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Does today’s Power Rankings theme double as a reason to crowbar a 1982 Scottish new wave banger into the very top of the column? Why, yes, yes it does. Good news: As theme music goes, it is also highly apropos.

Even a couple of weeks ago, we approached these power rankings with preseason notions still fully intact. North Carolina, Kentucky and Gonzaga were among the best teams in the country; even if they stumbled early they would obviously retain a power rankings presence in perpetuity. Now look. UNC is nowhere to be seen. Kentucky, which scored 21 first-half points against Bellarmine Tuesday and set off a non-minor UK Twitter meltdown, is missing for the second straight week. Gonzaga lost by 22 on a neutral floor to a team broadly (and not unreasonably) picked to finish in the middle of the Big Ten standings as recently as a month ago. Marquette beat Baylor 96-70 Tuesday night.

Feast Week — and this week’s ACC/Big Ten and Big East/Big 12 challenges, albeit to a lesser extent — changed everything. The landscape looks totally different today than it did a couple of weeks ago. And, most notably, things feel a bit more open and dynamic than they have in recent seasons, with fewer dominant top teams and more fluidity between the No. 12 (or No. 15) and No. 1. (This is an especially happy state of affairs for these power rankings in particular, which try to remain as proudly capricious as possible.)

Let’s take it again, from the top.

And what a fitting No. 1 this is this week — a team absolutely no one saw coming even a couple weeks ago, which now, after a brilliant Thanksgiving weekend in Portland, has a very strong argument as the best team in the country.

In the preseason, Purdue was one big man plus one big open question. Even the more bullish prognosticators (ahem) acknowledged what Matt Painter was only too happy to admit: The Boilermakers’ guards would have to learn on the fly. The backcourt was all new, and none of its personnel remotely resembled Jaden Ivey. The team had the benefit of starting around Zach Edey, but the rest was going to be a process, one Painter would have to figure out as he went.

It didn’t take him very long. It helps that Edey has started the year looking like the best, most productive player in college basketball. Freed from playing platoon minutes with Trevion Williams, Edey is attempting 30.5 percent of Purdue’s shots, he’s shooting 64.1 percent from the field (and making and attempting a whole raft of unguardable hook shots out to six and seven feet now), he’s rebounding everything on both ends of the floor, he’s blocking tons of shots (and disturbing even more), and he’s drawing a bunch of fouls. He is a revelation. He is a classic hulking old-school center in a world of hybrid forwards. He is a true center, an ur-center, a center who could trace his origins to George Mikan, a center from the days when “hey, if we have a tall dude around the rim all the time, that seems advantageous.” He is a rediscovery of the wisdom of the ancients. He is so freaking good.

Meanwhile, it turns out Purdue has really good guards, too. Freshmen Fletcher Loyer and Braden Smith have both been great in twin ballhandling roles out top, while veterans Ethan Morton, Mason Gillis, Caleb Furst and Brandon Newman are all doing the usual detail-oriented defensive work and floor-spacing that always works for Purdue, and that in particular so benefits Edey on the low block.

This Boilermakers blend isn’t just better than it expected. It is 7-0 after Wednesday’s win over Florida State. It is coming off a PK85 weekend in which it beat West Virginia (which is good, by the way!) 80-68, Gonzaga 84-66 and Duke 75-56. Those last two victories put the Boilermakers into truly rarefied air:

Purdue beat (6) Gonzaga by 18 points on Friday night and (8) Duke by 19 points today.

They are the 2nd team ever to beat 2 AP Top-10 teams by 18+ points on a neutral site in the same week, joining UCLA in the 1968 Final Four.

— Jared Berson (@JaredBerson) November 27, 2022

Is this team that good? 1968 UCLA good? No. But all the evidence currently suggests it is the best team in the country in 2022-23, at least right now.

Following Michigan’s 70-68 home loss to Virginia, Brendan Quinn took stock of where the Wolverines are right now — complete with all of the warts and concerns and personnel gaps and things that are driving Michigan fans slightly nuts at this very early stage of the season — before transitioning to a very important caveat: Michigan looked good Tuesday night. Really good, from this vantage. If you don’t watch every minute of Wolverines basketball, you might think this was just your standard home performance from a program that has put some very good basketball into the world in the past few seasons. It wasn’t that at all. It was, by far, the best Michigan — a team with an All-America center in Hunter Dickinson and a legitimate freshman star in Jett Howard — has played all year.

