College basketball power rankings: Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan (2024)

Your occasional reminder: These power rankings are subject solely to the whims of its author. If we don’t want to write about a team that week, we won’t, even if they probably deserve to be in, even if they were in the main list last week. Them’s the breaks. Likewise, if we want to start the power rankings with a detailed analysis of why Arsenal’s 4-2-3-1 setup has revitalized the team in every area of the pitch, then we will. Which is exactly what we’re doing today! Below please see the first of our 481 slides on Bukayo Saka’s best actions from the past two seasons. OK. OK. Take it easy. Just kidding. Let’s get straight to the hoops.

T1. Gonzaga (20-0)

T1. Baylor (17-0)

So Gonzaga is good at basketball. We all agree on this. We have agreed since the first few minutes of the game against Kansas in late November. The question is: how good? Is Gonzaga merely one of the two top teams in an otherwise muddled college basketball landscape? Or is Gonzaga historically good? How does it compare to, say, Kentucky 2014-15? Where does it rank in the past 10 years? The past 20? Where will it (and, yes, Baylor too) sit in the grand reckoning of greatness?

On some level, these questions can’t be fully answered yet, because we still have that whole matter of the NCAA Tournament and a national champion to sort out. (And we still need to see Gonzaga play Baylor, one way or the other.) But on the other hand, crazy things happen in the tournament. One bad game doesn’t need to define the outer limits of what a team was capable of, or what they did across the sample size of an entire season. The Zags have played 20 games now. It’s a lot. And right now, relative to the best teams of the past decade, they’re looking pretty damn good.

Frequently, college hoops writers will say something like “Gonzaga’s efficiency margin is higher than X team from the past,” but the data for the past team is the year-end data, from a point in time after that past team has played some of the other best teams in the country en route to a national title, or the Final Four, or a sudden collapse in the Sweet 16, or whatever. The comparison isn’t totally helpful, in other words. But Ken Pomeroy, in response to a helpful request exactly along these lines from David Hess, shared the peak single-day efficiency margins a few weeks back, and now this is really helpful, and also just plain fascinating:

2 teams have breached +40: 99 Duke and 01 Duke
2 more have breached +38: 15 Kentucky and 13 Florida
14 more got to +36: 19 Virginia, 19 Duke, 15 Virginia, 11 Ohio St, 10 Duke, 10 Kansas, 08 Kansas, 06 Duke, 01 Stanford, 00 Cincinnati, 98 Duke, 98 UNC, 97 Kentucky, 97 Wake Forest

— Ken Pomeroy (@kenpomeroy) February 3, 2021

Newsflash: Those Backstreet Boys-era Duke teams were pretty decent. Also newsflash: Kentucky in 2014-15 was unfair. Also kind of actual newsflash: The Scottie Wilbekin Florida years were way better than you remember.

But guess what: Those are the only teams in Ken’s database who at any point during their seasons had a higher efficiency margin than Gonzaga at present. After last weekend’s 100-61 win over San Francisco, the Zags are at plus-37.41. That is … ridiculous.

For comparison’s sake, Baylor, which is finally returning from pause this weekend, is at plus-34.90, which is also really good! The next-highest this season is Michigan, at plus-29.50; it’s a steep drop to No. 3. But even the brilliant Bears haven’t quite kept up with what Gonzaga is doing on both ends of the floor, as they attempt to chase not just an undefeated season but also a genuine claim at their peak as one of the best teams of the past 20 years. In some ways, they’re already there.

3. Michigan (14-1)

Be warned: Michigan is back, in every sense of the term.

This was not entirely true for the entirety of Sunday’s game at Wisconsin. The Wolverines were back in literal terms, of course, finally on the court again after a 24-day pause, an interregnum required by Michigan’s athletic department over concerns about a COVID-19 variant that required all coaches, staff and players to isolate — not just from the outside world, but also from each other. For 14 days, everyone was at home, in apartments and dorm rooms, occasionally hopping on the phone and doing Zooms and doing some body strength workouts on the floor, or whatever, but not playing basketball.

