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You could make an argument that Connecticut deserves to be No. 1 this week. After Wednesday night’s win at Florida, and the ease with which it was accomplished, we honestly gave the idea some serious thought. But then, just as we were about to file our final copy to our editors, we saw this:

Zach Edey has had a double-double in 3 straight halves.

✅: 1st vs. Minnesota (16 pts, 12 rebs)
✅: 2nd vs. Minnesota (15 pts, 10 rebs)
✅: 1st vs. Hofstra (15 pts, 11 rebs).

— Purdue Men’s Basketball (@BoilerBall) December 8, 2022

And we thought, yeah, you know what? Maybe we’ll stick with the team that has that guy.

Let’s power rankings!

1. Purdue (9-0)

Things are supposed to be harder in conference play, you know? Exceptions are meant to vanish; statistical outliers come back to the pack. Yeah, sure, you ran up your numbers against a bunch of minnows in non-league competition, a bunch of 6-foot-7 “centers” who barely stand eye to eye, whose foreheads top out at your sternum. Wait until you get into the real teeth of the Big Ten season, Zach Edey. Wait until all these Big Ten big men get their hands on you. Then you’ll see!

OK, maybe not so much.

Granted, Edey’s first Big Ten game of the 2022-23 season came at home against Minnesota, and Minnesota appears to be very bad. However! Edey still had 31 points and 22 rebounds in 30 minutes of competitive Division I basketball, which is not the kind of thing we should become desensitized to, no matter the opposition against which it is accomplished. And, funny, enough, Edey didn’t even play that well. He was just (“just”) 11-of-23 from the field, which for him is practically Allen Iverson-like in its inefficiency. Shamless gunner, that Zach Edey.

Edey had 23 points on 15 shots Wednesday night against Hofstra, and 18 rebounds, which is pretty decent as well. That performance was good enough to continue his incredible streak of single-game MVP designations on KenPom.com’s box scores: Purdue has played nine games, and Edey has earned the statistical MVP in all of them. That doesn’t happen. For as good as the rest of this team has been, and for as important the emergence of its guards, Purdue is good because Edey is incredible.

Variance should kick in at some point. Competition will get tougher, and the wild numbers get marginally less wild. It happens to everybody, and will probably happen to Edey — just not as soon and not as often as it will for every other really good player in college basketball. The big man stands alone.

Congratulations to Connecticut center Adama Sanogo, who last weekend provided what is so far — and is very likely to remain — the hardest quote of the 2022-23 season.

“They thought they had a chance to win the game tonight,” Sanogo said, after UConn’s 74-64 win over Oklahoma State. “They did not.”

Colllld-bloooooded. Also not incorrect. The Cowboys kept it marginal for the first 10 minutes, but UConn blew it open before halftime — Jordan Hawkins finally exploded, finishing 5-of-9 from 3 — and despite the relatively modest final score the game was never really a game from there. What was even more impressive was that the same dynamic at play again Wednesday night at Florida. The Gators appear to be a very average team, and they’re 6-3 having topped no one notable, but there are good players there (in particular Colin Castleton), but the Huskies, playing in a true road environment, just totally cruised the duration. It wasn’t a knockout win against another potential No. 1 seed, but it was the kind of consummate, comprehensive performance you really only ever see from teams with a chance to win the national title — from a group that no one has come close to touching in any of their first 10 games of the season, including some very strong competition. Where Houston and Virginia have had the occasional off night, even against so-so teams, the Huskies have exclusively dominated whenever they’ve touched the floor.

UConn thinks it has a chance to win a whole lot more than just one game. Right now, it thinks it can win everything. It should.

3. Houston (9-0)

The best seven days on Houston’s nonconference schedule begin Saturday. The Cougars will host Alabama, a rematch of one of the best nonconference games of the 2021-22 season, which was so high-level and hotly contested that a would-be goaltending call at the end of the game that didn’t go Houston’s way — leading 83-82 in the final seconds, J.D. Davison knocked the ball off the rim; Houston thought it should have been its bucket, but it wasn’t — sent the Cougars into a pro-wrestling level rage on their way out. Trash cans were toppled; chairs were kicked. Eventually, Jamal Shead, bless his heart, calmly picked up the chairs and the trash, which was reassuring and honestly almost uplifting in a very silly, minor way. In the following days, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson had to issue an apology on behalf of his players and staff.

