The NCAA Basketball season is filled with twists and turns each passing week. November isn’t exactly considered the most exciting month of the season, especially with a majority of these schools just playing easy, winnable games at home to get off on the right foot. However, this past week gave us plenty to think about with the various holiday tournaments happening both around the country and overseas.
Those holiday tournaments provide opportunities to each of their competitors in various ways. We can more clearly see if a team is for real when finally playing stronger competition and away from home. We get a chance for smaller programs or ones with lower expectations to really shine, which a few teams certainly did this past week. We also get to see individual players start to assert themselves, both among their own lineups and on the national stage in these events.
The first three weeks of the college basketball season give each team a chance to showcase themselves and start to figure things out, but this is certainly the week where we start to get a firmer picture and idea. No team’s season is made or broken at Maui, the Bahamas, or another event, but this is still a very radical time, and a chaotic week where some of the rankings or expectations seemed to be flipped on their head.
We’ll now be taking the latest attempt at the Top 25 rankings, knowing that things look drastically different from last week. A few prominent programs have dropped completely out of the rankings, while solid tournament performances have propelled several other teams. There are still many games to be played and no stories are fully written on any of these teams, but let’s start getting into where exactly the top teams stand at the end of November.
