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A quick note before we begin: You won’t see Texas ranked below. Under normal circumstances, you would see the Longhorns in this list, just as they’ve been all season. But after the arrest of their coach, Chris Beard, early Monday morning on a felony family violence charge — a woman told police Beard strangled and bit her — trying to rank and analyze the Longhorns as a basketball entity felt very gross and just totally beside the point, especially with such little distance between the alleged incident and what is usually a pretty lighthearted column.

That said, we also didn’t want readers to think we were simply ignoring, glossing over, or being flippant about the situation, either. Hence this explanation, front and center. This is simply a choice about a team we didn’t feel like we should be discussing at much length this week.

This is obviously subject to change, and likely will, in the weeks to come. Texas’s players still have a season, after all, and interim coach Rodney Terry has a job on his hands. But for now, this week, we felt this was the best way to handle things. Thanks for understanding.

1. Purdue (10-0)

We miss Yahoo! Answers. Who doesn’t? It was the world’s greatest place to find totally ridiculous questions posed by random people on the Internet, questions that made you deeply concerned for the future of humanity — but in a sillier, less viscerally horrifying way than so much of what you see on the modern web. Finding truly dumb or at least bizarrely nonsequitur questions out there on the web is much more difficult in its absence. RIP to a GOAT, etc.

But every now and then, Google’s “People Also Ask” feature comes up with something you might have seen back in Yahoo! Answers’ pomp. Like, for example, when you Google “Zach Edey:”

[insert screenshot]

“How did Zach Edey get so tall?” Well, you see, it’s a funny story. A long time ago, in the corridors of a beautiful desert city, Edey was a lovable, streetwise urchin scrapping for survival — until he met an adventurous princess and got caught up in a royal advisor’s scheme to seize power from her oblivious ruling father. One thing led to another, Edey took possession of a powerful djinn, and rather than use his powers to win the princess’s affection, defeat the evil advisor, or even free the friendly djinn, Edey wished to become 7-foot-4. The djinn granted his wish.

Thus — with enough hard work and dedication to his craft, and not a second or third wish, which Edey did not avail himself of, lest he also be granted the ability to shoot 3s at a 40 percent clip or jump 40 inches in the air, all of which would obviously be unfair — he could eventually maybe become the best college basketball player in the United States of America a few years down the line. And so it came to pass.

Seriously: That’s the first question people ask? How many of you are Googling this stuff?! Be honest. Guys. He just … grew.

2. Connecticut (11-0)

With Purdue just barely surviving at Nebraska last Saturday, and having maybe slowed down just slightly since its barnstorming run through its PK85 bracket, you can make a very coherent argument that UConn is currently the best team in the country. It is the only team with top-10 rankings in both offensive and defensive adjusted efficiency at KenPom.com, which is a stat that gets thrown around tournament time especially, and which probably isn’t all that meaningful for bracket-picking purposes, but which is nonetheless a pretty good indication of just how balanced and dominant the Huskies have been on both ends of the floor. Meanwhile, that 15-point win over Alabama — Alabama’s only loss — looks incredible after the Crimson Tide took down Houston at the Fertitta Center last weekend (and beat a good Memphis team Tuesday night).

Saturday’s trip to Butler should be interesting. It is the start of Big East play, obviously. It is a tough true road game in a very good gym. It is also a test of — and, if all goes well, could wind up being a testament to — UConn’s depth.

Butler, interestingly, has been very good this season when its starters are on the floor:

Lineups in the Big-6 Conferences with the largest point differentials

• @ButlerMBB‘s starters lead in both minutes played and +/-
• @UNC_Basketball may be struggling, but their starters are cooking

What else jumps out? pic.twitter.com/UdBdeMn2ML

— CBB Analytics (@CBBAnalytics) December 14, 2022

If you were only allowed to play five players, and fouls and fatigue weren’t things, Thad Matta’s first Butler team would be unstoppable. It behooves Matta — whose Ohio State teams always used to play pretty tight rotations, too — to keep his five starters on the floor together as much as possible. Alas, even the most foul-averse players have to come off the floor at some point.

