We all knew the 2020-21 college basketball season was going to be a little different. If nothing else, it was certainly going to feel different along the way. If no other predictions have come true, this one certainly has, but just how different has it been?
There are many avenues for this, but let’s just look at the game’s bluebloods. Can you imagine an NCAA Tournament without any of Arizona, Duke, Kentucky, Michigan State, North Carolina and Syracuse? If it were to start tomorrow, that might happen. That alone tells you how different this season has been.
Of those teams, only North Carolina appears to have a good shot at getting in, especially after they annihilated Louisville on Saturday. Even so, the Tar Heels are hardly a lock with a bad record against Quad 1 teams. Arizona is in the 50s in NET with just one Quad 1 win, Duke was below .500 before a recent three-game winning streak and finally got a quality win in holding off Virginia on Saturday, Michigan State is barely above .500 overall and has a NET in the 90s entering the weekend, and Syracuse has no Quad 1 wins.
Kentucky, of course, is well below .500, though the Wildcats could get hot and win the SEC Tournament since no one looks close to unbeatable there. Alabama looks to be the best team, but the Crimson Tide are not the basketball equivalent of their football team by a long shot. Tennessee has a surprisingly strong resume, but I’m not sold on the Volunteers as a team poised to make a deep run, and likewise teams like Florida, LSU, Missouri and suddenly red-hot Arkansas.
Duke is probably the most interesting of those teams right now. As noted, they have now won three in a row, including Saturday’s over Virginia. The Blue Devils may not have the talent they have had in other years, but they still have plenty of it. Perhaps they are starting to hit their stride now that this team has had a chance to play together, and the departure of Jalen Johnson may, strange as it might sound, be a case of addition by subtraction since they seem to be playing better without him. In fact, the Blue Devils have yet to lose a game in which he did not play.
Think about the teams listed who might not make the NCAA Tournament. Each has won a national championship in the past 25 years; since 1995-96, those six programs account for 11 of the national championships, and with last season’s tournament being canceled, that’s 11 of 24. Three of the four are annual participants in the Champions Classic (only Kansas is a sure NCAA Tournament team from those four, and the Jayhawks haven’t been an elite team this year, either). Once upon a time, every four-year player for Tom Izzo got to a Final Four, a remarkable run.
Take all of that and then add the entire NCAA Tournament being held in Indiana, and it would be quite a way to close an odd season. It’s a season without the Ivy League, a season where the Patriot League didn’t start until after the calendar turned to 2021, a season where multiple teams have gone over a month in between games because of COVID pauses, and almost never solely within their program.
The end goal of the season has always been to get to the NCAA Tournament and play it, of course. After it was canceled last season, all schools got significantly less in payouts, which led to a lot of a hard decisions in the Division I ranks. It led to conferences asking for some leniency from the NCAA because of the situation, as well as coaches having to take big pay cuts to help close growing budget gaps. These elite programs will be okay in the long-run, although Syracuse has been trending down in what may be the waning years of Jim Boeheim’s legendary run in upstate New York.
A lot can still happen, and we could still see many of these teams in the NCAA Tournament after all. The overriding goal has been to play the NCAA Tournament, no matter what shape it takes, to get the big TV money that was missed last season. Even so, an NCAA Tournament without most or even all of these top programs would certainly give it an even more different feel than it will already have.