Monday marks Week 14 of the college basketball season, and it brings the newest edition of the AP Top 25 men's basketball poll. A month of conference play is complete, and we are finally getting a sense of which teams are legitimate contenders and which squads coasted through their easy non-conference slate.
Kentucky dropped from 10th to 17th after losses to Florida and Tennessee while Texas Tech fell eight spots to 23rd after defeats to TCU and Cincinnati. On the other end, Alabama was the only team to rise more than five places in the rankings. The Rolling Tide took down Georgia and Mississippi State to jump from 24th to 16th.
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.
Two of the hottest mid-majors are still unranked
Saturday was a huge day for college basketball this past week. #3 North Carolina defeated #7 Duke, #5 Tennessee survived on the road against #10 Kentucky, and Kansas won at home against Houston in another top-10 matchup. But two of the biggest wins on the day came from outside the Power Conferences: Saint Mary's prevailing over Gonzaga and Indiana State taking down Drake.
Saint Mary's has won 15 of its last 16 games and its gritty road win over the Zags gives the Gaels four Quad I victories on the year and a two-game lead at the top of the West Coast Conference. This is an SMC team that looked dead in the water a month into the season after ugly losses to Weber State, San Diego State, and Xavier but is now 21st in the NET Rankings and 28th in KenPom. At 18-6 Saint Mary's is the first team out in the latest AP Poll.
Earlier on Saturday, Indiana State earned arguably its most important win of the year, taking down Drake at home for its seventh straight victory. The Sycamores previously lost to the Bulldogs in Des Moines, marking their only defeat in conference play. This result is only a Quad II win, but ISU remained perfect outside of Quad I games and improved to 20-3 on the year. Indiana State is 23rd in the NET Rankings and 36th in KenPom, and the team enters this week as the third team out in the AP Top 25 Poll.
Gamecocks make a rare appearance
For the first time since February 2017, the South Carolina Gamecocks are in the AP Top 25. Lamont Paris' team took down #5 Tennessee on the road — one of the best wins by any team in college basketball this season — before earning another road win against Georgia. The week before they also defeated top-10 Kentucky. These victories give South Carolina a 19-3 record with a 7-2 mark in SEC play.
AP Poll appearances are exceedingly rare for this program. SC went 11 years between top-25 appearances from the final 2004 poll to December 2015. Astute South Carolina fans will remember that the team's 2017 AP Poll display was the same year that the team reached the Final Four under Frank Martin.
Yet the metrics are not as favorable for the Gamecocks. USC is 38th in the NET and 44th in KenPom. A non-conference schedule that is 333rd in terms of difficulty and includes just three games in Quads I or II will do that. But this team has proven to be the real deal thus far in conference play, and at #15 in the AP Poll, the Gamecocks are playing some of the best basketball in the country right now.
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