Monday marks Week 15 of the college basketball season, and it brings the newest edition of the AP Top 25 men's basketball poll. With just three weeks remaining until the first conference tournaments begin, and have a strong sense of which teams are legitimate contenders and which squads coasted through their easy non-conference slate.
No team rose more than four spots in the latest poll, but Virginia, Saint Mary's Indiana State, and Oklahoma all jumped into the top 25. Wisconsin experienced the biggest fall, dropping nine spots to 20th on the back of a four-game losing streak.
While the AP Poll is by no means the be-all and end-all for determining how good a college basketball team is, it is an important capsule for determining who is playing the best basketball at any given week. Here are two big takeaways from the latest AP Top 25 men's college basketball poll.
Conference skids tanking former top-10 teams
The last two weeks have been nothing short of a bad dream for the Wisconsin Badgers and Kentucky Wildcats, as both teams are amid their worst stretches of the season.
Wisconsin was as high as sixth in the latest AP Top 25 Poll — its best ranking since Week 6 of the 2020-21 campaign — but has now lost four straight. The drought began in a game at Nebraska in which the Badgers gave up an 18-point second-half lead. A loss at home to #2 Purdue in the next game is forgivable, but Wisconsin has been unable to get back on track since. The Badgers dropped road contests to Michigan and Rutgers — both near the bottom of the league. The most glaring weakness for UW in this stretch has been a lack of outside shooting, as Greg Gard's team is hitting just 25.6% of its three-point attempts over its last four games.
For Kentucky, defense has been the prominent issue for a team with so much offensive talent. The Wildcats have lost three of four and four of their last six contests, including three straight at home for the first time in the Rupp Arena era. The most recent defeat to Gonzaga was particularly frustrating for UK fans as they watched the Zag continually carve them up in the paint as Graham Ike scored 23 points and Gonzaga grabbed offensive rebounds on nearly half of its misses.
Kentucky ranks 13th out of 14 SEC teams in defensive efficiency during conference play and 143rd overall per Bart Torivk. During its last six games, Kentucky's defense has been even worse, as John Calipari's team is 224th in defensive efficiency. The only consolation for the Wildcats is that two of those four defeats came against top 25 opponents, while the other two came at the hands of top-35 NET teams.
While Kentucky is still ranked at #22, both the Badgers and the Wildcats will need to improve their form in the final weeks of the regular season if they want to be contenders come March.
A new ACC team joins the fray
A team that many counted out earlier in the year, the Virginia Cavaliers are trying to prove that the ACC has tournament-quality teams outside of Duke and North Carolina. The Cavaliers are winners of eight straight to improve to 19-5 on the year while also boasting a top-10 defense. Yet the lack of depth in the conference meant that just one of these eight wins was of the Quad I variety (at Clemson).
Virginia has played the easiest ACC schedule thus far and has games against Duke and North Carolina on the docket as well as tricky contests against Wake Forest and Virginia Tech. The Cavaliers have done well to bounce back from a mid-season skid that included four losses in six games, but a tough finish to the season will show whether this team is a true ACC contender.
A long-awaited return for the Sycamores
For the first time since the final week of the 1978-79 season, the Indiana State Sycamores are back in the AP top 25 poll. Last week, we argued that this high-flying team should be ranked; this week, they are 23rd in the poll. ISU has made the NCAA Tournament just three times since Larry Bird's final season in Terre Haute, but at 22-3 this year, the Sycamores are poised to make it back even if they do not win the Missouri Valley's auto-bid.
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