Kansas was going to drop from the top spot in the Associated Press Top 25 poll regardless of what happened at Mizzou on Sunday. But what happened at Mizzou on Sunday will send the Jayhawks tumbling even further when things update later Monday.
Final score: Missouri 76, Kansas 67.
So KU went from 7-0 on the season with wins over Duke, Michigan State and North Carolina to 7-2 on the season with losses to unranked Creighton and unranked Missouri in a five-day span, making the Jayhawks just the fifth No. 1 team in the history of the AP poll to lose twice in the same basketball week to unranked opponents — and the first in more than 20 years.
“We haven’t been any good at all the last five days,” said Kansas coach Bill Self. “So I don’t know that we’re close to finding an identity yet because … who are we? Are we a skilled team? Are we an athletic team? Are we an execution team? What do we really hang our hat on?”
Lately, not much.
Here’s one way to illustrate that point: if you isolate nothing but the five-day span from last Wednesday through Sunday, the Jayhawks ranked 165th nationally in that stretch, according to BartTorvik.com, with an adjusted offensive-efficiency rating ranking 266th in the sport. That should never happen to a team with a Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame coach (Self), a national-championship winning point guard (Dajuan Harris), another guard who was the leading scorer for a top-20 team last season originating from the Big Ten (AJ Storr), and an All-American big (Hunter Dickinson). But, out of nowhere, it just happened to Kansas, which is why the Jayhawks are down to No. 10 in Monday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings.
Tennessee remains No. 1 in the Top 25 And 1 for the fifth consecutive day and should move to No. 1 in the AP poll later Monday. If that happens, it will represent the Vols’ first appearance at No. 1 in the AP poll since January 2019, when Grant Williams and Admiral Schofield led Tennessee to a 23-1 start featuring a four-week stay atop the poll.
