The college basketball season is more than halfway complete and a little over a month from now, conference tournaments will be beginning. Bracketologists are constructing NCAA Tournament brackets that are similar to the ones we will see in March and murmurs are beginning to grow about which teams are built to win in March Madness.
As we enter the heat of conference play, now is the time to weed out the teams that either overachieved or were not challenged during their nonconference slate. Here are three college basketball teams that are currently overrated.
Memphis
15-2, #10 in the AP Poll — that is where Memphis sat just a week ago. But after a pair of ugly losses to South Florida (after blowing a 20-point second-half lead at home) and Tulane, it is time to evaluate the Tigers' resume.
Memphis had numerous non-conference wins that looked good early in the season: Missouri (A), Michigan (N), Arkansas (N), Virginia (H), and Clemson (H), but all five of those games have dropped into Quad II territory, with the Arkansas victory now Quad III. Even a road win over Texas A&M could fall out of Quadrant I range.
Add in narrow victories over mediocre teams like Vanderbilt, UTSA, and Tulsa, and Memphis' metrics are in a free fall. Penny Hardaway's team is 58th in the NET Rankings and 54th in KenPom — numbers that are precarious for a team in search of an at-large bid in the NCAA Tournament. Yet Memphis is still ranked 19th in the AP Poll and continues to be a single-digit seed in most March Madness bracket projections.
Texas A&M
Texas A&M has seemingly followed the same blueprint every year under coach Buzz Williams: some success in the first half of the season, looking lost by the middle of the year, then finishing the campaign as one of the hottest teams in the country. The Aggies achieve this while playing a brand of basketball that is not pleasing to the eye, featuring a low three-point percentage, low effective field goal percentage, and one of the highest offensive rebounding rates in the country.
This year is no different. The Aggies started 5-0 with Quad I wins over Ohio State and SMU. Since then, Buzz Williams' team is 7-7. This stretch includes tough losses to Houston and Auburn but disappointing defeats to LSU (Quad III) and Arkansas (Quad II bordering on Quad III). An overtime win over top-10 Kentucky keeps A&M looking decent. Yet, the Aggies rank 212th in the nation in offensive efficiency in conference play and will continue to slide if they do not improve.
Ole Miss
After a 13-0 start, Mississippi is quickly finding out the perils of a weak non-conference schedule (248th in non-con strength of schedule according to KenPom). The Rebels faced just one projected tournament team in non-con play (Memphis, at home) and their only game against a true power conference team was a neutral site win over California. Meanwhile, this team won by just a single point against Detroit Mercy — the only team in all of college basketball without a win this season.
Ole Miss is 3-3 in SEC play, with losses to Tennesse and Auburn and wins over Vanderbilt and Arkansas. With NET and KenPom Rankings in the 60s, Ole Miss is firmly a middle-of-the-road SEC that is a borderline NCAA Tournament team at best.
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