By Aidan Joly
On Tuesday, unranked Marquette upset No. 6 Baylor.
It wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill upset that came down the final few possessions, the Golden Eagles put a beatdown on the Bears, beating them 96-70, a 26-point rout.
It was a stunning result and one of the larger upsets of the season, the top teams in the country losing to teams seen as inferior has become very commonplace in the first few weeks of the season.
Since the season began on November 7, 13 ranked teams have lost to unranked teams and there wasn’t any until Temple beat then-No. 16 Villanova.
Tuesday’s win was the third time this season we saw a team ranked in the top six in the country fall to an unranked team; Michigan State beat No. 4 Kentucky on November 15 and Iowa State took down No. 1 North Carolina in Portland last Friday.
A lot of the top teams in college basketball feel very vulnerable – the UNC loss seemed to have been a long time coming, even if it was just the Tar Heels’ sixth game of the season, it had not looked good. Two days later, it lost a 4OT thriller to No. 18 Alabama, which dropped them all the way to No. 18 when the latest AP poll dropped on Monday.
Gonzaga, who came into the season at No. 2 in the country, has suffered two blowout losses this season at the hands of Texas and Purdue. It has a nice 16-point win over Kentucky, but the Bulldogs are 1-2 against ranked opponents so far this season before a neutral site game against Baylor on Friday.
Duke has a pair of losses, one of them a 19-point loss to Purdue. Heck, three of the four teams that played in the Champions Classic all have multiple losses.
This has paid dividends for programs such as Houston, who now sits at No. 1 in the country for the first time since the Phi Slama Jama days in this week’s poll. Texas is in the top two in the country for the first time since 2010. Virginia is off to a hot start with wins against Baylor and Illinois and sits at No. 3 in the country. UConn is 8-0 and No. 8 in the nation. That same Purdue group is a top-five team and hasn’t lost a game yet.
We’ve heard for years now that the talent gap in college basketball is closing more and more by the year. So far this year, we are seeing that.
This all being said, it turned out that a lot of the teams ranked at the top of the polls early in the season turned out to more vulnerable than we thought. It’s showing and other programs are taking advantage.
AJ Hoops 