That’s where UConn really shines. Despite being one of the best two or three best teams in the country (or maybe just the best), none of UConn’s specific five-man lineups show up in that point differential. But they don’t need to. UConn’s rotation can, well, rotate; Dan Hurley has nine guys who play anywhere between 37.7 percent and 69.3 percent of available minutes. Even Adama Sanogo, Hurley’s All-America-level center, is on the floor just 60 percent of the time. This is a deep, bought-in roster, one whose flexibility should make it more resilient than most in the league tests to come.

Speaking of the tests to come, Houston comes to Charlottesville Saturday. We’ve been hyping this game as it pertains to both teams for weeks now, to the point that there’s not a ton new to add — especially for Virginia, which hasn’t played since it survived an injury to Reece Beekman and snuck past James Madison all the way back on Dec. 6. But, needless to say, Beekman’s health is a huge deal. Virginia’s star guard, who has started this season as one of the best all-around players in the country, aggravated his hamstring in the JMU game. He is currently regarded as “day to day” by UVa folks, but no one has revealed whether Beekman’s actually been practicing this week or not.

Virginia looks vastly different with him and without him, particularly when it comes to weathering Houston’s aggressive, handsy defense. The Cougars are hyper-physical, guard first shots like crazy and turn teams over often, but as a result of all of that aggro they tend to foul pretty often, too. Alabama shot 32 free throws in its win at Houston last week. As we’ve mentioned here in the past, Virginia has been drawing an anomalous number of foul shots to date this season — but getting the offense into those positions has had a lot to do with Beekman’s dynamism in a backcourt that needs more than one primary ballhandler to create its offense without turning it over. If it’s just Kihei Clark handling it back there Saturday, well, look out.

4. Alabama (9-1)

Well, well, well. Alabama, huh?

We did not see the win at Houston coming — but, to be fair, neither did most. The Crimson Tide were 8.5-point underdogs going in; KenPom.com’s projections had them losing by eight. Houston had hardly been flawless in its opening nine games, but the Cougars looked more complete, less flighty, more solid, less fidgety. Alabama’s best win of the season to date, its four-OT victory over struggling North Carolina, was somehow both impressive and eye-watering, a triumph of only-slightly-less-bad shot selection, a nice win for what it was worth but a performance that didn’t exactly flatter.

The win at Houston was different. This was big-kid basketball. It was two teams trading possessions, makes, and stops at a very high level. It required extreme levels of physicality and willingness to use it; a baseline floor of talent was necessary just to be on and stay on the floor. Alabama’s ability to hang around and not get blown away at any juncture was impressive. Its ability to actually take the game over late, to finish off the win on Houston’s floor, was revelatory. Noah Clowney — the less heralded of Alabama’s two lengthy wing/forward star freshman hybrid options to date — had the best performance of his season to date: 16 points, 11 rebounds, two 3s, two blocks and an assist. Brandon Miller had just eight points, but they were all from the free-throw line, where the Tide had 32 attempts. They scored inside, they drew fouls, and they kept an o-board-obsessed Houston off the glass (and away from easy looks) on the other end.

For a team with crucial — and, frankly, somewhat wispy — freshmen big guys playing big minutes, it was an incredibly tough performance. (It was also the first time any team had twice beaten an AP No. 1 team before Jan. 1 since 1966.)

The same was true, albeit to a lesser extent, against Memphis Tuesday night. There was slightly more willingness to trade possessions in that one; once Memphis agreed to let Kendric Davis attack off pick-and-rolls every time down the floor, the Tigers started threatening to win the game late. But that’s also a bit of what Alabama does: It trades possessions. It takes quick shots. It is happy to get up and down and see if they outscore you. That’s kind of the model. But if the Crimson Tide can regularly marry that ability, and all of that five-star talent, with the toughness you need to win a true road game at Houston, they are a national title contender.

5. Houston (10-1)

Having said all that, then, it’s not like Houston’s lone loss of the season was some unsolvable mystery. The Cougars didn’t get to the rim well enough, a problem exacerbated by their unusual lack of interior touches after offensive rebounds, and so their typical A to B to C offensive trajectory sputtered at source.

