Wyoming started the year at No. 273 before climbing to No. 90 for a mighty impressive 183-rung improvement.

But if the season ended today, Southern Miss' improvement of 229 spots from No. 324 to No. 95 would beat the record by a considerable margin. (The record belongs to 2019-20 Stephen F. Austin, which famously pulled off the gigantic upset of Duke in Cameron Indoor Stadium in the process of climbing 199 spots.)

It's plain to see why the Golden Eagles started out so low. They had gone 24-65 over the previous three years, and they lost more than 76 percent of their scoring from last season—all to the transfer portal, as last year's roster didn't have a senior.

But Jay Ladner brought in current leading scorers Austin Crowley and Felipe Haase from the portal, while the switch from Conference USA to Sun Belt evidently woke a sleeping giant. Southern Miss entered Thursday with a 19-4 record—including nonconference road wins over Liberty and Vanderbilt—and a perfect 12-0 record at home.

Marshall is arguably still the favorite to win the Sun Belt, but it's a four-horse race between the Thundering Herd, the Golden Eagles, James Madison and Louisiana. Sure would be something if Southern Miss pulls it off.

The A-10 is almost always a multi-bid league.

In the past 30 NCAA tournaments, the A-10 put at least five teams into the field more times (four) than it was held to just one (twice, in 2002 and 2005).

The expectation was that this year would be no different.

Dayton was No. 24 in the preseason AP poll. Saint Louis was "30th," sandwiched between Purdue and Michigan State among others receiving votes. Newest league member Loyola-Chicago had averaged 24.8 wins over the previous five seasons and was supposed to immediately contend. And VCU, Richmond, George Mason and Davidson were all situated within a few spots of 100th in the preseason KenPom rankings.

But things have not gone according to plan.

Fordham has been a pleasant surprise, which I wrote about in late December. The Rams were supposed to be the worst team in the league, but they're only one loss back for first place. George Washington has also been better than anticipated, so it's not a leaguewide disaster.

Still, nine of the 15 A-10 teams are rated at least 25 spots lower on KenPom than where they began the season, with Loyola-Chicago's plummet from No. 59 to No. 237 up there with Louisville and South Carolina among the most spectacular crash-and-burns of the year.

Dayton, VCU and Saint Louis are the only A-10 teams in the top 100 on KenPom or in the NET, and none of them rank top-60 in either metric.

The only hope for the league to get two teams into the tournament is for one of those three schools (or, perhaps, 18-4 Fordham) to win out before faltering in the A-10 tournament and settling for an at-large bid.

Short of that, it's auto bid or bust.

Since the ACC's inception in 1953-54—aka seven decades ago—Clemson has never posted a winning percentage in league play of greater than 71.4 percent.

There have been plenty of winning seasons, but the Tigers maxed out at 10-4 in each of 1986-87 and 1989-90.

But a 5-3 record the rest of the way would get the Tigers to a .750 winning percentage in ACC play.

That's very doable, by the way. They have home games remaining against Miami, Florida State, Syracuse and Notre Dame, plus a road game against aforementioned awful Louisville. Even if they lose the road games against UNC, NC State and Virginia, they should get five wins.

Then again, they should have won at Boston College on Tuesday, so we'll see what happens.

Because of that bad loss (coupled with previous Quadrant 4 no-nos against South Carolina and Loyola-Chicago), the first-place team in the ACC standings is back on the bubble.

This has been a solid team for most of the season, though.

All six members of the primary rotation shoot at least 75 percent from the free-throw line, and all five leading scorers are threats from three-point range. Hunter Tyson is nearly averaging a double-double (16.3 PPG, 9.7 RPG), and Chase Hunter has admirably stepped into the role of lead guard after serving as more of a glue guy for his first three seasons.

Clemson beat Duke, swept Virginia Tech and has solid wins over Pitt, NC State and Penn State. Brad Brownell seems to always be on the hot seat, but this should save his job for yet another year.

A lot of freshmen are having excellent seasons.

Alabama's Brandon Miller has been incredible, as has Duke's Kyle Filipowski. Baylor's Keyonte George, Kansas' Gradey Dick and Ohio State's Brice Sensabaugh have been microwave scorers. Kentucky's Cason Wallace, Arkansas' Anthony Black and Purdue's Braden Smith are doing a great job of running the point.

Plenty to like.

But the tippy top of this season's batch of first-year players has been unable to live up to the hype, at least partially due to injury.

No. 1 in the 247 Sports composite ratings was Arkansas' Nick Smith Jr. He has played in just five games because of a knee injury.

No. 2 and No. 3 both went to Duke, and both Dariq Whitehead and Dereck Lively II were injured during the preseason, missed action early in the year, missed a game thanks to an illness in late December and haven't lived up to the hype. Whitehead was starting to get there prior to suffering another lower-leg injury Jan. 23 against Virginia Tech. Hopefully he can return soon. But Lively has played most of the season without amounting to anything more than a good shot-blocker.

Some unflattering Skal Labissiere comparisons have been thrown around this year, but Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram joined him in the top three of the 2015 recruit rankings, and those two guys were incredible.