You could have forgiven the Wolverines if they’d decided, down 12 at the half at the Kohl Center, that they weren’t actually back yet at all. That this was a difficult circ*mstance, that no one would blame them, that they’d caught a tough lie, that they should yield to that little voice in your head that says you don’t need to finish that workout today, you’ll make it up tomorrow, don’t worry about it, you’ve had a rough week. Instead, Juwan Howard, who might be our coach of the year at this point, went into halftime fully expecting his projected No. 1 seed to play with all of the verve and precision it had demonstrated the past three months. No excuses. You’ve had your 20 minutes to feel yourself. Now go play.

What happened next, of course, was a 40-20 second half, an unstoppable theft of Wisconsin’s lead, confidence and soul, and a handy reminder, after a long time away, of just how good the Wolverines really are. It was, considering the context, every bit as impressive as the Jan. 16 win over Wisconsin, when the Wolverines proved their bonafides by blowing Greg Gard’s team off the floor. If that was an awakening, a first glimpse at Michigan’s ceiling, this was its reprise. It was the difference between simply being back on the court and truly returning.

4. Houston (17-2)

If you want to know why we think Michigan is so good, allow a point of comparison between the Wolverines and the team we rank just below them.

Houston is probably the best first-shot defensive team in the country. Opponents average 42.1 effective field goal shooting, the lowest number in the country; Opponents shoot 43.2 percent from 2 and 26.9 percent from 3. Simply put, getting a good look against Houston is borderline impossible. When you do, you’ve usually had to work extremely hard for it, and sometimes even looks that should be good end up being recovered against and defended into being just OK in the end. Houston is really, really good at this, and thus really good on that end of the floor as a whole.

Guess who ranks third nationally in opponent eFG%? That’s right: The Michigan Wolverines. Michigan opponents shoot it a bit better from 3, but just 40.3 percent from inside the arc, which is the lowest 2-point percentage in Division I.

Like Houston, then, Michigan is a really, really good defensive team. Unlike Houston, though, Michigan can shoot the ball on the other end too. The Wolverines make 37.9 percent from 3 and 56.8 percent from 2, with a healthy assist rate on made field goals and a reasonably balanced shot diet (albeit one that typically sees 3s as a second option, and generally tries to play through Hunter Dickinson in the post). It makes sense, it works, it flows.

Houston’s offense does not flow. For as good as Quentin Grimes and Marcus Sasser have been, the Cougars rank 212th in eFG%, and they’re shooting just 47.6 percent from 2. Houston excels on the offensive glass, and it generates a ton of second shots, but it also needs a lot of second shots to turn possessions into points. This is an effective offense, most of the time, particularly relative to the rest of the American Athletic Conference. Stylistically speaking, some of this is our own aesthetic preference for teams we like to watch play. But it highlights both why Houston is really good and why Michigan might be a level above anyone who isn’t Gonzaga and Baylor. The Wolverines do everything that makes Houston so good on one end of the floor and on the other they do even more.

5. Illinois (15-5)

It has been easy in recent weeks to focus on the individual brilliance of some of the Illini players, whether recognized stars such as Ayo Dosunmu and Kofi co*ckburn or burgeoning, excitingly unrefined talents like Andre Curbelo. What we haven’t discussed is how much better Illinois — from the coaching staff on down — has done utilizing that talent this season.

The numbers are pretty straightforward: Last season Illinois ended the season ranked 38th in offensive efficiency. This season it ranks eighth. But the difference between those two numbers required something like a wholesale overhaul of the Illini’s offensive systems, from the style of offense they ran in the half-court to the pace with which they got there. A year ago Illinois ranked 288th in adjusted tempo. It shot the ball horribly — especially from 3, where it made 30.3 percent on the year — and it ground out a ninth-best finish in points per trip against Big Ten competition.

This season Illinois ranks 95th in adjusted tempo. Getting into the offense faster leads to easier buckets as a rule, sure, but it also allows Dosunmu to initiate Illinois’ more simplified, screen-and-roll-derived half-court offense, a system that flows more easily, allows its best player to create and its second-best player (co*ckburn) to play downhill on screen rolls, and forces defenses to pick their poison in coverages. With Trent Frazier, Adam Miller and Da’Monte Williams hunting open looks, there is no good answer for defenses facing a Dosunmu-co*ckburn pick-and-roll — you’re going to give up something.