That said, if you go back and actually watch, all but one of Houston’s first-half 3s were either pretty open or very much so. The one that wasn’t, which resulted in a Clowney block, was an apparently open corner 3 until Clowney used his ridiculous length to close down the space and block the shot at the last possible second. Late in the first half, the analyst on the game commented that Houston was forcing bad shots (a few seconds before Houston ran a baseline drive set to get Tramon Mark an open look from the left wing, which he promptly buried). On repeat viewing, though, it doesn’t really look like it. The second half featured a couple of forces, no doubt, but just as many open ones. The shots just didn’t go in.

Virginia will play a much different, much less aggressive style of defense on Saturday. The Hoos get pressure on the ball, sure, but they don’t play like Alabama, and they never will. They have vastly different defensive priorities. They will, however, force Houston to make shots over the top, and the Cougars ability to do so — and generate their usual diet of offensive rebounds when they miss, at whatever rate those misses arrive — will be decisive.

6. Kansas (9-1)

A few weeks ago, playing Kansas at Kansas seemed like a no-lose situation for Indiana. Worst case, you get beat by a pretty good team in a very tough environment, oh well; best case, you take your Big Ten-contending group, face a rebuilding Jayhawks squad coming off national title-level attrition, and steal a win in Allen Fieldhouse. Either way, your schedule strength gets a huge boost, and no one thinks worse of you.

Now, though, Indiana will be lucky to leave Lawrence without suffering a scarring loss, complete with the accompanying reputational hit.

Look at Missouri: The Tigers were unbeaten and riding high when Kansas showed up for a proper Border War game in Columbia. Dennis Gates’s team was playing some of the best high-pace, high-pressure basketball in the country, at least statistically. The bookies had the Jayhawks favored by a point or two. The crowd was more than up for it. And Kansas just absolutely destroyed Missouri. De. Stroyed. Over in minutes. Never really a game. Missouri jumped and gambled and tried to speed up the game; Kansas scoffed at the notion, holding the Tigers by the forehead and letting them futilely flail.

It took a little bit longer for that same dynamic to totally materialize when Seton Hall came to the Phog on Dec. 1, but emerge it did. The Jayhawks have won their last two games by a combined 54 points.

A commonality here is the ascendance of Kevin McCullar, who has had his two best games of the season back-to-back. He has shot extremely efficiently, kept turnovers — which he struggled with early in the year — to a minimum, and generally been that connective piece between the frontcourt and the backcourt that has always made him a useful, unique player. If McCullar is at his best, Kansas is a very different, and vastly more difficult proposition. (Fear for the Hoosiers — especially if Jalen Hood-Schifino isn’t healthy.)

Time for Arizona to celebrate — and not just the big win over Indiana last weekend but the broader indefatigability it represents. After all, life after Sean Miller could have been a disaster. Miller was a good, successful coach who recruited top talent and built title-contending teams. His decline and departure was not by choice, or by the school’s desire to see him leave, but because Arizona was under a cloud of rule-breaking suspicion for a length of time that eventually, finally became untenable. As the Wildcats waited (and waited, and waited) for their IARP ruling, the program quietly stalled out.

Now that ruling is here, and what once upon a time could have been a doomsday scenario for Arizona — not that it should have been, or that we’re making any kind of moral judgment, or that any of this stuff really matters in a post-NIL era, just that it could have been — instead ended Wednesday, in part, with a $5,000 fine. LOL.

Back in the day, trouble of the kind Arizona was in for so long could have meant at least a brief time spent in the college basketball wilderness, at least a few years worth of cratering, if not the better part of a decade. Instead, the Wildcats, one season after competing for a title with one of the most entertaining teams in the country, are back at it again, boat racing a decent foe like the Hoosiers on a neutral court, their fans relishing every minute of their continued hoops relevance and success.

It was 34-17 at halftime of Tennessee’s Barclays Center matchup with Maryland last Sunday. Maryland was 3-of-24 from the field. It was the kind of dominant, brutal defensive performance against a surprising Maryland outfit that started to get us wondering about at least a couple of things: Maybe Tennessee is the best team in the country? Or, maybe, Maryland is coming back to Earth? Or both? Possibly both.

