Just get rid of reviews

And other things I'm pretty sure I think

So I have this group chat. It’s a bunch of high school buddies, a tight cadre of close friends I’ve been communicating with on a daily basis since we were all, like, 14-year-olds in Iowa on AOL Instant Messenger. Adult-era friends, and wives, are generally baffled by the engagement of this text thread. It is constant, and loyalties are divided. There is a lot of Iowa support, obviously. There is an Indiana faction. One guy went to Notre Dame. Another went to Michigan. There is a South Carolina fan in the mix. There is a lot of shit talk.

On Tuesday night, as Iowa got blasted in East Lansing by Michigan State, one member of the Indiana corps messaged the group: “Hawks look good.” Less than 24 hours later, as Indiana flailed at 4-4 Minnesota, an Iowa alum responded: “Hoosiers look good.” Got him there.

It reminded me of why I am so hesitant to do big, sweeping takes about college basketball teams early in any season. It is why I come back to the story of the Zen master and the little boy so frequently this time of year:

In this village, a little boy is given a gift of a horse. The villagers all say, “Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that wonderful? What a wonderful gift.”

The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

A couple years later the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg. The villagers all say, “Isn’t that terrible? The horse is cursed! That’s horrible!”

The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

A few years later the country goes to war and the government conscripts all the males into the army, but the boy’s leg is injured so he doesn’t have to go. The villagers all say, “Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that wonderful?”

The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

This parable epitomizes a religious and spiritual practice, of course, and so it always feels a little weird to apply it to our low-stakes understanding of sports. It is also out of time. The current predominant landscape of sports discussion demands brain-melting TikTok rips. Team lost a game? Fire the coach. Team won a game? Run for Governor! Weird AI Voice: Hey guys, this one crazy metal will balance your humours! Click the link for more info. Blueep.

Zen feels necessary, and the specific notion remains useful. Eight (or so) games is not a small sample size in college basketball terms, necessarily, but it’s not the most robust either. There is a lot of season left.

To wit: Boogie Fland. After an atrocious start to the season, and after a blah first half in a massive game Tuesday night in Cameron Indoor Stadium, Fland almost instantly rediscovered himself. It was like he woke up out of a panic dream. Oh, thank God, my arms do work. In the second half against a ferocious Duke, in almost all of the crucial moments, an undeniably talented player who had been up to this point in the year completely atrocious made play after intuitive play … right up to the point that his unforced turnover sealed Florida’s loss.

See? We’ll see.

(This is the part where I mention the most recent episode of the Basket Under Review Podcast, where Tate Frazier and I did a detailed Feast Week stock rising/falling section, indulged a bit of NET rankings silliness, and offered thoughts on all of the big stories of this week, with Tate and I eventually landing on Kentucky as the notable narrative conch-holder. It’s still not looking good, but again — well, you get the point.)

(Please listen to the podcast, subscribe, download, leave an incredibly positive review, all that stuff. Your support really helps, and I appreciate it.)

Anyway, it is in the above spirit that I offer up the following views of the past week and change. It is still early enough that sweeping conclusions are ill-advised — but not quite so early that post-Feast Week and post-conference challenge opinions can’t begin to be formed.

From the live chat

Size is now underrated

Speaking of both Iowa and Indiana: It is all well and good having technically gifted offensive players, and it’s great to run well-optimized stuff, and smart coaches can minimize the weaknesses of their rosters and maximize their strengths. Having said that …

… if you want to consistently win basketball games in a major conference — especially the Big Ten — you probably have to have some size on your roster. Iowa and Indiana have very little. This was the presumption on both teams in the offseason: They would be interesting and fun (in different ways), and they would represent respective breaths of fresh air for both sets of fans. But could they hang physically? Even in this more stylistically diverse Big Ten, there are still a lot of tall dudes around, and as fun as both teams might look against overmatched nonconference opponents, league hiccups felt inevitable.

And so it came to pass. Iowa’s lack of size and athleticism was immediately exposed at Michigan State Tuesday night, where the Hawkeyes looked like a mid-major team that showed up to play a vintage Tom Izzo outfit and were comprehensively outclassed in basically every category for 40 minutes.

Indiana’s loss at Minnesota was a bit more nuanced. Indiana didn’t look out of place, obviously, which makes sense considering their ostensible superiority to the 116th-ranked Gophers. But new coach Niko Medved clearly schemed toward IU’s strengths, shading his team’s defense toward Lamar Wilkerson and Tucker DeVries while happily taking one-on-one interior chances — even with a depleted frontcourt — against Indiana’s inside-out bigs. It worked: IU went 8-of-27 from 3, DeVries and Wilkerson shot 5-of-16 combined, and the Hoosiers could neither regularly generate their usual offensive flow or effectively play from the inside-out.

They had no other answer. That’s the problem with leaning into small-ish 3-point-offense-ball in any high major conference season, but especially in 2025: Teams are getting bigger now. Size and athleticism gives you a higher floor. Look at Florida: Perhaps no high-major team’s guards have been as disappointing as Todd Golden’s this season …

Xaivian, woof

… and yet the perimeter-deficient Gators nearly toppled an incredible Duke team on the road Tuesday night. Fland’s second-half surge helped, sure, but Thomas Haugh’s relentless tools — applied to the wing, always in conjunction two more UF bigs — carried the effort. Florida is at the vanguard of this nascent tactical movement. Sheer size provides them an incredibly stable baseline, with all those rebounds and second chances and rim contests, which is to say nothing of how impressively Cameron Boozer and Patrick Ngongba overcame them.

You also saw this with Louisville Wednesday. Arkansas freshman guard Darius Acuff got a lot of hype on the broadcast for his 17-10-5 night, and understandably so, but it was rehabilitated 6-foot-10 freak Trevon Brazile who was really the best player on the floor. Louisville isn’t tiny up front, but it isn’t particularly athletic there, and there is no question this is a team built around guards — guards who couldn’t account for the Hogs’ positional size and strength. Every shot felt hard.

It’s weird: In some ways, it has felt like college basketball has been rapidly catching up to the NBA meta, and part of that process has involved more coaches being OK with smallball rosters and faster pace and perimeter-obsessed attacks. This has been both effective and enjoyable. Still, at least at the highest level, the pendulum is swinging back. You need size. You always did. But now more than ever, you need at least one rim protector, one offensive rebounder, one designated dunker. Without it, bad nights get worse.

Just get rid of replay