As a result, the ugly, standstill let’s-let-Ayo-figure-it-out scenarios Illinois fans saw pretty often last season have almost entirely disappeared. Sure, having Dosunmu helps; the Illini just had to grind wins out at Nebraska and home versus Northwestern, and when not much was working Ayo was there to bail them out. Overall, though, this is now one of the better all-around offensive teams in college basketball, playing a more fluid, sustainable brand of hoop. The players have gotten better, sure, but its coaching staff deserves a huge amount of credit for finding the right construct in which they could do so. It really works.

6. Ohio State (17-4)

Having discussed these consistently surprising, better-than-the-sum-of-their-parts Ohio State Buckeyes in some analytic detail the past couple of weeks, we now turn to the truly vital Buckeyes-related content: a uniform appreciation!

So, yeah, Ohio State’s uniforms are pretty spectacular these days, huh? Eleven Warriors ran a poll asking fans to vote on their favorite uniforms this season, and whether you agree with the ranking it’s a handy compendium of everything Chris Holtmann’s team has worn this season. And they’re all good! There isn’t a bad uniform in the mix. But where the modern uniforms are merely fine, the Buckeyes’ throwback script unis might be the best in the country. They’re classic, they’re clean, and they’re riding a wave of scripted-font uniform revivals in college hoops that hearken back to some of the very best uniform days of all time. It’s a welcome trend, and OSU’s uniforms are right out there near the front of the pack.

The other day, as Ohio State was blowing Indiana away, and E.J. Liddell was doing beautiful things like this with his usual casual affect, it sort of hit us all at once. Wow. Ohio State’s uniforms are awesome. When did this happen? Which is sort of like Ohio State as a team this year: We’re not entirely certain how it happened, but all of a sudden the Buckeyes are fantastic.

7. Alabama (17-5)

Now that’s more like it:

That, in case you were wondering, is Alabama’s shot chart from its 115-82 win over Georgia last Saturday. Yes, the Crimson Tide scored 115 points in a 40-minute college basketball game. Yes, they scored 1.40 points per possession. Yes, they rediscovered their offensive groove, in a way that should scare every other team on this list.

For much of the season, Alabama made offense like this the primary feature of its success. The Tide defended well enough, sure, but the real reason to tune in to the Nate Oats Show was the entirely modern inputs and outputs on O: all 3s, layups, and free throws, though not necessarily in that order, all of it operating at as fast a pace as was possible. Since Jan. 26, though, those kinds of offensive performances almost disappeared. The Crimson Tide scored 70 in 72 possessions at Kentucky (but won anyway, because Kentucky) before managing just 61 points in 70 trips in a loss to Oklahoma (more on whom below). On Feb. 3, LSU held them to 78 in 79. At Missouri, 65 in 76. At South Carolina, 81 in 82. You get the picture. For weeks now, Alabama has been winning — when it has, which isn’t always — because of excellent defense. Scoring a ton of points in this fun, analytically inventive new style almost totally stopped being a thing.

Until Saturday against Georgia, of course. There, Alabama got back to what it did for the vast majority of January, when it emerged as the SEC’s best team. We’re all for great defense (even if it has been juiced by some fortunate bad shooting from opponents), but let’s be real: We like this Alabama better. More, please.

8. Florida State (12-3)

Speaking of “more of this” … um, hi, Florida State? Yeah. More of this.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how good Florida State was against Virginia on Monday night. Because let’s be clear: Virginia is good. The Cavaliers are a solid defensive team that scores it a high clip per possession, and one that causes serious matchup problems with its five-out starting five, let alone the number of flexible wing pieces Tony Bennett can bring off the bench. On Saturday, North Carolina got stonewalled in Charlottesville; the Cavaliers made what was sold as an intriguing game into one of the least compelling 40 minutes we can ever remember watching. It was over from the start. The competence gulf was too wide.

And then, two nights later, Florida State ran Virginia out of the gym. Yes, the Cavaliers had a rough night, and yes, FSU doesn’t usually shoot 13-of-24 from 3. But the outcome was so much more about what Florida State did to affect it: how it defended aggressively and pushed Virginia out of its comfort zone, how quickly the Seminoles got the ball up the floor, how interchangeable so much of this very deep team’s personnel is, how ludicrously talented Scottie Barnes is. All of the above and more ensured that FSU dominated the tone and tenor of the game from the very beginning. Within minutes, you knew how this thing was going to end.

