College Basketball Weekly: Everything Baylor, Houston and Penny

College Basketball Weekly is about to crown the Baylor Bears (once again), discuss Houston’s absurd string of injuries and is it heads or tails for Penny Hardaway. Also rankings at the end. Let’s get into it.

Baylor is the king of College Basketball

It sounds downright laughable, but this statement is pure truth. Baylor is the best basketball program in the country right now. For three years running the Bears have dominated arguably the best conference in the country, won the only national championship since 2019 and already have the inside track at the No. 1 overall seed this coming March.

They’ve lost one game in the combined months of November, December and January over the last three seasons. And it was the first one they played! A November 2019 loss to Washington to open the season is the only loss for the Bears between November 1st and February 20th in the last three years.

Saturday they advanced to 13-0 in 2021-22 by slaying the only other 12-0 team in the country. On the road, vs. Iowa State, in the first Big 12 game of the season.

Plus, Scott Drew isn’t doing it with leftover star power from this past spring’s championship run. He replaced his three-headed monster of transfer guards in Davion Micthell, Jared Butler and MaCio Teague. Now, it’s a new transfer running the point, James Akinjo, 2021 seventh man Adam Flagler, five-star super-athlete Kendall Brown, and my guy White KD (just look at this clown.)

🌎 We call it MATTHEW MAYER TIME ⌚️@MatthewMayer24 ⚡️#SicEm 🐻 | #TimeIsNow 🏀pic.twitter.com/klE2XMWNai
— Baylor Men’s Basketball (@BaylorMBB) March 22, 2021

Absolutely remarkable run from Scott Drew and the Baylor Bears. A culture and hoops standard in the sport. They have a stranglehold on the throne of college basketball. They are what Gonzaga believes it is.

Houston hobbled, but keeps winning

Mass destruction struck the Houston backcourt in December. Their three leading scorers heading into Sunday’s game against Temple were all sidelined. 17 point-per-game scorer Marcus Sasser is out for the year, sixth man double-digit scorer Tramon Mark is out for the year, and second-leading scorer Kyler Edwards is nursing a sprained ankle.

With all three of those guards out, Cougar coach Kelvin Sampson is piecing the backcourt together with trampoline-footed transfer Taze Moore (whose dunk mixtape is as slick as his name), a sophomore point guard and a freshman that didn’t enter a game until mid-December.

The rest of the scholarship players are forwards — and there are only four of them. I’m glad Kelvin Sampson got his Final Four last spring. He deserved it. His Houston teams are consistent analytical darlings and like Baylor have a great culture built on tough guards, three-point shooting and scrappy rebounders down low.

This season, despite the swath of injuries, Houston is still a top-five team in all of the major college basketball analytics sites (Bart Torvik, EvanMiya and KenPom to name a few). Curious to see how Sampson and the Cougars recover. Got a sneaky suspicion they’ll still surprise folks.

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Heads or tails for Penny

Might make this a weekly thing on this website. For now, it’s tails for Penny. I discussed college basketball teams with excellent leadership at the coaching position and a sturdy culture. Now let’s talk about the opposite: the Memphis Tigers.

Memphis is as advertised from preseason prognostications. They’re loaded! Talent and athleticism across the board, an elite defensive unit in 2020-21 that returned everybody and added top-five recruits Emoni Bates and Jalen Duren.

At their best, Memphis defeated decent Virginia Tech and Western Kentucky teams, smashed Wichita State and handled Alabama by 14. At their worst, Penny is throwing his upperclassmen under the bus in press conferences as they rack up losses to SEC bottom-feeders Georgia and Ole Miss and flame out against Murray State and Tulane.

Perhaps less Mr. Hyde from Penny and more of his kinder Dr. Jekyll side could have this talented group whipped into shape and beating Alabama while maintaining enough focus to get the job done against Tom Crean or Tulane.

Other College Basketball notes

Slim-fit Villanova surging. Jay Wright’s club mustered 36 and 59 points in 20-point losses to Baylor and Creighton in mid-December to drop to 7-4. Saturday they outlasted Seton Hall on the road while missing their sixth man Caleb Daniels. Normally a small absence for a college basketball team, but Nova only plays six guys. The micro-lineup is working for Wright lately, though, as his six-man, 6-foot-8-or-shorter rotation has back-to-back ranked Big East wins vs. Hall and Xavier.

The case for Colorado State. Let’s allow some love for the nation’s top-ranked mid-major (sans the Zags). For the college basketball nerds, the Rams run isn’t unexpected. They returned a 15-point, nine-rebound per game forward and a 15-point, five-assist point guard to spearhead the attack. 6-foot-5 plop of play-doh David Roddy isn’t conventional but he muscles his way to double-doubles and Isaiah Stevens sets the floor. A comeback win vs. Mississippi State is their best result, but they’ll be a trendy upset pick in the NCAA Tournament if they earn a double-digit seed.

Iowa State deserves the respect. The Cyclones defeated Xavier and Memphis with ease early in December but Saturday’s bout with Baylor was a litmus test of sorts. As talked about, Baylor is the best team in the nation by a comfortable margin. But ISU kept the game under control, trailed by 10 or so for most of the afternoon but rallied to spice things up with a minute to go. I left with the opinion that Baylor is the toast of the season, but that Iowa State is absolutely a top-15 team as well.