College basketball power rankings: Baylor is No. 1, Iowa State up to No. 3 before their huge game Saturday
Even coming off a light week of games, there's still a lot of movement, as Alabama hops back in and Auburn jumps even higher.
•
9 min read
No amount of postponements or cancellations can stop the Hey Nineteen machine from churning out a fresh batch of rankings each Thursday. Welcome to the penultimate day of 2021, where we've got a lot of movement in the power rankings below.
Sure, there are many teams listed that haven't played in a week or two (or more), but we make the best of the results provided to us. There's a lot of positive signs heading into the weekend, where approximately 90 conference games are scheduled as of this story's publishing. Christmas, naturally, reduced our inventory from the previous week as well. Here's how the top of the sport looks heading into league play and 2022.
Hey Nineteen Power Rankings
Reminder: My rankings are not solely about whom I think is "best." (Our Top 25 And 1 already does that daily.) The Hey Nineteen is a weekly encapsulation of the 19 hottest, most successful and/or most interesting teams in college basketball, combining team quality with win quality but also leaving no shame for recency bias and rewarding significant winning streaks.
| 1 |  |
| Record: 12-0 | Last week: 1st. The Bears beat Northwestern State 104-68 on Tuesday night to wrap up a 2021 that represents the high mark in program history. Scott Drew's program went 32-2 this year, won a national title and owns a sport-best 18-game winning streak. ESPN researcher Jared Berson shared this impressive stat earlier this week: The only teams to lose two or fewer games in a calendar year and win a national championship since 1985: 1992 Duke, 1996 Kentucky, 2021 Baylor. Bravo. Next up is the game of the weekend in college basketball: a tasty road test at unbeaten Iowa State on Saturday. | |
| 2 |  |
| Record: 12-0. | Last week: 2nd. No games since Dec. 18 for the paused Trojans, who are pacing to be able to return on Jan. 6 -- at the latest -- for a road game vs. Cal. I won't dock Southern Cal for the pause, but am curious to see if it can pick up where it left off. USC ranks 13th in the NET, 17th at BartTorvik.com and 20th at KenPom.com. If you can get future odds on USC to the Final Four, you're still getting good value right now. | |
| 3 |  |
| Record: 12-0 | Last week: 4th. The last time Iowa State defeated the No. 1 team at Hilton Coliseum was Jan. 18, 2016. The team: Oklahoma. The Sooners' star: Buddy Hield. That OU group went on to make the Final Four. Iowa State was in its first season under Steve Prohm and improved to 14-4 with the win. ISU was a No. 4 seed that season that made the Sweet 16. Cyclone fans would take that deal right now, but Saturday's home matchup against No. 1 Baylor is the issue at hand. It's the first time Iowa has ever hosted the No. 1 team into January while also being undefeated, and it will be only the fourth time in the last four decades that a game happens between two teams with records of 12-0 or better. | |
| 4 |  |
| Record: 11-1. Last week: 5th. Duke went on COVID pause earlier this week, as you likely saw. The ACC postponed its games vs. Clemson and Notre Dame, meaning the next time Duke would play is Tuesday vs. Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets also had to pause over Christmas, so ideally each team should be good to go soon. A reminder that Wendell Moore Jr. is averaging 17.0 points, 5.7 rebounds and 5.0 assists on 58.6% shooting. He's been superb. | |
| 5 |  |
| Record: 12-1 | Last week: 7th. I appreciated what Purdue announced on Wednesday. The school made sure to let the public know that, not only was the whole team previously fully vaccinated, but the team received its booster shots across the board. Good messaging in a pandemic. Purdue has done everything it can to prevent any pause in its program the rest of this season. In the noncon, Purdue went undefeated for the first time since 2009-10. Next? Wisconsin is paused for now, but hopefully the Badgers are good to go for their game at Purdue on Monday. | |
| 6 |  |
| Record: 11-1 | Last week: 8th. The Wildcats got a scheduling break because of COVID. On Dec. 22, Arizona lost 77-73 at Tennessee in what was supposed to be the first of a four-game stretch of road games that was as tough as any team would've had this season. However, the next two games against UCLA (which was supposed to happen tonight) and USC got bumped due to both those programs being paused. Instead, Arizona will now host Washington on Monday in its second Pac-12 game (the first came vs. Oregon State in early December), which was rearranged from a previous postponement. | |
| 7 |  |
| Record: 11-2 | Last week: 9th. Mark Few's team is currently scheduled for 28 games. I can't help but think he's squeezing in another somewhere, somehow against a quality team. The WCC opener is Saturday at Loyola Marymount; the Zags had their other game this week vs. San Diego fall through due to COVID. | |
| 8 |  |
| Record: 12-1 | Last week: 11th. On Wednesday, Providence hosted its first game between two ranked teams since 2016. Fifteenth-ranked Seton Hall went into the Dunk and lost 70-65; 2016 was also the last time Providence started 12-1. PC beat a shorthanded Pirates team, but nevertheless it continued its build of one of the best résumés in the sport. The Friars are 5-0 in Quad 1 games. No one else has four wins in Quad 1. How good is Ed Cooley? Providence is 9-2 in its last 11 games vs. ranked teams. | |