This is the challenge for Florida State more broadly: Can it do this every night? The Seminoles have had an up-and-down season, in part due to the usual reasons; multiple COVID pauses makes it hard to develop momentum and continuity in the usual Leonard Hamilton-coached ways. But some of FSU’s issues have been self-inflicted. The same team that dominated Virginia gave up 86 points in 69 possessions to UCF on the same floor. The same team got bogged down at Georgia Tech in late January. The same team barely got by at home Saturday, needing Barnes’ heroics and a 92-point effort just to ward off Wake Forest in overtime.

How is this possible? Vibes. The vibe around FSU, as relayed by people close to that program, is one of a team that occasionally needs a bit of external stimulus to get going. After struggling against the Duke/UNC and now Virginia hegemony for more than a decade, there’s a reason FSU loves to talk about being a “new blood.” Understandably, Hamilton loves a good us-against-the-world narrative. When the Seminoles lost to UCF, fell out of the Top 25 and then went on pause, they returned with five of the most impressive performances any team has strung together all season. Then they got ranked again. Then they lost to Georgia Tech. Playing Virginia was a great time to get all fired up about being counted out of the ACC race, about proving something against the best team in the league, etc.; it was the perfect night for a chip-on-your-shoulder performance. But can it bring that energy every night?

9. Iowa (15-6)

Perhaps Franuary came and went early? Perhaps there is some sort of Groundhog Day scenario happening here? Whatever is happening in Iowa City — beyond brutally cold temperatures and enough packed-down Midwestern snow that the buddies on group chat are starting to sound genuinely depressed and withdrawn — Iowa appears to have cut short its typically scheduled basketball meltdown. It’s not like Iowa collapses aren’t a real thing. As we detailed last week, they totally happen, several times in the past few years. But they don’t happen every year, not in any cut-and-dry way, and if there is any year to avoid one, this would be it.

Of course, there are also the rigors of the Big Ten to consider. Iowa beat a good Rutgers team at home, and then embarrassed Michigan State on the road, handing Tom Izzo the worst home loss of his career. But Iowa still has to play two games against Wisconsin (beginning Thursday night at the Kohl Center), plus Michigan and Ohio State on the road. That’s brutal, If the Hawkeyes — who still rank fourth in adjusted efficiency and first in offense, higher than the aforementioned historically good Gonzaga Bulldogs, by the way, and still have the best player in the country putting up ludicrously productive performances — lose three or four of those games, Fran McCaffery most likely will be accused of another late-season slide. It will be easy to look at the record before Jan. 21, and after, and point out the differences as evidence of some failure. But this is just a really tough schedule down the stretch. A bit of grace might need to be extended, at least until the NCAA Tournament, when the defining games, for better or worse, are always played. Iowa fans have been anxiously awaiting their impending collapse. But when is a collapse really a collapse?

10. Villanova (13-3)

Last week, in highlighting Villanova’s relative defensive struggles, and how opponents’ 3-point shooting was having a significant but probably slightly unsustainable impact on the Wildcats’ overall defensive output, your boy wrote the following: “If we had to offer a real take here, we’d say this defense isn’t nearly as bad as the numbers occasionally look, that if this were a stock now would be the best time to buy.” Ah, well. Nevertheless.

Naturally, Villanova’s next game came Saturday at Creighton, where the Wildcats were promptly and thoroughly Zegarowski’d. Creighton’s star guard was great, and the Bluejays put on a 1.34 points-per-possession clinic, but Mitch Ballock’s shooting performance (he was 6-of-8 from 3) represented half of Creighton’s 12 made 3s on the night. Of course, those makes are a big deal, but an even bigger deal is that Creighton was able to attempt those shots in the first place. Villanova allowed Creighton to get off 26 3s. For a defense, it’s much harder to control what happens after a 3 is attempted. But defenders can close out shooters aggressively and run them off the line, and Villanova has tilted that math in its direction — we take lots of 3s; you don’t — more than any other in the past six or seven seasons. These Wildcats aren’t really doing that. Opponents attempt 39.3 percent of their shots from beyond the arc. It has been better in league play, and a real area of focus generally, but there are still times when Jay Wright’s typically 3-averse, otherwise very good team simply gives up too many good deep looks.

