Oklahoma’s season changed for the better well before it began. Last July 1, point guard Jeremiah Fears decommitted from his hometown school Illinois and reopened his recruitment. Fears had been one of the highest-ranked high school players in the class of 2025—ESPN rated him No. 24—but reclassified. After leaving the Illini behind, he was quickly pursued by every blueblood program, including two-time defending national champion UConn.
Oklahoma seemed an unlikely choice, but it had connections. When head coach Porter Moser was an assistant at Illinois State (2003-07), he recruited Fears’ father, Jeremy. Oklahoma assistant coach Armon Gates was also friendly with the Fears family. That was enough to get Fears to commit without a campus visit. Fears thus became the second-highest rated Sooners recruit in the modern era, behind only Trae Young.
That wasn’t lost on Fears.
“They’ll be getting another Trae Young,” Fears told OUInsider.com. “I think I play a little bit better defense than he did, and I think I’m a little bit taller and stronger (6-foot-4, 182 pounds] than he was. But basically, the same leader and playmaker that he was.”
Fears isn’t putting up the crazy numbers Young did (27.4 ppg, 8.7 apg in 2017-18, his only season), but he doesn’t have to. Moser and his staff surrounded him with a pair of experienced transfers — Kobe Elvis, who played one season at DePaul and three at Dayton — where he started 80 games and averaged 3.0 assists — and Duke Miles, a senior who logged three years at Troy and last season at High Point, where he averaged 17.5 points and 3.6 assists. He’s shooting .471 from 3. The Sooners (9-0) are essentially starting three point guards, and they’re using them to good effect; Oklahoma is No. 4 in the nation in steals percentage (15.3) and 10th in free-throw percentage (80.5).
After beating Providence, Arizona and Louisville to win the Battle 4 Atlantis, Oklahoma — picked by the SEC media to finish 15th in the league — last week vaulted into the Top 25 (No 21), moved to No. 13 (Associated Press) and 17 (coaches) on Monday and could stay ranked for a bit if it can get past AP No. 14 Michigan in a game played in Charlotte, North Carolina on Dec. 18.
Fears, belying his age (he turned 18 on Oct. 14), has played like a veteran. He’s relentless getting to the rim, shoots well enough from 3 to force teams to guard him, is a crafty passer and a ball-hawking defender who’s third in the SEC in steals, second among league freshmen. He’s also second on the team and tops among SEC freshman in scoring (16.7 ppg).
The Sooners have two more guards who can stroke the 3-ball—Fairfield transfer Brycen Goodine (.467) and freshman Dayton Forsythe (.400) and a frontcourt weapon in 6-foot-7 Jalon Moore. He didn’t show up on any preseason All-SEC teams, but he’s playing at that level, averaging 18.2 points — eighth in the league — on impressive shooting splits .524/.387/.840.
This team is not going to finish 15th in the SEC.
Mizzou quickly putting last season in its rearview mirror
Dennis Gates’ three-year run at Missouri has been anything but dull.
In 2022-23, his first season, he took a team that had finished 12-21 (5-13 in the SEC) under former coach Cuonzo Martin and transformed it into a winner — the Tigers finished 25-10, 11-7 (tied for fourth) in the league and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. It looked like Gates had Mizzou rolling, but a career’s worth of injuries — the Tigers missed a combined 111 games and their top three projected players entering the year played in just 41 of a possible 96 games — turned last season into a nightmare from which Gates couldn’t wake up. The Tigers lost all 18 of their SEC games and in the first round of the league tournament.
Undaunted, Gates and his staff went to work recruiting. Last summer he told me the only two players he could guarantee would start were Duke transfer Mark Mitchell, a 6-9, 232-pound junior, and 6-4 graduate student Tony Perkins, who played four seasons at Iowa. But the Mizzou coaches brought in other talented players to join five holdovers, and that mix has the 8-1 Tigers’ fortunes trending upward again.
They proved that on Sunday, when they dumped then-No. 1-ranked Kansas, 76-67, in Columbia for their eighth straight win after a season-opening loss at Memphis. A holdover from last season’s slog, 6-5 Tamar Bates, the Tigers’ leading scorer, led the way with 29 points and five steals. Coupled with his 14 points against Cal, Bates earned SEC Player of the Week honors on Monday. He’s only the third player in the last 50 years to rack up at least 25 points and five steals vs. the No. 1 team, joining UCLA’s Reggie Miller in 1986 and West Virginia’s Jaysean Paige in 2016.
Another player toughened by last season also turned in an impressive performance against the Jayhawks. Anthony Robinson II, a 6-3 sophomore and stat sheet stuffer who leads the Tigers in assists and steals, contributed 11 points, four rebounds, three assists and matched Bates’ five steals.
Gates played his starters more than 30 minutes each against Kansas, but they didn’t seem to tire, swarming the Jayhawks defensively, forcing 22 turnovers and earning 23 points from them. KU entered the game tied for 12th in the nation, averaging just 9.3 turnovers.
This team won’t go winless in the SEC, thanks in large part to the lessons Gates learned last season.
Last August, after giving me his thoughts on his team, something flashed in Gates’ mind. “I’ve got a story for you,” he told me.
Gates served two stints on Leonard Hamilton’s staff at Florida State. He was a graduate assistant from 2004-05, left to become an assistant at Cal, Northern Illinois and Nevada, before returning to FSU in 2011, where he stayed until becoming a head coach at Cleveland State in 2019. Every month during his time in Tallahassee, Hamilton told Gates the story of his 1993-94 Miami team, which finished 0-18 in Big East play.
Gates couldn’t understand Hamilton’s insistence on recounting such a miserable experience. Last season, it dawned on him.