Indeed, it was the exact type of game that most merely good teams lose. Hot crowd, hot gym, hot (and slightly desperate) team, hot shooting — one of those true road games that you can be easily forgiven for losing. But Virginia just … didn’t. The Cavaliers are not merely good.

This team looks complete. Not perfect, obviously (it could maybe do with a true center backup option who was slightly less likely than Francisco Caffaro is to unintentionally cave an opponent’s skull). But it is a team undeniably built and now functioning in precisely the way Tony Bennett would have envisioned, the way his best teams often do.

To anyone who watched Virginia last season, the offensive fluidity here is remarkable. Everything works. Things flow. Everyone knows their role, and everyone is better — not just a little bit better, a lot better. Fun fact: Virginia has scored at least 70 points in its first six games for the first time since 2003-04. Meanwhile, in Reece Beekman, this team has one bright star, an unselfish two-way guard who not only defends (as ever) but now scores at all three levels as well as any in the country. He was hobbled for a big stretch Tuesday night; he was still effective. Before he got hurt, he was utterly unstoppable, and kept Virginia in the game when Michigan couldn’t miss.

As discussed last week, Virginia generates free throws at a rate unlike anything it has ever done under Bennett. It still ranks fourth nationally in free-throw rate; it went to the line 19 times Tuesday night, which carried it over the hump in the second half. Throw in a defense that held Michigan to just 23 second-half points, and players who understand and perform their roles intuitively, and there’s really not much not to like about how’s and why’s of this team’s performances right now. This is a team as well-rounded as it is good; the latter quality has a lot to do with the former.

Houston has not played a particularly challenging schedule to date, and so some of the same results-scarcity downgrading that pushed Texas a few spots down this list (see more on that, obviously, in the Texas blurb) likewise applies here. There was also a very dicey 49-44 win over Kent State last Saturday — a good Kent State team, it should be said, but Kent State nonetheless. Putting up 49 points in 70 trips at home against a MAC outfit does not exactly inspire a huge amount of confidence.

Still: That looks like a weird one-off, a gross shooting night for the ages. (Houston went 2-of-17 from 3 and just 14-of-33 from 2 against the Golden Flashes.) The Cougars turned around and beat Norfolk State 100-52 in 64 possessions three nights later, and Marcus Sasser shot 7-of-12 from 3 all on his lonesome. Unlike many of the teams on this list, the very best games on this nonconference schedule are still to come: Saint Mary’s on Saturday, Alabama Dec. 10, and at Virginia Dec. 17. If Houston is still unbeaten when it boards the plane out of Charlottesville, no one should be surprised.

4. Connecticut (8-0)

Even the most diehard UConn fan couldn’t have expected this. Oh, sure, they might have known that Adama Sanogo was going to be really good — everyone, neutral or otherwise, would have been on board with that notion. And maybe some UConn fans were convinced that sophomore Jordan Hawkins was about to be a breakout star, one who would replace so much of the perimeter skill and experience lost when R.J. Cole and Tyrese Martin left last spring. This offseason, the rest of the UConn roster was an interesting but altogether open question — a bunch of relatively unknown guys, a smattering of freshmen, some intriguing transfers.

Turns out, this whole thing works extremely well. Sanogo is playing great, obviously. But so is former East Carolina transfer Tristen Newton, a former big fish in a small pond accepting a more flexible role. (We should probably discuss how the 2020-21 East Carolina Pirates had two key players on current top five teams — Newton and Virginia’s Jayden Gardner — and finished 8-11.) The same is true of Naheim Alleyne, an important player for a good Virginia Tech team who has blended into this group. The same is true of former San Diego star Joey Calcaterra, a knockdown catch-and-shooter the likes of which UConn hasn’t really had under Dan Hurley, and one who brings a whole new dimension to how the Huskies can run their offense.