You have to go back to the 2008 class—in which Brandon Jennings went to Europe, Byron Mullens came off the bench at Ohio State and Jrue Holiday was good but not unforgettable at UCLA—to find the last time the consensus top three recruits came close to producing this little collegiate buzz.

Other noteworthy 5-star players who have missed a significant chunk of the season thanks to injury are Villanova's Cam Whitmore and UCLA's Amari Bailey, each of whom missed seven games. Bailey also struggled against quality competition prior to his injury, scoring a combined 13 points against Illinois, Baylor, Maryland and Kentucky.

Throw in the fact that we assumed non-college players Victor Wembanyama and Scoot Henderson would be the top two picks in this year's draft class, and it has been a weird year on the freshman front.

Detroit Mercy's Antoine Davis leads the nation in scoring at 26.0 points per game.

But that's nothing new.

Davis was third in scoring average last season (23.9 PPG), third in 2020-21 (24.0 PPG), fourth in 2019-20 (24.3 PPG) and third in 2018-19 (26.1 PPG). He has had a permanent green light since stepping on campus to play for his dad, Mike Davis, and it has resulted in some serious career numbers.

Before we continue, Davis got some help from the extra year of eligibility. But he's still only at 134 games played in his career since Detroit Mercy only played 22 games in 2020-21 and never makes the postseason.

By comparison, one of the all-time collegiate greats who Davis passed on the career scoring leaderboard less than a month ago, Doug McDermott, played in 145 games in his four-year career at Creighton.

If Davis ends up playing in 145 games—which would require a deep run in the Horizon League tournament—he'd be on pace to finish almost 500 points ahead of McDermott.

With back-to-back 40-burgers against Robert Morris and IUPUI last month, Davis (3,332 points) moved ahead of Freeman Williams (3,249) into second place all-time, trailing only Pete Maravich (3,667).

To catch Pistol, Davis will probably need the 8-15 Titans to win the Horizon League tournament and get at least one "bonus" game in the NCAA tournament. Detroit Mercy is so bad that it would almost certainly land in a play-in game against another No. 16 seed, opening up the possibility of a second "bonus" game.

Even that might not be enough for Davis to surpass Maravich, but it could be a fascinating story to monitor. Either way, No. 2 in career points is amazing.

Every team that opened the season in the Top 10 of the AP poll probably would make the NCAA tournament.

However, five of those 10 teams are unranked—Kentucky, Duke, Creighton, Arkansas and the preseason No. 1 North Carolina Tar Heels. And Houston (started at No. 3; still at No. 3) is the only one that hasn't lost ground.

Meanwhile, the current unanimous No. 1 team (Purdue) was unranked in the preseason.

I'm not opposed to preseason polls. If the AP didn't do them, somebody would. Quite a few brave souls rank all 363 teams heading into every season.

I'm simply using the AP poll to illustrate how wrong we all were in trying to forecast who would be the best of the best this season.

But who could have known Caleb Love would regress substantially after his incredible run last March?

That both Duke and Arkansas would seemingly never get to play a game at full strength?

That Kentucky would live and die with veteran former transfers Antonio Reeves and CJ Fredrick?

Or that Braden Smith—as a barely top-200 overall recruit—would thrive as the freshman point guard for Purdue?

Two years ago, we got Gonzaga and Baylor at Nos. 1 and 2 for basically the entire season, and they squared off for the national championship.

This year has been anarchy, and it feels like no one can be trusted from one game to the next.

Can't wait to fill out a bracket next month and lose my entire Final Four before the Sweet 16 is even set. It's gonna be great.

If you want to wait until early April to officially chisel Zach Edey's name into the various pieces of National Player of the Year hardware, good for you. Patience is a virtue.

But the race is effectively over.

Edey has recorded a double-double in 18 of 22 games, averaging an absurd 22.0 points, 13.0 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per night.

Purdue's 7'4" center was incredibly efficient last year, averaging 30.3 points, 16.2 rebounds and 2.6 blocks per 40 minutes. However, he only played 19 minutes per night. With Trevion Williams out of the Boilermakers' frontcourt picture, the unknown heading into this season was whether Edey could maintain that efficiency while experiencing a significant uptick in playing time.

Well, he has.

The scoring has waned slightly, but he's still at 28.0 points, 16.5 rebounds and 2.7 blocks per 40 minutes, even with about a 65 percent increase in minutes played per game.

Not quite as outrageous as what Shaquille O'Neal did in his sophomore and junior seasons at LSU (32.5 points, 18.1 rebounds, 6.5 blocks per 40 minutes), but this might be the closest anyone has come to matching O'Neal's dominance in the past three decades.

(Zion Williamson averaged 30.1 points, 11.8 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per 40 minutes and was more of a phenomenon. But Edey has been slightly more dominant.)

One preposterous footnote on Edey: He's not even projected to get drafted. Per the NBA Mock Draft Database's consensus big board, Edey is at No. 71. Go back in time 15-20 years and he'd be the unanimous No. 1 pick. But apparently the "old-school big man" has been so eradicated from today's pro game that it's not even enough of a market inefficiency to spend a second-round draft pick on the guy who will win all of the NPOY awards.