5 early lessons of men’s basketball season: Real vs. pretend contenders, more

It has been 37 days since the men’s college basketball season began — and what a wild opening stretch it has been.

The freshmen class quickly emerged as one of the best in the history of the sport. The group is so good that Washington’s Hannes Steinbach, at an average of 18.5 points and 12.8 rebounds, is projected as the 21st pick in ESPN’s 2026 NBA mock draft.

The early stretch has also helped identify which preseason contenders are true threats to win the national championship — see: Michigan defeating fellow AP top-10 team Gonzaga by 40 points during Feast Week — and which look more like pretenders.

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Through all of the mayhem, it’s clear this season is producing some of the best basketball of this era. The top teams are really good. The talent pool is deep. The coaching is top tier. And the atmospheres have been awesome (this is not an invitation to rant about the Players Era Festival crowds).

We’re marching toward what should be an incredible finale at the Final Four in Indianapolis, a decade after Villanova’s Kris Jenkins hit a winning 3-pointer at the buzzer to beat North Carolina in the 2016 national championship. If the first month is an indicator, the 2025-26 season could end with similar fireworks.

Here are the five biggest lessons we’ve learned so far.

This freshman class could be the best of one-and-done era

In the four seasons between 2021-22 and 2024-25, KenPom’s final Player of the Year rankings featured four freshmen combined: Chet Holmgren and Paolo Banchero in 2022, Brandon Miller in 2023 and Cooper Flagg in 2025. That’s the same number of freshmen included in this season’s rankings.

That list begins with Cameron Boozer. Duke’s star has a higher offensive rating on KenPom than Flagg or Zion Williamson, the past two National Player of the Year winners produced by the Blue Devils, finished their award-winning seasons with. Through the first five weeks, at least, Boozer has separated himself from the field with a breathtaking effort for an undefeated Duke team.

On Boozer’s heels are a collection of first-year standouts who deserve similar recognition.

BYU’s AJ Dybantsa has arguably been the second-best player in the country, and North Carolina star Caleb Wilson is leading a resurgence in Chapel Hill. That same bounce-back is in the works for Kansas now, too, with projected No. 1 NBA draft pick Darryn Peterson’s return from a monthlong absence because of a hamstring injury.

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AJ Dybantsa throws down exclamation point jam for BYU

AJ Dybantsa takes the open lane to the basket and throws down a massive jam for BYU.

Each of the top eight picks in ESPN’s 2026 NBA mock draft are freshmen — a group that doesn’t even include surging prospects such as Houston’s Kingston Flemings or Arkansas’ Darius Acuff Jr.

In the one-and-done era, this crew has a chance to be the best we’ve ever seen.

Florida, Kentucky and St. John’s have failed to meet expectations

Three days after it suffered through its worst scoring drought of the past eight years — a 10-minute, 25-second stretch in last week’s loss to North Carolina — Kentucky missed its first 10 shots and lost to Gonzaga by 35 points in Nashville on Friday. To say that a team that was ranked ninth in the preseason AP Top 25 is in trouble would be a vast understatement. The Wildcats are a mess, but they’re not the only preseason contenders searching for answers.

Months after winning a national title with an elite set of guards, Florida’s Todd Golden rebooted his backcourt with former Arkansas star Boogie Fland and Princeton transfer Xaivian Lee. It hasn’t worked out as planned. In Florida’s two-player lineups — an on-court metric at EvanMiya.com that captures how teams perform when specific players are paired together — the Fland-Lee combination ranked 26th within its own team. And though Lee scored 19 points against UConn in Tuesday’s game at Madison Square Garden, that loss was another example of the Gators’ limitations when Lee and Fland (1-for-9 combined from 3 against the Huskies) aren’t equally elite on the same night.

Ultimately, Florida hasn’t looked like a defending champion thus far, despite Thomas Haugh (18.6 PPG, 7.6 RPG, 2.8 APG) playing like an All-American.

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Thomas Haugh soars for a thunderous alley-oop jam for Florida

Xaivian Lee floats the ball to Thomas Haugh for an epic and-1 alley-oop slam for Florida vs. UConn.

