Biggest Disappointments of the 2022-23 Men's College Basketball Season So Far

While men's college basketball teams like Connecticut, Maryland, Mississippi State and Purdue have gotten out to better starts than anyone expected, plenty of others have come nowhere close to living up to the preseason hype.

A handful of preseason AP Top 25 teams always sink like a lead balloon.

But from No. 1 to unranked in four weeks' time?

For shame, North Carolina.

The season is still young, though. Plenty of time for early disappointments to hit their stride—something the Tar Heels know all too well after spending most of last season on the bubble before figuring things out in late February.

Nevertheless, these are the biggest disappointments roughly one-third of the way through the regular season.

Teams are presented in no particular order, though we'll save the biggest disappointment for last.

Unless otherwise noted, records and KenPom rankings are current through the start of play Monday, Dec. 12.

Several Pac-12 teams have been worse than anticipated. Oregon opened the season at No. 21 in the AP poll and lost five of its first nine games, including a home game against UC Irvine. USC's disappointment was instantaneous, losing by 13 as an 18-point favorite on opening night against Florida Gulf Coast. (The Trojans have been respectable since then but would not be a tournament team today.)

However, those disappointments pale in comparison to the train wreck that is the California Golden Bears.

Granted, Cal was bad long before these past five weeks. The Golden Bears have gone 51-105 over the last five seasons, including a horrific 24-point loss to Chaminade in 2017. But each of those iterations of this program managed to win at least five nonconference games.

That ship has sailed as Cal sits at 0-11 with just games against Santa Clara and Texas-Arlington remaining on the noncon slate.

Cal has lost home games to UC Davis, Southern, Texas State and Eastern Washington, as well as a road game against UC San Diego.

None of those five teams even ranks in the top 175 on KenPom.

Woof.

Most of the games have been competitive. Each of Cal's first 10 losses was by 15 points or fewer.

But this might be the worst offense in the country.

KenPom puts Cal's chance of a winless season at 0.9 percent. Should the Golden Bears pull it off, it would be the first winless season* since Grambling State went 0-28 in 2012-13.

*Chicago State went 0-9 in 2020-21 before canceling the remainder of its season. That doesn't really count.

After three consecutive victories over Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Boston College, Villanova looks much less disappointing than it did during a 2-5 start to the season.

The Wildcats are undefeated with Cam Whitmore in the mix, and they should get even better if Justin Moore can return and play at anything close to his level from last season before the Achilles tear.

All the same, Villanova was No. 16 in the preseason AP Top 25 and was gone by the first in-season poll. Just because we understand the reason for the disappointment and expect things to continue to improve doesn't mean it hasn't been a disappointment.

Dating back to the beginning of the 2013-14 season, Villanova had played 316 consecutive games in which it ranked in the top 30 on KenPom.

By game No. 4 this season, the Wildcats were out of the top 30.

By the end of November, they were out of the top 50.

From February 2013 through the end of last season, Villanova had suffered just two losses to teams that ended the season ranked outside the KenPom top 100—at Penn in 2018 and at Butler in 2021.

It took the Wildcats just six games to reach that mark this year, losing to both Temple and Portland.

(I did sprinkle a little something on Villanova +3500 to reach the Final Four while writing this. Might have gotten even better odds three games ago, but it's still a ridiculous buy-low opportunity.)

With the star inside-outside duo of Graham Ike and Hunter Maldonado returning to a team that won 25 games in 2021-22, preseason expectations for Wyoming were higher than for any other season in at least the past two decades.

Not quite "San Diego State" high, but the Cowboys looked ripe for a second consecutive trip to the NCAA tournament.

Unfortunately, Ike—the Mountain West Conference Preseason Player of the Year—suffered a lower-leg injury in early November and has yet to play.

The hope is that he'll be back in the next couple of weeks, as the initial prognosis was that he'd be out 6-8 weeks. But without that frontcourt phenom, the Cowboys have been nothing special, most notably on defense.

Wyoming has yet to face a KenPom top-75 foe, but it is 5-5 with a dreadful home loss to Southeastern Louisiana among the many missteps. Ike would have devoured the undersized Lions in the paint, but without him, the Cowboys attempted 42 of their 64 shots from three-point range and didn't make enough of them.

It was a similar situation in the Dec. 3 loss to Grand Canyon. And they were without Maldonado (head injury suffered early in the loss to Boston College) for the overtime loss to Santa Clara.

Wyoming has some buy-low potential, as the Cowboys should hang with anyone in the MWC once Ike returns to the lineup. But this brutal start to the season without their big man all but guarantees they won't sneak back into the at-large mix.

As with Villanova and Wyoming, a preseason injury is largely to blame for South Carolina's shortcomings.

After averaging 5.2 assists per game over the past four seasons at Coastal Carolina, Ebrima Dibba transferred to South Carolina to become the veteran point guard of a rebuilding team. But he suffered a torn Achilles during summer workouts and will miss the entire season.

It's a huge loss from which South Carolina has been unable to recover. The offense sputters through dry spells on a regular basis as it tries to get by with Meechie Johnson—who wasn't efficient over the past two seasons as a reserve at Ohio State—as its primary ball-handler.

In each of its four losses as well as in its win over Clemson, South Carolina scored 60 points or fewer. It entered Sunday's game against Presbyterian shooting below 40 percent from the field while committing three more turnovers per game than it forced.

The Gamecocks lost by 24 at George Washington after going 0-3 in the Charleston Classic with a 32-point loss to Colorado State.

South Carolina wasn't expected to be a Final Four contender or anything. The preseason SEC media poll had the Gamecocks finishing dead last in the league. But they were 78th on KenPom to open the year and have plummeted to No. 168.

That 90-spot difference is the third-largest drop by any team, better than only winless Louisville (minus-146) and winless California (minus-112).

We'll hone in specifically on North Carolina later, but what a disastrous start for the ACC as a whole.

In the preseason, the league's average team ranking on KenPom was 56.0. Though the league only had four teams in the top 40 (Virginia, North Carolina, Duke and Virginia Tech), only Georgia Tech (at No. 117) was expected to rank outside the top 100.

As of Sunday morning, the league's average team ranking on KenPom had ballooned to 81.0 with four teams rated 120th or worse.

The ACC is clearly in last place among the six major conferences, and it's not far ahead of the Mountain West Conference.

Most of the free fall has been contained to three teams: Florida State (dropped 74 spots), Boston College (dropped 82 spots) and no-good-very-bad Louisville (dropped 146 spots).

The winless Cardinals have lost six consecutive games by at least 19 points. The Eagles have inexplicably lost two home games to the America East's Maine and New Hampshire and got blasted by a struggling Villanova team on Saturday. Florida State didn't even make it through Thanksgiving before suffering losses to Stetson, Troy and Siena.

In short, the basement of the ACC might be worse than ever.

But Notre Dame and Syracuse have also fallen short of expectations, and the preseason No. 1 Tar Heels have been a colossal disappointment.

That's 40 percent of the league coming nowhere close to living up to the hype.

Save for shockingly 11-1 Fordham, the A-10 has been almost as disappointing as the ACC. It has been a multi-bid league in the past 16 NCAA tournaments, but it is almost irreparably out of the at-large picture with no team ranked better than 61st on KenPom or 85th in the NET.

Of the A-10's many letdowns, though, Dayton takes the cake.

The Flyers brought back basically everyone from a team that won 24 games last season and were ranked 24th in the preseason AP poll. They were the clear favorite to win what would be a three-bid league if two of Saint Louis, VCU and Loyola-Chicago could also live up to the hype.

Instead, the Flyers have blown every nonconference opportunity and might need to go 20-0 the rest of the way to even have an argument for an at-large spot.

At UNLV, Dayton committed 24 turnovers and blew a 12-point second-half lead. And at Virginia Tech, the Flyers went through one of the worst droughts you'll ever see from what was supposed to be a good team, letting the Hokies go on a 34-6 run over a stretch of about 14 minutes.

However, the real disappointment came in the Battle 4 Atlantis. The Flyers dropped a back-and-forth rock fight with Wisconsin, lost an early 10-point lead against NC State and blew a 23-point lead against BYU to head home with an 0-3 record.

In that eight-team field, they had a golden opportunity to prove they belonged in the NCAA tournament. Instead, the Flyers did the exact opposite.

