Analysis | College basketball’s biggest mystery is a team that suddenly stopped winning

NCAA tournament bracketology: Connecticut looks ready to defend its title

But would it really be a, ahem, shocker if Memphis falls its next time out after it stumbled at home against 8-13 Rice on Wednesday?

Memphis isn’t in the middle of a conventional slide. Sure, the other teams it lost to in late January are respectable. South Florida (14-5) has done fine work under first-year coach Amir Abdur-Rahim to match its victory total from all of last season. Tight losses such as a two-point setback at Tulane (12-8) happen from time to time. And UAB (14-7) has proven a tough out in its first year in the league.

But even some of the Tigers’ relatively recent victories — by two at home over SEC doormat Vanderbilt just before Christmas, in overtime at home against a defensively limited Texas San Antonio bunch, in giving up 86 points to a less-than-explosive Wichita State team — offered warnings.

Hardaway’s teams have woven two elements into their success. There was a significant Memphis presence on the roster, a byproduct largely of his own ties to the city but also a strong provincialism about the program that reflects its place as the longtime center of the area’s sports scene. And the Tigers made up for whatever they missed on the offensive end by defending with zeal.

They scored much more easily on the way to NCAA tournament berths the past two years but still defended well (if not quite at the elite level they achieved in 2019-20 and 2020-21). This season, the offense is decent but the defense has reached its lowest point in the six-year Hardaway era.

It’s been especially poor of late, and while guard Caleb Mills’s season-ending left knee injury last month is no help, it isn’t a catchall explanation. Memphis is poor at denying second chances and is mediocre at defending the three-point line. Both have gotten worse of late (opponents are 41.1 percent from three over the past four games), but they weren’t great to begin with.

This isn’t like Villanova’s five-game skid, which includes getting swept by Marquette, losing by a point to Connecticut and losing at St. John’s. Those results make some sense. So does Nevada dropping four of five after it hit the teeth of the Mountain West schedule. The explanation for Michigan, which was lauded during a 3-0 start and is 4-14 since, is even easier. The Wolverines just aren’t good.

But Memphis has a decent collection of victories. It won at Texas A&M and knocked off Clemson and Virginia, all in a three-game span in December. It also upended a handful of teams (Arkansas, Missouri and VCU) that haven’t turned out to be as good as expected.

And now, it seems like Memphis isn’t, either.

Game on at South Carolina

South Carolina appeared on few lists of potential surprise teams at the start of the season. The Gamecocks weren’t good at much of anything while going 11-21 in Lamont Paris’s first season in charge last year, and they were picked to finish last in the SEC’s preseason poll.

Things were bound to get a little better as Paris — a former Wisconsin assistant who took Chattanooga to the NCAA tournament in 2022 — established his plan. But heading into February with an 18-3 record that features victories over Kentucky and Tennessee? That’s something else altogether.

The Gamecocks have four players averaging in double figures, including Meechie Johnson (15.1 points per game) and Wofford import B.J. Mack (14.0). They’ve done that despite playing at the No. 349 adjusted tempo out of 362 teams, according to KenPom.com.

South Carolina also just got Vanderbilt transfer Myles Stute back from a three-game absence, and he promptly scored 13 points with three made three-pointers against Tennessee on Wednesday.

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National polls mean only so much, but it’s hard to ignore first-time-in-a-long-time stats like the ones the Gamecocks have compiled. The 63-59 victory in Knoxville this week was the program’s first on the road against a top-five team since toppling Kentucky in 1997. And South Carolina hadn’t collected two top-10 wins in three games since winning at Duke and North Carolina in February 1968.

Whether the Gamecocks have a deep run in them is far from certain. But they’ve already matched their largest victory total since their 2017 Final Four appearance, they’re defending the perimeter at a high level since the start of SEC play, and they’ve won three road games in a row entering Saturday’s visit to Georgia. Few may have seen South Carolina coming, but it is within a game of the SEC lead and far from finished this season.

Listening to Sundance Wicks’s voice mail greeting offers a spot-on sense of Green Bay’s first-year coach.

“Don’t forget to bring your own juice,” Wicks booms infectiously.

A man who peppers his conversation with quotations and pop culture references, who is adorned in a green-and-white plaid jacket in the photo on his bio page on the Phoenix’s website and whose enthusiasm is palpable even on a phone call is presiding over one of the best turnarounds in Division I.

Green Bay has a long history of success. It was exceptional during a run in the 1990s under Dick Bennett, famously picking off Jason Kidd-led Cal in the first round of the 1994 NCAA tournament. But the past three years were rough under Will Ryan, leading to his firing in the middle of last season before a 3-29 finish.

Enter Wicks, who has the Phoenix at 15-9 overall after Thursday’s 79-56 rout of IUPUI and has energized a vibrant fan base.

“That whole community gets behind us,” Wicks said. “You can kind of forget pretty fast where we were in the last three years at 16-71 to all of the sudden this year being 15-9, because they want to have that memory like a goldfish, like Ted Lasso says. You want to forget how it was the last three years.”

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Wicks, who had a two-year stint at Division II Missouri Western, spent the past three seasons as an assistant at Wyoming. It was there he got to know junior guard Noah Reynolds, who followed him to Green Bay.

