NCAA Basketball: Villanova’s fall, holiday breakdown among biggest takeaways
By Joey Loose
4. Strength of schedule?
At this point in the season, there are a lot of people who look at a team’s record, trying to compare that one team may be better than another. It’s very important to consider the strength of that team’s record and clearly just looking at a team’s strength of schedule will give us these answers. It’s especially important now before conference play when most of the tough games for some of these power conference teams have been only in their holiday tournaments.
We’ll start on the tougher side. Gonzaga has not looked like themselves at times this season, with big losses to Purdue and Texas, but they’ve also played one of the top five toughest schedules in the nation. It’s hard to judge them based on these early games against elite foes, especially when they’ll be judged for the opposite reason in January and February, playing foes like Pacific and Pepperdine regularly.
On that same wavelength, San Diego State is a team that some people may be writing off after a couple of losses at the Maui Invitational, but that would be a mistake. The Aztecs are also near the top of the league in strength of schedule and already have a pair of power conference wins away from home. Their losses to Arizona and Arkansas were unfortunate, but this is still the Mountain West’s premier team.
On the other side, there are a few teams off to nice starts that may not be as impressive as they seem. Texas excelled in that win over Gonzaga but has played four pretty bad opponents in their other games. Indiana is another team that’s getting a lot of praise despite their only good win being a 2-point road win at a rebuilding Xavier team. Their other five wins have come against teams that will almost certainly be Q4 games.
This isn’t to say that Texas or Indiana aren’t impressive early; they certainly aren’t the only teams we could’ve mentioned. Georgetown, Missouri, and TCU all sit in the bottom 25 in strength of schedule and we know that two of those teams have gotten their seasons off to awful starts. On the flip side, Gonzaga and San Diego State have handled very difficult schedules with mixed results. Only time will tell how these teams actually look when they face far more important challenges.