Indiana basketball is fun again

And other early impressions of a super fun new season — featuring Kentucky, Louisville, Purdue, Georgetown, Kansas, Gonzaga, Vanderbilt and more

Photo credit: Indiana Athletics

In our house, anyway, 7 p.m. ET tip-offs can be tough. Dinner is finishing up, dishes are piling up, kids are squeezing out the last bits of play or devising new ways to stall out bath and bed, and even if you can get a college basketball game on the television — if — your odds of catching more than a few fleeting glimpses are low.

When things do calm down, and you can actually absorb what you’re watching, it’s easy to feel lost. Watching a college basketball game properly involves settling in at the pace of the game: seeing how teams size each other up, gauging the energy of the home team and the crowd, rendering sweeping judgments based on one or two first-minute plays. Jumping in late feels odd and overwhelming.

Rarely has this sensation been quite as pronounced — or quite as enjoyable — as Thursday night.

Purdue’s 87-80 win over Alabama felt like a metaphor for this young, enthralling college basketball season to date: tactically savvy, brilliantly executed, gloriously chaotic, chock full of scoring. You couldn’t look away. Some of this was just what Alabama does to every game, sure; at one point in the first half the Crimson Tide shot a 3 on 15 straight possessions. But most of it was the truth that has defined the first two-ish weeks of the season so far: Everyone is sort of Alabama now.

Even Purdue — which very intentionally schemed the Tide into a more moderate (69-possession) pace, happily utilized analytically unoptimized short rolls and midrange 2s and post-ups and seven-foot Trey Kaufman-Renn shotputs, and won the game by rebounding everything in sight — often looked in on the joke. The Boilermakers heaved the ball ahead. Braden Smith (29 points, seven rebounds, four assists, lol) flew around, threw audacious passes, dribbled the ball through a defender’s legs, and flung himself into the teeth of Alabama’s frontcourt. Purdue gave up 1.16 points per possession and still won away in Tuscaloosa, over a team that just won 103-96 at St. John’s, because they were just that good at putting even more points on the board.

This is what college basketball is now. The first week of the season was the fastest since 2018-19 and the highest-scoring since, well, forever. Threes are hoisted at unprecedented rates. Free throw and 2-point shooting keeps getting better. Assist rates keep going up. So, too, do turnover rates, which may drive coaches crazy but indicate increased offensive aggression — and lead to fast breaks, which are fun. These improvements in the quality of play — and they are unqualified improvements, because all you have to do is watch the games to know teams are also defending harder and smarter than ever, too — are statistically likely to continue all season.

That was the feeling we had jumping in cold to Purdue-Alabama Thursday night. It was the same one we had on opening night, watching Koa Peat plant a flag against Florida, and that we have a few dozen times since. For years now this sport has been getting better, smarter, older, more efficient and more effective. Now we’re here. The first two(-ish) weeks were an explosion of visual dopamine, a kaleidoscope of points and 3s and spacing and steals, a euphoric and sometimes overwhelming trip.

We would be happy enough, after any offseason, just to have games back. 2010-era struggle-fests, even. Cool! Great! This is not that. This is as good as college basketball has ever been, at least in our lifetime, and it’s November Freaking 14. Esto perpetuum.

Anyway. This newsletter is a collection of opinions about a host of teams we’ve watched and enjoyed and/or been intrigued and/or concerned by since last Monday — a notebook-dump of first impressions, coming after at least a couple of games each, in this already raucous and wooly campaign. Beginning with …

The suddenly incredible Indiana Hoosiers

Here are some fun facts from the first three games of Indiana’s Darian DeVries era: