NCAA College Basketball Polls, Rankings, week 17

NCAA College Basketball Polls, Rankings, week 17

The college hoops rankings rarely make sense to me. Here's a particularly mystifying example: Villanova is ranked higher than Creighton.

They are in the same conference. They have played twice. Creighton won both. They did not just kinda sneak by. It was like LeBron playing 1-on-1 against me. The first game was 96-68 and it could have been much worse, but both teams emptied the bench. The second game was 101-80 with Creighton giving playing time to 14 players (although superstar Doug McDermott played 35 minutes and scored at will.)

McDermott's career scoring total is now among the ten highest in history. He was already passed such prolific scoring machines as David Robinson and Larry Bird, will surely pass Oscar Robertson, and could make the top five before he graduates. It depends on how many games Creighton can last in the NCAA tournament. He needs 150 to crash the fab five and Creighton has three more games in the regular season. If they can make it to the round of eight in the tournament, McDermott should make it. He might even have a chance if they lose in the sweet sixteen, because he averages more than 26 per game.

For the record, Pete Maravich's all-time Division 1 total seems unassailable. He scored 3667 points, compared to 3249 for second place, and he did it in a mere 83 games, for an uncanny average of 44.2 per game - and there were no three-pointers in those days! No other player in history has averaged as many as 44 points per game in a single season, let alone a career. The non-Maravich record for a season is 41.7, which happened way back in the days of the two handed push shot. Frank Selvy posted that mark in 1952-53 by playing several non-division-1 opponents along the way. (He had the three best games of his career against those legendary powerhouses Newberry, Mercer and Wofford.)

Far behind Maravich, the second-best career scoring average is 34.6 (Austin Carr, Notre Dame). The best in a major college since 1980 is 29.0.