Freshman Alex Karaban looks great. Andre Jackson and Hassan Diarra offer different looks at the guard spots. Donovan Clingan, a 7-foot-2 freshman center playing 39.1 percent of available minutes, had 15 points and 10 rebounds in UConn’s 71-53 Phil Knight Invitational title game win over Iowa State. That victory was UConn’s third dominant one in three days, a performance that announced its presence as among the best teams in the country. It’s a small sample size still, but this team appears to be very deep and very good — better than anyone could have reasonably foreseen.

Oumar Ballo has officially reached basketball maturity. This is very bad news for the rest of the Pac-12.

Ballo — the Malian center and former Tommy Lloyd recruit to Gonzaga who left with Lloyd to do a year-in-residence behind Christian Koloko last season — always felt like a bit of a gamble. He was a big dude who put up respectable numbers in his short stints as both a Bulldog and Wildcat, but he always looked raw and a little unsure of himself on the floor in that way that only extremely large humans do.

He didn’t look like that at all last week, when Arizona streaked to the Maui Invitational championship, dominating San Diego State before beating a very good Creighton team in the final. Ballo — often facing Creighton center Ryan Kalkbrenner, no less — had 30 points on 14-of-17 shooting and 13 rebounds. Just like that, another brilliant focal point of the Arizona offense was born.

As of today, the Wildcats lead the nation in 2-point field goal percentage, and the vast majority of their buckets come from inside the arc. A plurality of their shots — around 44 percent — happen at the rim. This is all by design. Good 3-point shooting is great and all, and Arizona shoots the ball from 3 really well, but the design of Arizona’s spread transition offense is (like Gonzaga’s with Drew Timme) to generate easy layups in large quantities. When the defense halts the transition flow, Arizona gets the ball into the block. Ballo did both brilliantly against Creighton — he would rim-run in transition, but he would just as quickly establish deep position, seal, and turn over one or both shoulders for soft little hook finishes around the rim. Arizona made 5-of-16 from 3 against Creighton; Creighton shot 10-of-26. But Ballo’s dominant interior play, and Arizona’s ability to generate good shots around the rim, made up for it.

There are still some signs of the rawness you saw when Ballo got on the floor in Tucson a year ago. In the first half he put up an ill-advised 15-foot jumper that was really more of a one-handed shot-put; in the second half, he was running to his spot beneath the basket so hard, and so overenthusiastically, that he totally demolished a Creighton defender and was whistled for an offensive foul. He’s still a little clumsy. He’s a big dude, you know? But he is also exhibiting a level of polish and confidence you only see in self-actualized stars, and ideal alignment to the players and system around him. To paraphrase that “Uncut Gems” meme: This is how Arizona wins.

So, why downgrade Texas? The Longhorns haven’t lost! Well, sure, fair, but that’s more like AP poll voter logic; that’s not really how we roll. We put Texas atop the leaderboard when Chris Beard’s team had the best, most impressive win of a very short-season sample. Now, with the benefit of a bunch more games, with at least one other team having beaten Gonzaga convincingly away from its own building, dominating the Zags in your own gym, no matter how authoritatively, is a marginally diluted accomplishment.

Other than that, results-wise, Texas hasn’t done much. Performance-wise, the Longhorns are very convincing. They also haven’t yet left their home state. The only non-true-home game came at the Bert Ogden Arena in Edinburg, Texas, against Northern Arizona, in a sort of fan-development barnstorm trip to the Rio Grande Valley. (Texas won 73-48.) This is going to be a bit of an issue down the line: Before the start of Big 12 play, UT’s trip to Madison Square Garden to play Illinois is the only game away from home, while Texas will play exactly one true road game in its entire nonconference schedule, at Tennessee on Jan. 28. That’s part of the SEC-Big 12 Challenge, of course, just as Creighton’s arrival Thursday night is part of the Big 12-Big East ordeal. You can’t control which year you travel in those competitions, of course. But Chris Beard, for all his strengths as a coach, has not traditionally scheduled very strongly in the nonconference, and that is probably putting it politely. For a team this good, there was surely room for one marquee trip to a real road gym somewhere in this schedule.

7. Creighton (6-1)

There was very little to dislike about Creighton’s work at the Maui Invitational last week. The Bluejays saw off a very talented Arkansas team in a game we wrote about in these very rankings the following day, and then went toe-to-toe with Arizona in the title game, falling short by a bucket after a 30-point, 13-rebound Ballo breakout. The Texas trip will be a massive test in a true road environment — and a very good road environment, now that Texas has its new gym up and running. But everything we saw from Greg McDermott’s team last week suggests they will be up for it.