Reynolds leads the Horizon League in both scoring (20.8 per game) and assists (5.1) in conference play, and his consistency provided a foundation for a team with 12 new players on a 15-man roster to acclimate. But he is far from the Phoenix’s only option.

Freshman David Douglas Jr. has three 20-point games in his past four outings. Forward Elijah Jones is shooting 62.7 percent, including 47.8 percent from three-point range. Green Bay has seven players averaging between 5.4 and 8.7 points.

“We got Noah Reynolds and what I call the Crazy Eights,” Wicks said. “We have eight guys who essentially play different roles for us that have scored in double figures. We’re probably the hardest scout in America, because when you have eight guys that are playing different spots — starting, not starting — eight different guys who all scored 12 points in a game at some point this year, you’re going to sit there and go, ‘Who do we stop next?’”

Wicks credits players for committing to the Phoenix after it closed out last season at No. 361 (out of 363) in both the NET and the KenPom.com rankings. But beyond the boundless energy — “juice,” in Wicks’s parlance — is a coach who has figured out an ideal way to deploy his roster.

He argues that if you don’t have overwhelming talent, there are two ways for a team to separate itself in basketball today. One is to play fast/fast — running, jumping and trapping on defense, pushing the pace on offense. The other is slow/slow, which combines a defense making opponents feel like every possession is a trip to the dentist and a deliberate approach on offense.

Green Bay is definitely the latter, ranking 350th in KenPom’s adjusted tempo metric. But the Phoenix is also third in Horizon League play in offensive efficiency, and it has distinguished itself as a team that shoots lots of threes (seventh nationally in percentage of field goal attempts beyond the arc) and makes plenty of them. Plus, Green Bay smothers opponents from the outside.

It’s quite the homage to Bennett, whom Green Bay fans revere for taking the Phoenix to four NCAA tournaments from 1991 to 1996.

“They actually really appreciate it,” Wicks said. “I make sure they’re reminded we are playing Bennett basketball around here. The Green Bay way is gritty, not pretty. But what’s funny is there’s a little bit of the new-school twist that I’ve kind of pulled the wool over their eyes a little bit in the sense of we shoot a lot of three-pointers. We’re still grinding it out defensively, but we’re going to have the pretty side of basketball, too.”

And then there’s the most beautiful part: At 10-3 in the Horizon League, Green Bay sits in first place with seven games to go. That should be enough to juice up any Phoenix supporter.

Houston at Kansas (Saturday, 4, ESPN): The Cougars (19-2, 6-2 Big 12) head to Allen Fieldhouse for the first time as a conference rival of the Jayhawks (17-4, 5-3), who thrashed Oklahoma State on Tuesday to bounce back from a loss at Iowa State. Kansas will be no worse than a half-game out of first in the Big 12 as it hits the midpoint of league play if it wins, and two behind Houston with a trip to face the Cougars still to come if it loses.

Duke at North Carolina (Saturday, 6:30, ESPN): The host Tar Heels (17-4, 9-1 ACC) are coming off an unexpected loss at Georgia Tech as they head into their first showdown with the Blue Devils (16-4, 7-2). This game will feature the ACC’s best guard (Carolina’s RJ Davis) and its best big (Duke’s Kyle Filipowski), and it’s not hard to envision a big game helping either of them eventually land conference player of the year honors.

Iowa State at Baylor (Saturday, 8, ESPN2): Did Baylor (15-5, 4-3 Big 12) rediscover its footing by dispatching Central Florida this week to snap a three-game skid? Or were three losses by a combined nine points (and two in overtime) not worth getting worked up about in the first place. Beating the Cyclones (16-4, 5-2), who had a midweek open date, would help settle that question.

Tennessee at Kentucky (Saturday, 8:30, ESPN): This one lost a bit of its shine as the Volunteers (15-5, 5-2 SEC) lost at home to South Carolina on Tuesday and Kentucky (15-5, 5-3) stumbled in overtime against Florida at Rupp Arena a night later. But it’s still one of the SEC’s marquee games, and neither wants to be looking at a two-game slide in the middle of conference play.

Saint Mary’s at Gonzaga (Saturday, 10:30, ESPN): The first of (at least) two editions of the West Coast Conference’s best rivalry unfolds at the Kennel, where Gonzaga (16-5, 7-1) has not lost to the Gaels (17-6, 8-0) since 2018. Given their skimpy résumé, the Bulldogs have plenty of work to do, and while other games loom larger (at Kentucky this month, the return trip to Saint Mary’s and the WCC tournament), this would be a helpful victory.

Purdue at Wisconsin (Sunday, 1, CBS): A loaded weekend saves a blockbuster for Sunday, when Zach Edey and the Boilermakers (20-2, 9-2 Big Ten) head to Madison for the first of two regular season games against the Badgers (16-5, 8-2). Wisconsin had won 15 of 17 before an overtime loss at Nebraska on Thursday, and AJ Storr’s breakout sophomore season after arriving from St. John’s has helped transform a mediocre offense a year ago into its most efficient scoring machine since the days of Frank Kaminsky in 2014-15.