And then the second half started and the Terrapins rallied — while Tennessee’s offense disappeared down a deep, dark psychological prison of the mind.

This could become an issue. There is every reason to expect Tennessee will be one of, if not the best, defensive team in the country. The numbers are already there, and it would make sense: The Volunteers have been a top-five defensive team for the past two full seasons under Rick Barnes, who has traditionally coached some pretty damn good defense. But the offense? Woof. Tennessee is shooting 46.0 percent from 2 and 32.4 percent from 3 while turning the ball over on a fifth of its possessions. This is a good offensive rebounding team, one that generates free throws and moves the ball well and runs good stuff and all of that — but it is not, as of yet, a team that can reliably shoot.

Josiah-Jordan James getting healthy will help, but this appears to be the key area for Tennessee to monitor most of the year. If the Vols really figure it out offensively, they’ll be scary. If they don’t, they’ll still be a very tough out, albeit one with a limited ceiling. We’ll see.

At risk of dwelling on the same downbeat note two weeks ago, the loss of Trevon Brazile really is a shame. It’s primarily a shame for Brazile, obviously. But it’s also a bummer for anyone who wanted to see what all this Arkansas talent might become. Brazile played his first games as a Razorback before freshman phenom Nick Smith Jr. got healthy, and so this team was never able to offer a real glimpse at something you might call full strength.

The win over Oklahoma last Saturday offered a small hint: On a relatively quiet scoring day for freshman guard Anthony Black — who took on the closest thing to a star turn in Smith’s absence — Smith scored 21 points on a modestly efficient 16 shots, while Wichita State transfer Ricky Council IV scored 26 on 10-of-15 shooting from the field. Council is a good player, and arguably could have been the guy at a number of destinations, and it’s not like he’s not getting touches or shots — he is averaging nearly 26 percent of Arkansas’s shots while on the floor. But he willingly arrived to play a collective role in a talented team with guards that were probably always going to outshine him in terms of local and national recognition, let alone NBA Draft projections. Council, like Brazile, signed up anyway.

The Razorbacks are going to be very good regardless but, man: They could have really been something to see.

Utah beat Arizona 81-66 in Salt Lake City. Utah lost to Sam Houston State 65-55 in Salt Lake City. Utah may or may not be good at basketball this season. It’s really hard to tell. Marquette has three (close) losses but also beat the snot out of Baylor. Marquette seems good, but it’s somewhat hard to tell.

And so you could maybe sort of say the same thing about Mississippi State, which has beaten both of those teams and exactly no one else of real note — and, in fact, last week one commenter, Trey B., did:

Mississippi State! Maybe we’re decent?! Maybe we suck?! I’ve watched all the games and I have absolutely no idea! We do look good at defense though and defense should travel so maybe we can compete in the SEC. Honestly can’t wait to find out.

Fair enough. And deep into Wednesday night’s unexpected struggle of a win over Jackson State — 1-9 Jackson State, ranked 300th in adjusted efficiency Jackson State, coached by Mo “Did you know he coached there?!” Williams Jackson State — you could be forgiven if Trey B. drew his conclusions toward the latter. It wasn’t pretty. It was really only with a couple of minutes remaining that Mississippi State went on the 13-3 run it needed to fully put the Tigers away. For a while there, in front of a pretty sizable crowd at the Mississippi Coliseum, it looked like Jackson State was cooking something special.

It didn’t happen, and really, you would have to lean much harder into the former these days, wouldn’t you? Mississippi State is good! The defense, especially, looks legit: sixth in the nation in adjusted defensive efficiency, third in 2-point field goal percentage defense, and first in steals percentage — active, physical, tough, with few easy baskets allowed. That works.

The offense is an open question. In fact, if you squint, and set aside the specifics of personnel — because the personnel comparison is hardly one-to-one; Tennessee doesn’t currently lean on any one offensive player (especially not a big) as hard as MSU leans on Tolu Smith — Mississippi State kind of looks like Tennessee. Both teams guard like crazy, but both teams are a bit stodgy on the other end. Neither team shoots it well; both teams grab a ton of offensive rebounds.