And after finishing second in adjusted defensive efficiency, defending Big East champion St. John’s is 51st in that same category since Nov. 24, per BartTorvik.com. Rick Pitino signed some of the top transfers in the portal but has failed to manufacture the same defensive integrity that helped his squad earn an invitation to “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” a year ago. The Red Storm have already lost three games after finishing last season with only five losses.

Michigan, Iowa State and Arizona are much better than we realized

After his colleagues had been peppered with questions at Big 12 media day, Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd sat on the stage in Kansas City, Missouri, and acknowledged the lack of interest in his team at that same juncture. “No other questions? Really?” Lloyd said. “OK.”

Since that moment in October, Arizona has shocked college basketball. The Wildcats earned their first No. 1 ranking in the AP Top 25 since 2023 this week thanks to early wins over No. 5 UConn, No. 18 Florida, No. 21 Auburn and No. 25 UCLA. Sensational freshman Koa Peat (15.9 PPG, 5.5 RPG) leads a squad that has averaged 88.5 points.

Two teams that had not been viewed as serious preseason contenders have also managed to earn national acclaim over the first month-plus.

Michigan beat Gonzaga by 40 points in Las Vegas during Feast Week, capping a 3-0 run at the Players Era Festival with wins over San Diego State and Auburn, too. Led by All-America candidate Yaxel Lendeborg, the Wolverines have the nation’s best defense and have won six games by 25 or more points.

Joshua Jefferson (17.6 PPG, 6.7 RPG, 5.4 APG) and Iowa State also have dominant wins on their résumé, including last Saturday’s 23-point true road victory over then-No. 1 Purdue. That’s the best win of the season thus far. The Cyclones have also managed to force turnovers on 26.5% of their opponents’ possessions, the best mark in the country.

All three teams finished outside the top six in the preseason AP poll — Arizona (13th) and Iowa State (16th) weren’t even top 10. But those three teams have looked the part of serious national championship contenders through the first month of the season.

The 3-point revolution has reached record highs

In George Washington’s 84-70 victory over Army on Dec. 2, the two teams combined to shoot 70 3-pointers. In the 2015 national title game, Wisconsin and Duke combined to shoot 32 3s — or seven fewer than Army took last week.

While the significance of the 3-point shot in college basketball isn’t a new phenomenon, the uptick in the first month of the 2025-26 season suggests that we could see a flurry of 3-pointers at a rate unmatched. A then-record of 121 teams took 3-pointers on at least 40% of their shots in 2021-22, an uptick from the 103 teams in the same category five years earlier, per KenPom. That number rose again to a stunning 157 teams last season.

So far this season, at least 40% of total field goal attempts for 187 teams — more than half of Division I programs — have been 3-pointers.

The game is rapidly evolving in real time, and the first month has proved as much with the multitude of 3-point attempts across the landscape.

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Alex Karaban sinks an early 3 for UConn

Alex Karaban sinks an early 3 for UConn

The ACC is … back?

The ACC sent a North Carolina team that finished 13-7 in conference play as its fourth and final NCAA tournament entry a season after finishing with only four bids for the first time in more than a decade.

Needless to say, it has been a couple of down seasons for the ACC, but the conference is already beginning to erase its recent woes. Yes, Duke is Duke. Boozer is the front-runner for National Player of the Year and is surrounded by a supporting cast that could help the Blue Devils win their first national title since 2015. That’s not new. What is though, is the role other ACC teams could have in producing a resurgence for the conference.

Louisville (Mikel Brown Jr.) and North Carolina (Caleb Wilson) are led by a pair of projected lottery picks. First-year head coaches Ryan Odom (Virginia), Jai Lucas (Miami) and Will Wade (NC State) could turn the tide for their teams this season. Overall, five ACC teams are ranked in the top 25 in adjusted offensive efficiency at the start of December.

That’s a good sign.

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The ACC ended last season with only five top-100 teams in KenPom’s final rankings. So far this season, the conference already has nine. It also had eight sub-100 KenPom teams at the end of 2024-25, which is a better measuring stick for the conference’s overall strength (or lack thereof). This season, there are only three ACC teams in that same category.

With a talent boost and new faces on the sidelines, the ACC has already demonstrated that it is collectively prepared for a better season than the past two.