It wasn’t a great look, sure, but with some distance you could at least say that it offered a healthy hint of the competitive edge these recent Houston teams always have bubbling not-so-far under the surface. It’s not really ideal to throw a tantrum and make a mess, but that’s kind of exactly what you want your team to look like if your team feels like it is a) really good and b) got cheated out of a massive December nonconference road win. Both teams look slightly different now, but there’s no reason to believe this edition will have any less heat to it come 3 p.m. Saturday.

4. Virginia (8-0)

We’ve seen enough: James Madison looks pretty good! And this is not even the first time the Power Rankings have brought the fighting Dukes to your attention this season. Indeed, several weeks ago, after JMU combined some eyebrow-raising early-season KenPom metrics with a reasonably competitive loss at then-No. 1 UNC, we took a long-enough look to realize that after a couple of nice 2022 transfers (including former South Dakota State guard Noah Freidel) Mark Byington — coaching at a place that, let’s face it, is usually toward the bottom edge of Division I men’s hoops — suddenly had a pretty impressive mid-major roster on his hands.

On Tuesday night, that roster almost made its marquee statement of the season. The Dukes had Virginia fans perspiring at John Paul Jones Arena, and in a manner — sluggish, defensive, slow, and with a paucity of outside shooting — that recalled some of the less attractive times in UVa’s post-title lean years. A fair amount of that was on James Madison, and its ability to hang in a grinder at JPJ. But of course a lot of it was also on Virginia, which has suddenly started missing a lot of shots. The Dec. 3 win over 1-9 Florida State was ugly, too; Virginia is now 10-of-40 from 3 in its last two games. Typically, UVa’s newfound penchant for free throws should have seen it through, but the Hoos went 12-of-24 from the stripe against JMU. Ugly stuff from everywhere, with the possible exception of increasingly intriguing freshman guard Ryan Dunn.

#ICYMI @Almighty_ry3‘s dunk was the top play on last night’s @SportsCenter Top 10!

🔶⚔️🔷#GoHoos pic.twitter.com/pkf4ukSAiB

— Virginia Men’s Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) December 7, 2022

The perimeter shooting may or may not be a long-term issue, but any loss of guard Reece Beekman definitely would be. Beekman left Tuesday’s game after a few minutes with a hamstring injury, which caused Virginia’s doctor to rule him out for the rest of the game. The good news, beyond the fact that Tony Bennett’s team was able to grind out a win against a good mid-major all the same, is that Virginia is now off until Dec. 17’s massive home date against Houston. If the breakout junior guard returns for that fixture, UVa fans’ concerns will greatly assuaged.

There’s nothing like a random early-season loss to throw the hounds off your scent. Losing to Colorado in Nashville Nov. 13 was a shock, yes, but it’s one of those things that can happen the first week into your season, particularly if you’re an experienced team with high expectations both internal and external. You come in thinking things are going to be easy, that this will be another simple step in your nonconference dominance, and then, bam: Colorado gets you out of your preferred pace and into an uptempo game, shots don’t fall (UT went 6-of-26 from 2 and 10-of-37 from 3 that day), the second half starts to tilt away from you, and the next thing you know everyone is asking if you were overrated from the beginning.

It does not appear that Tennessee was overrated. Not only have the Volunteers soundly beaten Kansas since, but they have spent most of their time boat-racing everybody else they’ve played. Are some of these teams pretty bad? Yes. But casually putting up a 94-40 night, even against the likes of Alcorn State — or Wednesday’s 84-49 annihilation of Eastern Kentucky — still suggests a level of ability that plenty of other teams can’t match.

It doesn’t take much to sell us on the idea of a quality Illinois team. Brad Underwood was excellent at Oklahoma State, was an obvious slam-dunk hire the minute Illinois lured him away, had the Illini rolling after Year 2, and has lost hugely impactful, All-America level players without suffering too much damage in the past. A lot of people — perhaps even Underwood himself — underestimated just how much the team would miss Ayo Dosunmu last season, but even if the Illini weren’t better without him they still ended up being pretty dang good.

