Men’s College Basketball Panic Meter After Feast Week Flops

College basketball’s Feast Week is always chaotic, but this year’s action took things to another level. Five top-10 men’s teams in the previous week’s AP poll lost games, with four of those five dropping games to unranked opponents. UConn’s disastrous 0–3 trip to the Maui Invitational got most of the headlines, but Gonzaga losing to West Virginia, Houston falling to San Diego State and Alabama dropping a game to Oregon all were surprising results. And that’s not even mentioning brutal weeks for teams with high preseason expectations like Arizona, North Carolina and Creighton.

Which teams’ bad Thanksgiving weeks were an ominous sign for things to come and which will we look back on as a blip? Here’s a look at Sports Illustrated’s concern level for several top teams.

UConn Huskies

Feast Week Damage: Losses to the Memphis Tigers, Colorado Buffaloes and Dayton Flyers

The machine the UConn program had been for the last two years put out an all-systems failure in Maui, so much so that Dan Hurley indicated he’d never play in another tournament like it again as long as he’s at UConn. Some of that has to do with separate financial realities that make heading to Maui less attractive, but UConn’s on-court collapse over three days makes a compelling case for why plenty of coaches no longer want to play these three-games-in-three-days formats anymore. After an overtime loss to Memphis on Nov. 25, things went absolutely off the rails, losing to a Colorado team picked near the bottom of the Big 12 on Nov. 26 and getting smoked by Atlantic 10 foe Dayton on Wednesday. UConn isn’t nearly as bad as it showed in Hawaii, but make no mistake, the Huskies have clear flaws.

The most obvious pain point is on defense, where every fear about the Huskies’ ability to remain elite on that end in a world without Donovan Clingan came true and more. Not only did UConn’s center duo of Samson Johnson and Tarris Reed Jr. struggle with foul trouble, but UConn’s perimeter defense was a sieve. Transfer guard Aidan Mahaney and sophomore Solo Ball were a rough watch on that end of the floor, but their replacements (Hassan Diarra and Jayden Ross) aren’t nearly as reliable on the offensive end. Hurley has been an elite defensive coach dating back to his time at Rhode Island, so I’d bet on UConn finding a way to improve on that end of the floor even if it’s not quite up to the Huskies’ lofty standard.

The other significant concern was point guard play. Hurley invested a lot in Diarra, who had backed up Tristen Newton the last two years, as the Huskies’ answer at that spot, but his limitations are evident. Mahaney was excellent at Saint Mary’s on the offensive end, but is more combo guard than true point guard and was at times unplayable in Maui. Hurley now seems intent on force-feeding minutes to freshman Ahmad Nowell, but that doesn’t seem likely to save UConn’s season.

Is UConn an NCAA tournament team? Yes. How much more they are than that remains to be seen, but a third straight national title feels very far away at the moment.

At 3–4, Arizona is under .500 in the month of December for the first time since Sean Miller’s first season in 2009–10. The schedule hasn’t been easy, but that’s still quite the shock given how high the expectations were in the preseason and how consistently excellent Arizona has been under Tommy Lloyd. And while each loss individually is explainable, losing all four is well worth the alarm bells.

Arizona’s most obvious flaw is its lack of shooting on the offensive end. Arizona is shooting just 26% from deep in its four losses, and that number is more a personnel issue than cold shooting that will eventually turn around. Starting bruising guards Jaden Bradley and KJ Lewis in the backcourt, a 4-man who made just 12 threes last season in Trey Townsend and a non-shooting center (either Motiejus Krivas or Tobe Awaka) was a spacing concern on paper that has come to fruition. That’s less of an issue against overmatched buy-game opponents that Arizona can overwhelm physically, but the Wildcats get bogged down quickly in the halfcourt against teams with comparable athleticism.

If you’re going to play such a bruising, athleticism-first lineup, you’d hope you’d at least be elite on the defensive end. Instead, Arizona has been outside the top 150 nationally defensively against top-100 teams, per T-Rank. The Wildcats foul too much, aren’t turning teams over at a high rate and have given up a ton of threes early on. Losing neutral-court games to Oklahoma and West Virginia this past week is a big concern given what Arizona is staring down come Big 12 play. Missing the NCAA tournament isn’t off the table.