Example: Kerry Blackshear. He made second-team all-ACC last season in helping lead Virginia Tech to the Sweet 16. Had he remained in Blacksburg, he'd have been the only member of the first and second all-conference teams to return. When coach Buzz Williams left for Texas A&M, Blackshear split, too. He's now the leading scorer and rebounder for Florida. That's not an indictment of anything. That's just the way of the basketball world.
The upshot is that even the blueblood programs get stretched thin. This is the least gifted Duke team since the one that was upset by Mercer in 2014. This might be the second-worst Kentucky team since John Calipari arrived in Lexington in 2009. North Carolina, minus the injured freshman Cole Anthony, just had to win consecutive games to get to 10-10. UCLA is likewise 10-10. Those four programs have combined for 30 of the 81 NCAA championships.
We haven't yet hit February, but we've seen enough to believe that, come March, the usual Madness could be replaced by chaos. Duke lost last week at Clemson, the same Clemson that had just won at North Carolina for the first time ever. In December, that same Clemson lost at home to Yale. If you're looking for a down-bracket sleeper, look no further the Ivy League Bulldogs, who are 14-4 and whose losses have come by a total of 17 points. Yale has history in the NCAA tournament: It gave No. 3 seed LSU a run last year, and in 2016 it upset Baylor, now the nation's No. 1.
College basketball has grown accustomed to subsisting without top-end talent, such talents having left for the NBA while still teenagers. But the scattering of mid-level talent, which has only accelerated with the advent of the transfer portal, is something everybody's still trying to process.
Georgia, which could have the NBA's No. 1 draft pick in Anthony Edwards, couldn't hold a 20-point second-half lead at Missouri on Tuesday. Kansas would get some backing as the nation's most talented team, but the Jayhawks could manage only 55 points in a home loss to Baylor, whose MVP might be big man Freddie Gillespie, who began his collegiate journey at Division III Carleton College.
Rutgers hadn't broken .500 since 2004, when it was in the old Big East, and its first five seasons in the Big Ten saw it go 16-76 in league play. The Scarlet Knights hold third place in the Big Ten and are ranked 25th in the AP poll. Their best 3-point shooter is Akwasi Yeboah, who this time last year was the leading scorer for the Stony Brook Seawolves of the American East. And on it goes.
Come April, it will all stop here. It's possible we could have a Final Four of usual suspects _ Kansas, Kentucky, Duke, Michigan State. (Not North Carolina, though.) But in a season where form has been cast to the winds, that seems unlikely. I could envision something like Rutgers, Yale, San Diego State and Dayton, with Obi Toppin and the Flyers cutting the nets. And with Kevin Riley, who's the editor of the AJC and a Dayton grad, taking victory laps.