And so it wasn’t hard for us to get on board with the idea that Underwood could lose Kofi Cockburn and pretty much everyone else from last year’s team and still have a competitive, top-half-or-better Big Ten team. Underwood had landed quality players in the portal, particularly Terrence Shannon Jr. (Texas Tech) and Matt Mayer (Baylor) and, so, sure, maybe it would take a minute for Illinois to figure out how to play together. But if some preseason prognostications see a lack of personnel continuity or shared minutes and run in the opposite direction, it felt easy enough to trust the simple formulation of: “Brad Underwood + talented players = very good team.”

And yet, even as bullish as we were, we definitely sold Illinois short.

On Tuesday night, for the first time, you could finally catch a glimpse of Illinois’ ceiling — and it appeared awfully high after all.

There was some of it in the win over a good UCLA team, and it was present even in good losses to Virginia and at Maryland, but Tuesday night’s 85-78 overtime win over Texas was the first time maybe all year that Mayer played well individually, and as a result Texas was never able to put Illinois away. Once Shannon got going late in the game, and Illinois’ long, active, but decidedly less plodding defense got its arms around the Longhorns, Illinois suddenly looked like one of the best teams in the country. Shannon and Mayer need to play well at the same time more often, but that seems like the sort of thing that gets ironed out over time. And in the meantime Skyy Clark is growing, fellow freshman Jayden Epps gave key minutes, and Coleman Hawkins is an extremely useful, stretchy big guy. (He is also convinced he has never committed a foul, even when he bludgeons a shooter, which is both kind of funny and also mildly annoying.)

Anyway, if you want to see what Illinois might be, go back and watch the last eight-ish minutes of regulation and overtime, when the Illini went on a 14-2 run that spanned the end of regulation and won them the game. They’ve been good already this year, while also looking like a team that was figuring itself out on the fly. When they do? Phew. Look out.

7. Texas (6-1)

And, having said all that, Texas absolutely could have, and probably should have, won this game.

You could argue this is a good time to drop the Longhorns down a few more spots, considering this was the first chance they’d had to win any kind of game away from home — and not even a true road game, but still, a game outside the Lone Star State against a quality opponent — all season, and they promptly lost at the first opportunity. Fair enough! But all of the numbers and all of the visual evidence suggests this is a pretty dang good team. Frankly, had UT maintained its level for the last few minutes of what was otherwise a very high-level performance — if it had taken a few better shots, turned it over a bit less down the stretch, and not committed one particularly egregious foul — we’d be as impressed as ever. Not a huge deal.

Wednesday was a bad news day in Fayetteville. On Tuesday night, after nine minutes, forward Trevon Brazile left Arkansas’s win over UNC Greensboro with an injury of unknown seriousness; on Wednesday, an MRI revealed that Brazile had torn his ACL and would miss the rest of the season.

The severity of the injury is bad enough in and of itself, obviously; torn ACLs, even if they’re not as devastating as they used to be, are long, tough, mentally and emotionally challenging injuries to recover from. Worse is that Brazile — who transferred from Missouri after a promising but raw freshman campaign — was really just beginning to find himself as a top SEC-level player, bordering on a star. His length and defensive flexibility made him a terror; he led the team in rebounds and blocks without playing like a conventional center; and Arkansas coaches have raved about his eventual NBA future while knowing full well the many areas for improvement. He was responsible for the dunk of the season to date, and he was a perfect piece for the amoebic “let’s-see-how-these-pieces-all-fit” blendability that has defined Eric Musselman’s best teams at Arkansas. Brazile could fit with anyone, but he fit especially with this team and this backcourt.

Even coming off the bench, he was playing heavy minutes for the Razorbacks, and playing well to boot. In his absence Tuesday Musselman turned to Makhi Mitchell, an interesting player but a much more conventional big man in many ways (and one without Brazile’s otherworldly athleticism). Mitchell was very good Tuesday: He had 13 points, 14 rebounds and four blocks in 32 minutes, but let’s see how that holds up against power-conference opposition like Oklahoma Saturday.

The good news: Star freshman Nick Smith Jr. — the guy everyone expected to be Arkansas’s best player this season — played 39 minutes against UNCG. His recover from early-season injury appears complete, and it will be fascinating to see how he runs the Razorbacks’ show in his first minutes against stiffer competition. And the Brazile-less front court, without its ability to stretch the floor, will likely require adaptation from Smith and Anthony Black. Available space will look much different moving forward.