8. Arkansas (6-1)

All Arkansas-related analysis — even up to the simplest “whoa, these guys seem really talented, let’s see what they can become” gut feelings — has been hampered by a missing piece of data: Nick Smith Jr. The top-rated incoming freshman guard in the country, Smith was meant to be this team’s bonafide star, a ball-dominant scoring guard who could do anything with the team on his back. Not that he would need to be that; he would be surrounded by, again, a very talented group, up to and including fellow freshman guard Anthony Black, more than capable of remaking a game in his own image.

Thanks to injury, however, Smith has been missing from action all November, and hints of Arkansas’s final form have been even more elusive than usual at this time of year. No more! On Monday, Smith made his Razorbacks debut. He checked in at the 14:10 mark in the first half. He received a standing ovation. He played for six minutes, got one offensive rebound, attempted one field goal, and did not score a point. It was … not the most auspicious start.

What it was, though, was gametime, proof that Smith is nearly over the right knee issue that has kept him from the floor. Arkansas coach Eric Musselman told reporters after the game that Smith was under a huge amount of pressure — he is, after all, an Arkansas native son who got a standing ovation from fans just by running onto the floor — and that he is most excited to see what Smith does in full-speed practice in the next few days. It’s a reasonable time to ease Smith in: Arkansas plays San Jose State Saturday, then UNC Greensboro Dec. 6, before a trip to Tulsa to play Oklahoma Dec. 10. We’ll see how Smith looks by then.

Indiana: Officially good at basketball again. True story.

In Wednesday night’s comprehensive, almost wire-to-wire 77-65 win over reigning national runners-up North Carolina — a game in which Indiana only occasionally flirted with the idea of making things closer and more stressful than they needed to be, which marks a continuing and massive departure from last season in and of itself — the Hoosiers did almost everything right. They finished with 1.13 points per possession. They hammered in 50 points in the paint. They played incredible defense on almost every possession: harrying, pressuring, supremely physical. They challenged every UNC shot. Like, all of them? They held North Carolina to 24 points in the paint, 20-of-59 shooting overall, 5-of-18 from 3, 0.96 points per trip, and — crucially — just five assists on 20 made field goals. Indiana was good scoring the ball; it was better defensively; it made every UNC possession feel like a one-on-three struggle against the odds.

(UNC helped with that, as it did in its loss to Alabama Sunday, about which more below.)

The Hoosiers did two things poorly. First, they fouled too often, which allowed UNC to stay in the game on a night when its offense otherwise couldn’t function. Second, IU shot it poorly from 3 (3 of 13), a hint of the offensive imbalance that torpedoed the team’s point generation so often last season. But that was it: a cold outside shooting night and too many fouls, many of which were the cost of doing all that aggressive defensive business.

Everywhere else, this team Mike Woodson has built looked really good. Trayce Jackson-Davis remains Trayce Jackson-Davis (which is to say: whew), but around him he now has more elite talent — Jalen Hood-Schifino had his coming out party, and revealed some dog that will serve him well in the Big Ten wars to come — and more cohesive, developed returners (Trey Galloway, who was great; Tamar Bates; Jordan Geronimo; Miller Kopp) excelling in assigned roles. Race Thompson is still there to guard and rebound; Xavier Johnson looks like down-the-stretch-last-season Xavier Johnson is just … who he is now.

Early in the first half, UNC star forward Armando Bacot started clutching his shoulder. He went into the tunnel before he eventually returned. UNC doesn’t have the depth to weather that kind of injury. Indiana suddenly does. All of a sudden, a team that barely made the tournament a year ago was capable of making the national runners-up look very average — and without too much drama, either.

Hands up: We really thought this team was being overhyped in the fall, that it was being set up to disappoint. We don’t think that anymore.

Here’s how bad everybody thought Maryland was going to be: The Big Ten/ACC Challenge schedulers decided to make the Terrapins play Louisville. Louisville, huh? Are we right, folks? Is this thing on? Ducks beer can thrown by man wearing Lamar Jackson replica Louisville football jersey. Welp, that’s our time! You’ve been a wonderful crowd.