After five consecutive years of finishing either first or second in the Missouri Valley Conference and making three trips to the NCAA tournament, Loyola-Chicago moderately increased its difficulty level by relocating to the Atlantic 10.

The Ramblers were expected to become one of the A-10's contenders, picked to finish fourth in the 15-team league.

Instead, they have deteriorated into a sloppy disaster that cannot stop shooting itself in the foot.

Loyola-Chicago has become one of the most turnover-prone teams in the nation, averaging 18 giveaways per game. Per KenPom, only New Orleans, McNeese State and Florida A&M have a worse turnover percentage.

The Ramblers have also been atypically physical on defense, allowing more than 20 free-throw attempts per game. Two years ago, they led the nation in that department, allowing just 11.5 free-throw attempts per game.

Between all those turnovers and free points for the opposition, they started out 3-5 with bad losses to Tulsa and Harvard and near losses to Fairleigh Dickinson and Illinois-Chicago.

Loyola-Chicago did lose five of its seven leading scorers from last season and hasn't gotten as much as it expected from transfers Bryce Golden and Sheldon Edwards. But that doesn't change the fact that this team has been a huge disappointment.

The sad thing for the A-10 is that this still might be the fourth-best team in the league.

It'd be hard for Georgetown to be disappointing compared to last season. The Hoyas finished the 2021-22 campaign on a 21-game losing streak, going winless in Big East play and not beating an opponent worth mentioning aside from the rivalry game against Syracuse.

But the expectation was that Georgetown would bounce back thanks to an influx of impact transfers, and that hasn't happened.

Brandon Murray (LSU), Jay Heath (Arizona State), Primo Spears (Duquesne) and Bryson Mozone (USC Upstate) each averaged at least 10 points per game last season, and they have combined to do a lot of scoring in the nation's capital.

However, Georgetown's defense is every bit as awful as it was last year.

Because of that, the Hoyas have lost by double digits in each of the four games played against KenPom top-150 opponents, and they are 0-5 against the KenPom top 200.

The real disappointment, though, is that no one in the DMV area cares to watch this team anymore.

For Wednesday's game against Siena, Georgetown was giving away free tickets to anyone with an ID from Washington, D.C. Yes, literally giving them away. Even if the reported attendance of 3,526 was accurate, that would've been sad. But based on a video posted to Twitter by Hilltop Hoops, there is no way even 2,000 people showed up.

Sure, it was a midweek game against a no-name opponent (no offense to Siena, which has beaten Seton Hall and Florida State this season) with finals rapidly approaching. Tough one for working professionals or the student body to go to the trouble of attending, hence the giveaway.

However, in Patrick Ewing's first season at the helm in 2017-18, after back-to-back losing seasons under John Thompson III, Georgetown hosted Howard on Thursday, Dec. 7 (as opposed to Wednesday, Dec. 7). Even without giving away tickets, the announced attendance was 4,543—nearly 30 percent greater. Just a shame to see.

Going from preseason No. 1 to unranked in less than a month is almost impossible.

Before this year's Tar Heels pulled off the unlikely and unflattering feat, it had only happened one other time when UCLA started 3-3 in 1965-66 and slipped out of the AP rankings. But the AP only ranked the top 10 teams at the time, so the Bruins' fall from grace nearly six decades ago wasn't as astounding as what happened to North Carolina.

Even though the Tar Heels are still comfortably in the consensus projected tournament field, they have unquestionably been the biggest disappointment.

In the process of losing four consecutive games to Iowa State, Alabama, Indiana and Virginia Tech, North Carolina shot 23.7 percent from three-point range and averaged 9.5 assists against 12.8 turnovers. Despite having Armando Bacot and Pete Nance down low, UNC's annually elite offensive rebounding has been only marginally better than the national average.

Even before the losses piled up, the Heels didn't look great in their first five wins, particularly against College of Charleston and Portland.

They have seen a lot of hero ball by RJ Davis and Caleb Love and not much urgency on defense or on the glass.

Basically, they look like a team that spent the offseason reading about how good they'd be as opposed to actually working to get better.

Maybe this was the slap in the face the Tar Heels needed in order to turn a corner, or maybe this year's team will never adequately adjust to life after Brady Manek.

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