The final week of the college basketball regular season is here, and with it comes the final stock watch of the campaign. Teams want to be trending up as we approach March Madness, which is less than two weeks away, but one of the most curious cases to track entering the NCAA Tournament involves No. 10 Texas Tech. A trendy sleeper team thanks to huge victories over Duke, Arizona and Houston, people started to doubt the Red Raiders once they lost star forward J.T. Toppin for the season with a torn ACL.
Toppin was a key factor in all three wins, so it was reasonable to assume a dip in performance once Texas Tech no longer had him, but that has not been the case to date. The Red Raiders have won all three of their games without Toppin, including handing then-No. 4 Iowa State its first home loss of the season on Saturday, As the season winds down, let's take one last look at who is trending up and down with the stock watch, starting with a deeper look at the new-look Red Raiders.
College basketball's risers entering the season's final week
Texas Tech Red Raiders
The NCAA's Selection Committee had its doubts about Texas Tech during the Top 16 seed reveal, with committee chair Keith Gill revealing they had been dropped a seed line after learning about the extent of Toppin's injury. Any concerns the committee had have been eased by seeing the Red Raiders look as dominant as ever without their star, including a convincing road win over a Cyclones team the committee had as its final No. 1 seed in the exercise.
Point guard Christian Anderson has stepped up in Toppin's absence, averaging 22 points, 6.3 rebounds and 8 assists per game during the three-game winning streak. The loss of Toppin likely ends Texas Tech's chances of winning a national title but the three-headed monster of Anderson, Donovan Atwell and Lejuan Watts (all of whom average at least 12 points per game) gives them a chance to at least reach the second weekend.
Michigan State Spartans
Don't act surprised because the calendar has flipped to March and No. 8 Michigan State is playing its best basketball. The Spartans had a very fruitful trip to Indiana last week, knocking off No. 8 Purdue for Tom Izzo's first win at Mackey Arena since 2014 while surviving a test from a desperate Indiana side to record their fifth win in their last six games.
A big key to Michigan State's resurgence is the emergence of Kur Teng as a perimeter threat, with the sophomore guard nailing 13-of-24 three-point attempts during the Spartans' four-game winning streak, a 54.1 percent clip. Izzo's team is well-positioned to land a three-seed in March Madness, which could set them up for another trip to the Sweet 16 with the potential to be a Final Four sleeper if they get a good draw.
Missouri Tigers
On a weekend where most of the bubble fell flat on its face, Missouri deserves credit for taking care of its business. The Tigers have won six of their past eight games, including Saturday's 24-point blowout of Mississippi State, to move off the bubble and into a safe position entering the final week of the regular season.
Dennis Gates' team is a guard-heavy group as his top six scorers are perimeter players, with three of them (Jayden Stone, Trent Pierce and Jacob Crews) knocking down at least 39 percent of their three-point attempts. With wins over Florida, Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Tennessee under their belts the Tigers have shown the ability to hang with strong teams in March, which could make them a dangerous draw for a No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the Round of 32.
College basketball's risers entering the season's final week
The Bubble Teams
This was not a good weekend to be a bubble team as many squads had opportunities to improve their fortunes and squandered key opportunities. Indiana let a Quad 1 opportunity slip through their fingers with a loss to the Spartans while San Diego State came up just short in what felt like a do-or-die meeting with New Mexico at The Pit, but far too many bubble teams suffered losses to teams that could sink them out of the bracket.
California lost at home by 16 to Pittsburgh, which stalled any upward momentum the Golden Bears had been building, while SMU (losing by 20 at fellow deep bubbler Stanford), UCLA (lost by 5 at Minnesota), Texas A&M (lost by 6 at fellow bubbler Texas), USC (lost by 15 at home in a must-win spot to Nebraska) and Auburn (lost by 6 at home to Ole Miss) offered a showcase of why tournament expansion beyond 68 teams is a fool's errand.
Auburn Tigers
The situation surrounding Auburn, whose loss to Ole Miss on Saturday dropped the Tigers to 15-14 on the season, merits further discussion. The Tigers looked relatively safe entering February with a win over Texas on Jan. 28 putting them at 14-7 overall and 5-3 in SEC play with the toughest schedule in the country, but they have all but fallen out of tield by dropping seven of their past eight games.
The one win in that stretch was a controversial victory over Kentucky thanks to a generous late foul call to allow Auburn to shoot the go-ahead free throws in the final seconds. Those strong schedule numbers have kept Auburn viable in the bubble hunt for a while but a potential tournament team can't lose three times to teams that won't make the field (at Mississippi State and Oklahoma in addition to the Ole Miss home debacle) and safely get an at-large because at some point you actually need to win basketball games, not just show up to play them.
Bruce Pearl
Pearl, the former Auburn coach who is now a college basketball analyst at TNT, created a firestorm over the weekend when he questioned the credentials of Miami of Ohio as a potential tournament team, declaring on air that they had to win their conference tournament to go to the dance because they weren't one of the 68 best teams in the country. While there are fair criticisms over the Redhawks' schedule, which is one of the weakest in the country, Pearl's commentary basically implied that the regular season doesn't matter for mid-majors, only how they fare in their conference tournaments.
The argument behind expansion is to allow more access to the field, which is certainly going to benefit teams like Auburn (who Pearl's son Steven now coaches, leading Bruce to likely be biased in his arguments against the Redhawks) over teams such as Miami of Ohio, who has won every basketball game they have been asked to play at this point of the season. Pearl's argument takes college basketball down the college football rabbit hole where who you play matters more than the results of the games, which is something that drew steep criticism in the online space since we shouldn't bother playing the games if a team that has won all 29 times it has taken the floor to date has to sweat out an at-large bid because they didn't beat enough good teams for Pearl's liking.