But seriously: Rarely are Challenge matchups this lopsided. Usually, everyone involved has at least some coherent half-idea of what teams are going to be like, relative to their inter-conference competition, and so the best teams play the best teams and the worst teams play the worst. It helps make these challenges so competitive and watchable. You don’t send Duke to play Northwestern, or whatever.

But by the time Maryland showed up the Yum! Center Tuesday night to play the winless and worse-than-anyone-could-have-known Cardinals, Maryland had already established itself as a dark horse Big Ten title contender — having already hammered Saint Louis and Miami in back-to-back days in Uncasville. By the time Kevin Willard brought his first Terps team to what used to be one of the best home-court environments in college hoops, he had already found a group that, despite its struggles last season, really works for him: Rejuvenated, flexible wings like Donta Scott, Hakim Hart, Julian Reese, all of whom were lost in the fray of Mark Turgeon’s departure less than a month into the 2021-22 campaign. All of those guys look vastly improved, while star Charlotte transfer Jahmir Young is merely the latest high-level guard Willard has helped blossom. And Georgetown transfer Don Carey hasn’t even started making shots yet.

The speed with which Willard has figured this thing out — like, immediately, with no hesitation — was thrown into stark relief by the mess Maryland showed up to steamroll Tuesday night. Louisville’s rebuilding project looks like a multi-year affair that will test everybody’s patience, not least of which first-year coach Kenny Payne’s. If he’s allowed multiple years, which already seems in doubt. Willard needed about three weeks.

11. Illinois (6-1)

Illinois beat Syracuse 73-44 Tuesday night, which, at first glance, seems like a really drastic result. A 29-point win over Syracuse? A 44-point output from the Orange? Let’s not go too crazy: Syracuse is bad. Possibly very bad. The 3-4 Orange have already lost home games to Colgate and Bryant, and the vibe around the team, from the top on down, seems to be about as bad as it has ever been. Jim Boeheim has a reputation for (sometimes even charming) grumpiness, so you expect it. His players have rarely looked this pissed off and over it.

Still, though, 73-44 is impressive, as much because it dovetails with our instinct that this Illinois team could be a buzzsaw once it starts to come together. It already has. Terrence Shannon Jr. is having a Big Ten player of the year type of season thus far — the Big Ten POY race is going to be tough — while Coleman Hawkins just posted a dang triple-double in the soft underbelly of the Syracuse zone. And the defense, which is every bit as switchable and movable as we suspected while also still being a bunch of dudes who haven’t played together before, is already this team’s best characteristic. It’s all really promising stuff, no matter how much of a disaster Syracuse is.

In the first week of the season, you can never tell what’s real and what is a fluke. Maybe Colorado is actually awesome. Maybe Tennessee is actually bad. Maybe a 12-point loss by the latter at the hands of the former is an indication of how both teams’ seasons are going to pan out in the final analysis. Could be!

After a few more weeks to mull it over, um, yeah, no: None of that appears to be the case. Since that fateful November meeting, Colorado has lost to UMass by 3 and Boise State by 13. Tennessee, on the other hand, beat Butler 71-45, held off USC in overtime, and then toppled Kansas 64-50 to win the Battle 4 Atlantis, a tournament we’ve never been to and definitely need to cross off one of these years, you know, for research. (This is also true of the Maui Invitational. Someday.)

Anyway, “toppled” Kansas might not be the correct phrasing here. We still have the Jayhawks on the board, but Tennessee is No. 3 at KenPom.com (with the top-ranked adjusted efficiency defense) and No. 2 in Torvik’s rankings (and No. 8 if you just include this season’s performance, rather than preseason data baked in). There is a high degree of laptop-related confidence in this team, which makes sense: Tennessee has a very good, experienced, defensively capable squad even without Josiah Jordan-James, who missed the B4A with a day-to-day knee injury. The most likely outcome is that UT keeps getting better.

13. Kansas (7-1)

Last week, we dwelled on the idea that without David McCormack, Kansas suddenly had a dearth of offensive rebounders on the roster, and that its offense would have to be more effective from the outside in as a result. What happens when you play arguably the best first-shot defensive team in the country? Your first shots don’t convert, and instead of keeping things alive on the glass (or even just being able to dump the ball around and into the low block) you get just 10 offensive rebounds, and (thus) basically zero clean looks, and so you shoot 12-of-32 from inside the arc and the whole thing breaks down.