9. Kansas (8-1)

Last week, Kansas came in at No. 13 of a 14-team edition of these very serious power rankings, which means we actually considered taking the Jayhawks off the list proper altogether. It would have been the first time in a very long time. Without going back and checking every week from last season, because there are only so many hours in each day and many of this week’s precious hours have been occupied by sick kids stuck home from school, we’re 99.9 percent sure they were a wire-to-wire team in last season’s power rankings before they won the national title. Most of the time we’ve been writing this column, one Bill Self team or another is a fixture on it.

Then, that same night, Kansas ripped off a 91-65 home win over Seton Hall, a thrashing in 69 extremely uneven possessions. So much for dropping the Jayhawks! One neutral-court loss to Tennessee need not be disqualifying. This is clearly a very good team getting All-America level performance from Jalen Wilson, who continues to look like he spent all summer both a) really working on his game and b) doing self-confidence validation exercises in the mirror and taking selfie videos of how to walk like you know you’re the best player on the floor, because he does that now, and he didn’t as recently as April. Dajaun Harris is still very good out top, and he helps this team move the ball quickly and assist on its made field goals at a very high rate.

Maybe Seton Hall is worse than we thought, but still: It was a very impressive offensive performance. This team’s lack of interior presence continues to be the big glaring flaw; offensive rebounds and easy inside buckets are not going to be the bread and butter here. But oh well! When this team really shoots it — and there are lineups Self can roll out where everyone can shoot it, if and when he is so inclined — it can be devastating.

You know when you get really good at a pretty challenging video game and occasionally you stop, take stock, realize how good you’ve gotten, and find your arrival at this point to be extremely satisfying? Trayce Jackson-Davis sometimes plays college basketball like that.

Not always: A very well-coached, tactically intelligent Rutgers team hid the controller from everyone in an Indiana shirt at Jersey Mike’s Arena last Saturday. Rutgers decided the Hoosiers — which had 50 points in the paint against North Carolina last week — weren’t going to score in the paint, and then spent the entire game making it so. But there were times Wednesday night at home against Nebraska when Jackson-Davis was just exploring the space of his talent and superiority. What combos can I come up with? How can I break this game? At one point in the first half, he grabbed a rebound with one jab of his giant left hand, dribbled up the floor, exchanged cute little passes with Xavier Johnson and back, and then touch-flipped the ball out to Tamar Bates for an open 3; it was the basketball equivalent of the first goal the Netherlands scored against the U.S.

At the end of the game — when Jackson-Davis needed one more assist to record just the program’s third triple-double — he was like a kid grinding squad battles rewards in FIFA Ultimate Team, spamming the pass button as Indiana teammate after teammate missed the resulting shot over and over again. Eventually, Trey Galloway converted a layup on a backdoor cut, and Jackson-Davis came off the floor. Jackson-Davis looked very satisfied, but also like he had run right up to the end of the difficulty curve — like he was finding a way to keep himself artificially entertained. Fortunately, far more punishing quests lie ahead.

11. Alabama (7-1)

Alabama freshman star Brandon Miller got the scouting spotlight treatment from our own John Hollinger in his column, and it was nice to be validated on the idea that Brandon Miller is one of the more unusual, interesting players in the country. He’s obviously a high-level talent, a 6-foot-9 wing with a handle who is an active rebounder, has the frame to be a really good defender, and whose best feature is his perimeter shooting. NBA folks clearly agree; Sam Vecenie has him sixth on his latest big board.

But it’s also interesting how bad Miller is at finishing from inside the arc. Miller has attempted exactly 58 2s and 58 3s this season; he has made just 20 of the former and 27 of the latter. For a 6-foot-9 guy who can put the ball on the floor a little bit, that’s kind of weird, right? Meanwhile, you can see Miller hunting 3s as his first- and second-order priorities; you have to really run him off the line before he accedes to trying to go around you.

You do wonder if some of this is a function of Nate Oats’ disdain for midrange jumpers. You could imagine Miller being a very good midrange player; the same stepbacks that work from 20 feet might just as well work from 12, and he can see over most of the defenders who check him. But Oats’ teams avoid those shots like the plague; if you are going to shoot a 2, you are going to do so around the rim, and that means getting all the way there pretty much every time you go. For all his unique strengths, that is not really Miller’s game at the moment. Then again, he plays for a coach who has given him the greenest of green lights from the perimeter, a coach who runs quick little sets to get him wing 3s early in plenty of possessions. If you have Miller’s skills and you’re trying to get to the league as soon as possible, you take that tradeoff. In any case, it will be interesting to see what Houston has in store for him defensively, and physically, in Saturday’s huge contest.

