It’s Only Week 1, But Here’s What We’ve Learned in College Basketball This Week

Is one week too early to make bold predictions about a sports season? For college basketball, maybe not.

As Ken Pomeroy pointed out in his newsletter this week, what’s cool about this sport is that there are so many games in the first week that you actually have enough data to see where the season might be headed. For instance, KenPom data shows we’re currently on pace for the highest-scoring season in at least 30 years.

This works anecdotally, too. Most teams have played two games by now, some even three. We’re not doing “NFL Week 1 overreactions” here.

So let’s run through some of the most interesting and apparent takeaways after a little more than one week of college hoops action.

Fab freshmen are everywhere.

The lotteries of the past few NBA drafts have featured a number of international prospects creeping in and taking over. The 2026 draft won’t look like that at all — it’ll be stuffed with diaper dandies.

Last year was top-heavy, the season-long narrative dominated by Cooper Flagg at Duke and the Dylan Harper/Ace Bailey tandem on a Rutgers team that didn’t even make the tournament. This year? It was going to be a big three of Darryn Peterson at Kansas, Cameron Boozer at Duke, and AJ Dybantsa at BYU. But as promising as they’ve looked, their classmates Koa Peat (Arizona) and Caleb Wilson (North Carolina) have fared even better while helping their teams to marquee wins over Florida and Kansas.

Watch out for Tennessee’s Nate Ament and Baylor’s Tounde Yessoufou, too.

Thanks to Darian DeVries, Indiana is back.

I’m calling it! Surely Indiana won’t find a way to disappoint us later, right? 

In all seriousness, the Hoosiers look like a team renewed under Darian DeVries, who’s risen from a great run at Drake and one season at West Virginia to this high-profile job.

Three of Mike Woodson’s four teams in Bloomington finished outside the top 200 nationally in 3-point shooting, and even when the Hoosiers could hit deep shots, they just never took many. Under DeVries, Indiana has made 24 three-pointers in two games, including 14-of-28 (50%) in a neutral-court blowout of Marquette. Neither team is ranked, but this Marquette group isn’t supposed to be awful — and Indiana blitzed them. Plenty of reason for confidence in the Hoosier State.

Sons of star coaches have work ahead at Auburn and Xavier

Steven Pearl may have been at Auburn since 2017, but he’s got plenty to learn about being the one in charge. If you’re just catching up, Bruce Pearl opted to retire in September — a transparent ploy to install his son as his successor since there wasn’t time or the candidate pool to conduct a proper search.

The Tigers were ranked No. 20 in the preseason, and in their first game under Steven Pearl, they let mighty Bethune-Cookman hang around all night and force overtime before Auburn escaped 95–90. The early returns for Richard Pitino at Xavier aren’t promising either. A four-point win over Marist and a five-point victory over Le Moyne exposed some early issues, and then Herb Sendek coached circles around Pitino as Santa Clara trounced Xavier by 21.

A bonus takeaway on the women’s side — and one about as predictable as a cold winter in Connecticut — is that Geno Auriemma has what could be a bulldozer of a team in his 41st season on the job.

The defending national champions saw Paige Bueckers finish her career and head to the WNBA but still have a tremendous core of Sarah Strong, Azzi Fudd, and KK Arnold, plus a deep bench to go with them. The Huskies aren’t playing cupcakes, either. They led then-No. 20 Louisville by as many as 28 in their season-opening win and then dropped 99 on Florida State.