Sure, Kansas also went 5-of-21 from 3 in its 64-50, 67-possession loss to Tennessee at the Battle 4 Atlantis, but hitting a bunch of those 3s would have merely papered over the hollowness of this offensive core on the day. Kansas will get by on Jalen Wilson et al. from the perimeter more often than not, but against elite defensive opponents, it may not be enough. (Note: The Big 12 tends to have a lot of elite defensive opponents.)

14. Alabama (6-1)

Jay Caspian Kang, an excellent writer who also tweets a lot about North Carolina basketball (among other stuff), was less than impressed with his Tar Heels in their 103-101 four-OT loss to Alabama in the Phil Knight Whatever Bracket Sunday night:

This game is not worthy of Bill Walton who is being a good sport watching 2 teams dribble for 25 seconds and take awful step back 3s

— kang (@jaycaspiankang) November 27, 2022

This was a succinct but accurate description. As the game wore on, and Alabama and UNC felt each other out, that was essentially what the whole thing became — a couple of teams running offense that eventually devolved into a ballhandler getting some form of dribbled-into 3. At the 10:03 mark in the first half, Caleb Love was forced to fire up a stepback trey with two defenders on him as the shot clock expired. Walton said, as the somewhat hopeless shot went up: “Oh, boy. This is mistaking activity for achievement.”

It was funny and also, yeah, pretty polite, especially considering how bad the possession had been. Love would finish 13-of-36 on the day. There was a lot of activity, not quite so much achievement.

That all said, the reason that dynamic emerged wasn’t just down to Love deciding he was going to fire up damn near 40 shots on a Sunday. (Though … you could see it.) It happened because Alabama was defensively capable of taking North Carolina out of so much of its stuff. It isolated Carolina’s offensive players, prevented them from getting any momentum or downhill motion, kept screeners from making good screens out top, and so the clock went long and the shots turned into desperation heaves after too many dribbles. That is how Alabama wants to play. And on the other end of the floor, well, no team is more comfortable with a ballhandler taking a decent-but-not-amazing 3. That’s Alabama’s whole thing! You merely adopted the questionable stepback 3! Alabama was born in it, and so on, and as ugly as that pace-and-chuck style can look if the shots aren’t falling, getting sucked into that quicksand usually ends poorly for opponents, as it did for UNC.

Also thinking about: Gonzaga; Baylor; UCLA; Duke; Michigan State; Kentucky’s offense, which, yikes; Iowa; but more specifically, Kris Murray had 30 and 20 Tuesday night, guys, he really is doing the whole player of the year thing, this is not a drill, everybody needs to get on board; how our preseason POY draft included both Edey and Murray, muahahaha; West Virginia, which looks much better than anyone would have thought; Marquette, for its remarkable win over Baylor if nothing else; Mississippi State, 7-0 under first-year coach Chris Jans, who is apparently also referred to as “Bench Boss” (??) which sounds like a TruTV show; Auburn; Ohio State; San Diego State; the clip of Herve Renard at halftime of Argentina-Saudi Arabia getting an incredible amount of airtime the last week but still making us want to run through a brick wall every time we see it, “COME ON GUYS, ZIS IS ZA WORLD CUP, CAN’T YOU FEEL SOMETHING?!”; that brief and wonderful Wednesday where it looked like Mexico were going to go out on the fair play tiebreaker, which was exceptionally hilarious, before Saudi Arabia scored again and finished them off on goal difference, which was slightly less hilarious but still very funny; Jerry Stackhouse getting his money’s worth while being ejected Wednesday night; dipping into the USMNT discourse for the first time in like two years and not being remotely ready for the Gregg Berhalter-related blowback; Lionel Messi; Yuri Collins, assist king; that Portland Bible box score you’ve undoubtedly already heard about; the energy of an Indiana home game early in the year when the team looks good and UNC or Duke is in town for the Challenge and optimism is running extremely high in Bloomington — there’s truly nothing quite like it.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photo of Purdue’s Zach Edey: Soobum Im / Getty Images)