| 9 |  |
| Record: 11-1 | Last week: 14th. Tigers are aggressively moving up. They knocked LSU around at home on Wednesday, starting with an 18-1 advantage in the first 10 minutes. Freshman Jabari Smith (16 points) was smoothly impressive again, but the story is sophomore Walker Kessler, who is becoming one of the best big men in the country. The UNC transfer had 16 points, 11 blocks and 10 rebounds. It was the second triple-double in Auburn history and marked the first time since 2018 that someone had a triple-double with at least 11 blocks. Kessler's averaging 6.8 blocks the last four games. Auburn looks like it has a Final Four ceiling. | |
| 10 |  |
| Record: 10-1. Last week: 12th. The Jayhawks are a missed shot vs. Dayton away from an undefeated record. As of late, Bill Self has been working the phones to fill games and he's been successful. After seeing the Colorado and Harvard games go by the wayside because of COVID, Self added Nevada and George Mason. KU thumped Nevada 88-61 on Wednesday night. Mason will play at Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday, coached by Kim English, who knows the place well — he was there four times as a player at Missouri. | |
| 11 |  |
| Record: 10-0 | Last week: 6th. The Rams are staring down a three-week pause, as CSU had its Mountain West games for this week postponed. Coach Niko Medved was one of many on the team to contract COVID-19. By the time next week's Hey Nineteen runs we should have an 11th result on the board for CSU; the Rams are on pace to return for Tuesday's conference matchup against Air Force. | |
| 12 |  |
| Record: 8-1. Last week: 10th. No good team has fallen off the radar more dramatically in the past two weeks than UCLA, which last played on Dec. 11 and has been pinned down by university protocols. Mick Cronin's team will be one to watch when it returns to the court next week. The Pac-12 will likely have to flex into league games on Mondays and Tuesdays (it normally schedules for Thursdays and Saturdays) in order to get its teams above the 25-game mark if possible. The Pac-12 had 18 combined cancellations or postponements in December. | |
| 13 |  |
| Record: 12-1 | Last week: 3rd. The Tigers' loss means we're down to four undefeated teams. Wednesday night's defeat at Auburn marked the first time this season LSU played a road game. It was also the first time it faced a top-50 KenPom opponent. Worth taking stock of — because the Bayou Bengals' next six opponents in the SEC are all top-50, beginning with Kentucky on Tuesday. | |
| 14 |  |
| Record: 10-2 | Last week: 18th. Speaking of Kentucky! The Wildcats opened their SEC slate on Wednesday with an 83-56 blow-by W against Missouri. Since losing 66-62 at Notre Dame on Dec. 11 (on 2-of-19 3-point shooting), Kentucky has gone 3-0 with wins by an average of 30.3 points and a 3-point clip of 42.3%. Oscar Tshiebwe, who had 20 boards vs. Mizzou, is now at a 15.8 average in points and rebounds. He's the nation's leader in caroms, now 2.1 ahead of Utah Valley's Fardaws Aimaq. | |
| 15 |  |
| Record: 11-1. Last week: 13th. The Mountaineers will open Big 12 play on the road in a tasty game against Texas on Saturday that will tip at 11 a.m. local time. Bob Huggins is 7-5 vs. Chris Beard, with all 12 meetings coming in recent years when Beard was at Texas Tech. If WVU wins, it will mark the sixth time the 'Eers have started a season 12-1 under Huggins (2009-10, '14-15, '15-16, '16-17, '17-18). | |
| 16 |  |
| Record: 10-3 | Last week: N/R. The Tide earned a morale-boosting home win over 14th-ranked Tennessee on Wednesday night. Go figure: Bama shoots 7 for 31 from 3-point range, its worst outing from beyond the arc in a long time, but comes back late and overtakes a Vols team (73-68) that was in control of that game for about 35 minutes of it. Bama now has three wins over top-10 NET teams. Tennessee was without star freshman Kennedy Chandler and key senior John Fulkerson (both COVID). That quality battle reinforced how good the top third of the SEC will be in 2022. | |
| 17 |  |
| Record: 11-2. Last week: 17th. The Coogs hold steady at 17. It's going to be rough moving forward. Since we last met here, Kelvin Sampson lost his leading scorer, Marcus Sasser, and utility specialist Tramon Mark for the season. Kyler Edwards is nursing an ankle. Houston is on pause. Sampson probably still has the best team in the American, but on the heels of Memphis' shorthanded loss to Tulane on Wednesday, it's clear that the league will struggle to get more than two bids. | |
| 18 |  |
| Record: 11-2 | Last week: N/R. The Spartans make their Hey Nineteen 2021-22 debut. When they lost to Baylor in the Battle 4 Atlantis, their record dropped to 5-2 and they weren't under consideration in the debut version. Now MSU has won six straight with victories over Louisville and Minnesota included in that streak. An under-the-radar one to watch for this weekend comes Sunday when MSU will play at 8-2 Northwestern. | |
| 19 |  |
| Record: 13-1 | Last week: 19th. The Dons are still hanging at this party, folks. Between COVID cancellations and some good teams taking a loss, no one else has a viable case to leapfrog one of the three best mid-major teams this season. Saint Mary's, on the road, awaits Saturday. If USF wins that, the Dons will not only move up in these rankings, they should crack the AP Top 25 for the first time since 1982. | |