Hey, it’s Mississippi State! OK! Sure!

Are there teams in the below section that “deserve” to be here more than the Bulldogs? Yeah, sure, but so what? They’ll get their run, if they haven’t already, and the bottom of the power rankings list is nothing if not a sucker for surprising teams having great starts to seasons. Mississippi State is nothing if not that.

In some respects, maybe this start isn’t all that surprising. The Bulldogs were a consistently solid team for most of Ben Howland’s tenure, particularly the final four, even if they always rated out more highly on your laptop screen than they did in sheer wins and losses. This is why Howland, despite having the adjusted per-possession metrics to look like a tournament-ish team at least twice in his last three seasons, only made one NCAA field in seven years. Alas.

This team does not look revolutionary. In fact its core comprises players who have been regular figures in Howland’s recent teams: D.J. Jeffries, Cameron Matthews, Shakeel Moore. The difference — beyond the addition of gem Eric Reed from Southeast Missouri State, who is one of the least turnover-prone guards in the country — is that senior forward Tolu Smith has started this season looking like one of the best players in the SEC. A somewhat peripheral player for most of his career, Smith is now even more efficient despite jumping from 24.8 percent usage and 23.4 percent shot rates to 31.8 and 25.4, respectively. He is touching the ball all the time, he’s converting interior finishes at an unprecedented rate, and he’s drawing a ton of fouls in the process. Mississippi State is still not a very good outside shooting team, a la last season, but it appears to be a genuine buzzsaw on the defensive end, of the kind Howland only occasionally approached.

The only caveat? The schedule. Chris Jans is a first-year head coach, and he scheduled the way a lot of first-year head coaches do, which is to say: softly. You want to build momentum; you want to give your guys confidence; you want to win them over with success; and sometimes you just don’t really know if your team is going to be any good in the first place. But other than an event in Fort Myers, Fla., where they played (and beat) Marquette and Utah on a neutral floor, this is an extremely soft nonconference schedule. KenPom ranks it 342nd in the country. It’s the kind of schedule you end up with in a transitional year, except Mississippi State looks really good right now. We’ll have to wait until the teeth of the SEC campaign to test it out, and the Bulldogs will have to hope that they can sustain this level — and that their unfortunate noncon slate won’t damage them too much when it comes time to select and seed the field a few months down the line.

But still: Mississippi State! Kind of cool!

Also thinking about: Duke, which is beginning to take shape; Kentucky, which had a decent win over an OK Michigan team in London but which still has a long way to go if it’s going to make good on its promise any time soon; Baylor, Maryland, UCLA, Gonzaga and Arizona, though not necessarily in that order; Ohio State; Auburn, which is 8-0 with a pretty questionable nonconference schedule that will probably remain that way even after games against Memphis (neutral) and USC (away); Wisconsin, which is four points away from being unbeaten with wins over Kansas (lost in overtime), Marquette and now Maryland; thinking about how unfathomable it is that Georgetown’s crowd is this small even on a free attendance night, and then remembering that if we ever had a real free night out with the wife (which are very few and far between these days) there are like 32 amazing restaurants and an Alamo Draft House showing “The Fabelmans” and definitely some galleries and honestly just a few new random bars that would be higher on the list than even a free Georgetown men’s basketball game, and we love college basketball, so actually that crowd kind of makes sense; Kent State, which is two points against Charleston, five points against Houston, and seven points against Gonzaga away from being 9-0 and ranked in the top five, ha; Rutgers, which is keeping last year’s dream alive by losing to so-so teams in nonconference (Temple) not long before beating good teams in its league (Indiana); Saint Mary’s; Spain passing the ball eight bajillion times and getting mad because Morocco wouldn’t be gentlemen about this whole thing and simply let Spain score; Cristiano Ronaldo’s career crumbling out from under him in the matter of like three weeks; gradually getting used to the new Synergy layout; Pentiment; Louisville ranking 360th in the first NET rankings, four spots up from the very bottom of Division I, which sounds like the setup for a punchline but is honestly just kind of sad.

(Illustration by Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photo of Illinois’ Terrence Shannon Jr.: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)