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Neil Paine
It’s been a tough season for teams to stay at the top in men’s college basketball.
Only one team — the Purdue Boilermakers — has been ranked among the top five in the AP Top 25 poll every week of the season. Just three others — the UConn Huskies, Houston Cougars and Kansas Jayhawks — have been season-long fixtures in the top 10. And even those teams have had their ups and downs: A couple of weeks ago, UConn and Purdue, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively at that time, lost as favorites on the road within the span of two days.
The rest of the nation’s best teams, from the Arizona Wildcats and the Baylor Bears to the Duke Blue Devils and the Tennessee Volunteers, have seen even bigger changes to their poll positions over the past four months. Take, for example, Antonio Reeves, Reed Sheppard and Kentucky’s up-and-down journey from 16th before the year to No. 6 by midseason, and then outside the top 20 recently after multiple losses against unranked opponents.
With all of this chaos, there’s a case to be made that this has been the most unpredictable season for top teams over the past 15 years — and it could translate to even more volatility in March.
In terms of overall record, teams ranked among the AP Top 25 at the time of a game are 505-198 this season through Thursday, according to SportRadar data. That 71.8% winning percentage is the third lowest in any regular season since at least 2009-10, ahead of only last season (70.5%) and 2020-21 (69.7%). Before this season, the usual win rate for Top 25 schools was 74.4%.
A similar trend holds for teams specifically ranked among the top 10. Their collective 205-74 record this season through Thursday (73.5% winning percentage) is far below the pre-2024 norm for the nation’s best teams (78.8%), checking in ahead of just 2020-21 (72.4%) among the worst showings by the top 10 in a single season since 2009-10.
All of these extra regular-season upsets have meant more chances than usual for fans of lower-tier teams to rush the court after knocking off an elite team — and more confusion about who the national title favorite should be as we barrel toward the start of the NCAA tournament.
Behind this season’s struggles
Dig a little deeper into the top teams’ troubles, and a couple of driving factors emerge.
Ranked squads have been particularly unable to win on the road this season (again, remember all of those court stormings against them?). Whereas the average winning percentage for Top 25 teams in away games since 2009-10 was 57.0% going into this season, those teams have won fewer than half the time (49.6%) on the road this season. Top-10 teams might appear to be faring better in that regard — they’re at least breaking even in road contests, at 51% — but that group’s mark is even worse relative to the pre-2023-24 average (64.2%) than it is for Top 25 teams overall.
No. 7-ranked Kansas, for instance, has a 3-5 record in away games this season, with the highest-ranked opponent in those contests being the then-No. 23-ranked Iowa State Cyclones (to whom the Jayhawks lost 79-75 on Jan. 27). And they’re far from the worst offender in this department: Colorado State is 1-6 on the road in games where the Rams were ranked, while Texas Tech is 1-4, BYU is 2-6 and Wisconsin is 3-6. All of these teams lost by at least 6.0 points per game in their road losses, with Kansas losing by 9.8 on average, Wisconsin losing by 10.8 and Texas Tech losing by a lopsided 12.5. If playing away from the comforts of home is a test of a team’s true mettle, a lot of this season’s top schools are failing.
On top of that, ranked teams haven’t had a worse season against unranked teams in the past 1½ decades.
Teams in the AP Top 25 this season have won 76.8% of the time against teams not in the Top 25, their worst showing since at least 2009-10. (The usual winning percentage in a ranked-versus-unranked battle is 81.1%, in favor of the ranked school.) And again, teams in the top 10 are doing even worse this season, relative to their usual success rate. Against unranked opponents, top-10 teams have won 78.1% of the time — not much better than their record against all opponents regardless of ranking, and far below the usual average of 85.5%. Prior to this year, no season since 2009-10 had seen top-10 schools beat unranked opponents at a rate lower than 80%.
Colorado State is once again the poster child for losing to unranked teams, posting a shockingly mediocre 7-7 record against teams outside the Top 25 this season in games where the Rams were ranked. But others high on the list of frequent letdowns against lesser foes include San Diego State (6-5 versus unranked opponents), Wisconsin and BYU (11-5 apiece), Kentucky (16-6), Kansas (14-5) and Creighton (18-6).
What it means for the NCAA tournament
This data might seem trivial, since we’ve all seen plenty of chaotic regular seasons in college basketball before. (The 1993-94 season, for instance, saw top-ranked teams fall a record eight times during the regular season, but we still ended up with a No. 1 seed in Arkansas — see: “40 Minutes of Hell” — facing a No. 2 Duke team for the national championship.)
However, there’s a real connection between ranked-team struggles during a regular season and the number of upsets we see later on in the NCAA tournament.
Here’s a relatively simple way of looking at it: Since 2009-10, the five regular seasons with the strongest Top 25 overall records saw an upset rate of 12.2% during the tournament’s round of 64. (The overall average round-of-64 upset rate over that span was 14.1%.) By contrast, the five regular seasons with the weakest Top 25 records featured an upset rate of 15.4%.
The same trends hold when we look at the seasons when Top 25 teams had their troubles on the road and, especially, when they struggled to beat unranked teams. In the five seasons with the worst road records for Top 25 members, the first-round upset rate rose to 14.8% from 12.8% in the seasons with their best road records. In the five seasons when Top 25 teams had their worst records against unranked opponents, the first-round upset rate rose to 15.4% from 11.9% in the seasons when they fared best against unranked foes.
And if you think about it, it makes sense that problems either on the road or against unranked schools would project onto early tournament struggles. Both describe situations that are somewhat analogous to what a higher-seeded team must immediately face in the NCAA tournament — games against unheralded opponents and far from the friendly confines of a team’s home gym. (Yes, tourney games are technically held at neutral sites, with geographic preference given to the favorites. But they’re certainly not like the home games that teams have been accustomed to all season long.)
The less dominant top teams are during the regular season, the less reliable they are in the postseason. Which, in turn, points to a potentially unpredictable NCAA tournament, even by usual March standards. And let’s be honest: That would be a fitting end to one of the more volatile college basketball seasons we’ve seen in quite a while.
Neil Paine is a contributor for ESPN.