Whatever you think of the aesthetics of Tennessee basketball, particularly last weekend, the fact of the matter is that this formula is generally effective. And given where Tennessee has been in recent seasons, and where Mississippi State wants to go, getting even tangentially compared to Rick Barnes’ Vols constitutes a massive step in the right direction, no matter how ugly things got in Jackson Wednesday night.

11. UCLA (9-2)

So, first things first: How good is Jaylen Clark? The Pac-12 steals leader — averaging 2.6 per game and 4.8 per 100 possessions — had one possession Wednesday night in which he personally, individually blew up Maryland’s whole possession. First he hedged a screen and nearly ripped the ball out of the handler’s hands right then and there; then he followed the handler and forced him away from the middle of the floor and back to his original defender; and then he recovered back to his own man, jumped the slight gap Terps guard Ike Cornish thought he’d found in the defense, and ripped the ball out of the air. It was a jaw-dropping, virtuoso three seconds of defense.

That possession was a small vertical slice of UCLA’s performance Wednesday, and it was representative, though Clark was hardly the only standout performer in the Bruins’ College Park blitz. Mick Cronin’s team was comprehensive and merciless, particularly in its 49-20 first half, 20 minutes that shellshocked the whole arena. Maryland fans, high on Kevin Willard’s overnight success at the school, were ready for a marquee night, a confirmation of their re-ascent; throw in no DMV rush hour traffic with a 9 p.m. ET start, and Xfinity Center was full and covered in white shirts at tip. It was a rowdy crowd. UCLA immediately sat everybody down. By the end of the first half, you could actually hear a few boos.

Perhaps Maryland is coming back down to Earth after all. But UCLA was also extremely good Wednesday, better than it has looked at any point in the season, particularly in the single-digit losses to Illinois and Baylor. Jaime Jaquez Jr., Tyger Campbell and Clark were as good as usual, but everyone else was brilliant, too. David Singleton buried Maryland under a near-perfect shooting night. Star frosh Amari Bailey looked more in the flow of things than he ever did in those two competitive but formless losses in Las Vegas. Freshman big Adem Bona was active defensively and always around the front of his rim offensively; Wednesday doubled as his coming-out party. The whole team was telekinetic defensively, none more so than Clark. Poor Maryland guard Jahmir Young basically just wasn’t involved in the game, by design.

In retrospect, maybe, UCLA was a newer team coming into this season than many observers (read: us) fully accounted for. Jaquez and Campbell were back, but everyone else was gone. That was an old, experienced, familiar team. This one is not. The Bruins were always going to need at least a bit of time to figure things out. They seem to have done so. Sheesh.

Also thinking about: Indiana, which we should probably note also has a chance to actively rehabilitate its reputation against KU Saturday, but you wouldn’t bet on it, would you?; Kentucky, which didn’t exactly blow Yale out of the water last weekend but did get 28 and 12 from Oscar Tshiebwe, which helps; Illinois, which got an enthusiastic spot in last week’s list only to immediately lose by 15 to Penn State at home; Memphis, which beat Auburn and then gave Alabama a real run in Tuscaloosa Tuesday night; Baylor; Gonzaga; West Virginia, which continues to fly way too far under the radar relative to how it’s actually playing this year, especially at home; Marquette; Ohio State; Duke; Creighton, which used to be a fixture on the list but which has since lost five straight games, including Monday to Arizona State; Arizona State, which is now 10-1 with a road loss to Texas Southern; hoping Reece Beekman is healthy Saturday not because of any rooting interest but because we’re covering that game in person and we just want to see both teams at full tilt; Marvel Snap, both a really good card game and also perfect if you spend a lot of time holding an infant in one arm and only have one free arm available to you and/or you just don’t have any actual free time to sit down and video games anymore anymore anyway, sigh; Christmas cards and Christmas shopping, gonna get around to that any day now; the more emotive, open Lionel Messi, and the connection he suddenly has with his every single one of his fellow Argentinians; Antoine Griezmann; the Louisville men’s basketball team, winless no more.

(Illustration by Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photo of Nick Pringle and Noah Clowney: Bob Levey / Getty Images)