11. Creighton (16-5)

Against Creighton, of course, giving up too many good deep looks is a death sentence, especially when this team is playing its best, and last Saturday, this team was absolutely playing its best. As the Bluejays ran away with the game, there was a lot of “wow, come watch Creighton play offense!” stuff going around on Twitter, and understandably so: Creighton runs some of the prettier-looking sets in the sport, with versatile, skilled players who constantly move themselves and (most important) the ball. Watching this offense at its best throws off a hint of the feeling you get when you’re playing good pickup basketball with guys you’ve known forever, maybe played with in high school, whom you understand and who understand you. Everything in its right place.

You’ll notice, of course, that we keep using the phrase “at its best” after “Creighton’s offense.” Intentionally so. Because one interesting thing about Creighton is how often the offense hasn’t been at its best. After all, a few days before the explosion of light and color that was the Villanova game, Greg McDermott’s high-octane offensive show managed all of 63 points in 73 possessions at Georgetown. It didn’t matter, because Georgetown is bad, and scored 48. (Seriously: yikes!) But Creighton’s last loss, Feb. 3 at home to that same bad Georgetown team, came in a game the Bluejays scored 79 points in 75 possessions, which that time wasn’t enough.

This is a more balanced team than some of McDermott’s past outfits. The 2020-21 squad plays better defense than Creighton’s usual rep. (The Bluejays are second defensively in the Big East in points per trip allowed, for example.) But this offense only occasionally blows up the way you saw last Saturday. If Creighton figures out how to produce anything remotely close to that on a slightly more regular basis, there’s nowhere this team can’t go.

12. Oklahoma (13-5)

Lon Kruger is really good at his job. It’s worth reminding people of this every now and then, because even though Kruger does it himself, the long arc of his career has tended to blend into the background. He’s a pretty low-key dude. But man does he get the most out of his teams.

As Krugerian overachievement goes, these Sooners are one of his greatest achievements to date. With all due respect to his players, this is not a team full of stars. It is not even a team composed of particularly recognizable names, which is why Oklahoma started this season relatively (if not entirely) off the radar. Austin Reaves is the closest thing, and his development into a high-usage lead wing/guard hybrid who can run the show offensively has been crucial to how OU — a team that doesn’t shoot it or grab offensive rebounds particularly well, and merely does a job with solid, mistake-free play — gets by on the offensive end. Brady Manek is a big who can shoot, and he has been around a while. But the rest of the roster began this year as relatively anonymous.

Still, Kruger has figured out a way to make them into a force. Primarily (as our own C.J. Moore detailed last week), Oklahoma has become a devastating defensive team ever since Kruger realized, in early January when Manek missed a game due to COVID-19, that he could incorporate guard Elijah Harkless into the lineup, play four guards and suddenly match up with just about anyone. Since the switch, Oklahoma has been better on a per-trip basis defensively in the Big 12 than even Baylor, and those numbers aren’t fluky: You can see the difficulty opponents are having just by watching Oklahoma for a few minutes. Without being this spectacular-looking, high-pressing sort of team, or one that really catches the eye in obvious ways (turnover generation, blocked shots, etc.), OU still stifles the life out of basically every game it plays. The Sooners are smart, tough, and they never get broken down. They’re Kruger through and through.

Also thinking about: USC; Virginia; Texas; West Virginia; Loyola Chicago; Wisconsin; Tennessee; Texas Tech; Virginia Tech; Missouri; Kansas; Arkansas; San Diego State; how to intellectually justify Belmont on the Bubble Watch page; honest to goodness good news, finally; James Bouknight’s return; having checked out Valheim over the weekend, that game is incredible, strangely beautiful, generally way better than it has any right to be, and also a total life-stealer that should be avoided at all costs; how all webcams are bad; how little we needed to understand why Cruella De Vil became evil or whatever; the All Your Base meme being 20 years old this week; how Drake got rocked in its really cool powder blue throwback uniforms with the cursive lettering, and then switched it up to their normal unis and immediately got a win, not unlike yours truly stopping wearing his bruised banana Arsenal shirt and immediately seeing an uptick in the club’s all-around fortunes; Colorado; the world’s most obscure radio stations; but seriously, Bukayo Saka is life; the Perseverance Rover.

(Top photo of Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs: Jeffrey Swinger / USA Today)