“Last year, that story helped me get through,” Gates told me. “Sometimes you learn through success, and sometimes you learn through failures. Some people are afraid to share their failures with you. But not coach Hamilton. And because he shared his failure with me—so many times—I came through last season with my head held high.
“That season for coach Ham was 30 years ago. He’s still a head coach [at age 76]. I’m sure during that season he thought it was going to be his last. But he’s been coaching for five decades. He’s going to have a hall of fame career. I understand now why coach told me that story so many times. He was preparing me for failure. And now, I’ve got my own version of that story to tell. And I’m going to share it with other coaches.”
Around the Rim
- Tennessee, which ascended to the top spot in both major polls this week for the first time since 2019, has been ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press poll six times in its 116-year history, and five of them have come under coach Rick Barnes, now in his 10th season. Over the last seven years, Tennessee is one of just six programs to earn the top spot in multiple seasons, joining Baylor, Duke, Gonzaga, Houston and Purdue.
Barnes has guided the Vols to a place in the AP Top 25 for 65 consecutive weeks. That trails just Houston (91) and Kansas (70). No other school is close to 50 weeks, and the nearest SEC team is Kentucky (27).
Barnes, 70 and in his 38th year as a head coach, knows better than to get too jazzed over being ranked No. 1 this early in the season. “Other than the fact it’s a compliment to the start we’ve gotten off to and how hard we’ve worked,” Barnes said. “Our guys certainly want to be No. 1, but they really want to be No. 1 at the end of the year.”
There’s a long way to go before that happens, but here’s a cool stat the Vols and 11 other teams should keep front of mind the rest of the season. In the last 20 years, a team ranked among the top 12 in the country after week six of the regular season went on to win the national championship. - Most elite teams would feel the loss of their best 3-point shooter, and if Alabama coach Nate Oats had his druthers, he’d prefer having 6-3 fifth-year senior Latrell Wrightsell, Jr. — who has made 87 of 197 (.442) shots from behind the arc during his time in Tuscaloosa — healthy. But after Wrightsell ruptured his Achilles tendon in a Players Era Invitational championship game loss to Oregon, he was done for at least the next calendar year.
Luckily for Oats, Alabama had one backup plan in place and another set to deploy. Though he was a career .377 3 shooter and averaged 13.8 points in three seasons at Pepperdine, Houston Mallette was prepared to redshirt this season, in part because some knee issues early last summer set back his progress and in part because ‘Bama is loaded at the perimeter positions. Redshirting was a calculated move, as is every decision Mallette has made in his college career. He relies on a brain trust of his father, Wesley, the director of athletics at UC Riverside, and his former high school coach.
Oats wasn’t about to demand Mallette burn his redshirt season after the Tide had already played eight games, but Mallette, who prides himself on his team-first attitude, willing did so. He made his debut against North Carolina in the SEC/ACC Challenge, and he immediately proved he could make up for the loss of Wrightsell, knocking down the first two 3s he took and finishing with six points, three rebounds and two steals in the Tide’s 94-79 win.
“In my opinion, a lot of times in society, we have what’s best for me,” Mallette told the media after the game. “But I feel like what’s best for me in my life is what’s best for the team. And anything I can do to help impact people and impact the team is what I’m willing to do. That’s kind of how the decision came into play.”
Alabama will also soon regain the services of 6-4, 224-pound grad transfer Chris Youngblood, the American Athletic Conference’s co-player of the year in 2023-24. He’s yet to play this season because of an ankle injury. Youngblood, who began his career at Kennesaw State, is a prototypical Nate Oats player — he shot .416 from 3 last season and has averaged double figures all four of his collegiate seasons.
“He’s big, strong, athletic and ultra-competitive,” Oats told me last summer. “He’s already established a strong leadership role. You can’t do that without playing hard on defense. We needed someone to stretch the floor, and we needed help defensively. He checks both boxes.”
- The SEC’s 14-2 destruction of the ACC in last week’s SEC/ACC Challenge was even worse than the final tally indicated. SEC teams won by an average of 16.2 points, a number inflated by Mississippi State’s 90-57 beatdown of then-No. 18 Pittsburgh and Tennessee’s 96-70 win over Syracuse. Barnes did his best to call off the dogs, but with just nine scholarship players on his team and eight in his rotation, he couldn’t sub in players who aren’t major contributors.
SEC teams have put together an impressive first month of the season. Nine are ranked in the latest AP Top 25, including Tennessee and Auburn at 1-2. Auburn is No. 1 and Tennessee No. 2 in KenPom’s rankings, and in the NCAA’s latest NET rankings, the Vols are first and the Tigers second.
Five league teams have won MTE championships — Auburn (Maui Invitational), Florida (ESPN Events Invitational), Oklahoma (Battle 4 Atlantis), Tennessee (Baha Mar Hoops Bahamas Championship) and Texas (Legends Classic). Vanderbilt finished second in the Charleston Classic. - South Carolina, which finished a surprising tied for second in the SEC last season, has been overshadowed a bit so far, perhaps because of a season-opening loss to a North Florida team depleted by the loss of Chaz Lanier who left via the transfer portal to Tennessee. The Gamecocks (5-3) have also lost at Indiana and to Xavier in the Fort Myers Tipoff, but in their last three games have taken down a pair of ACC teams by double figures — Virginia Tech in Fort Myers and Boston College in the SEC/ACC Challenge — and beaten East Carolina. They close out the non-conference portion of their schedule with four consecutive home games — including against rival Clemson — the only team to beat Kentucky this season — before they begin league play.
Collin Murray-Boyles, a 6-8, 245-pound sophomore, has taken his game to another level after earning SEC All-Freshman team honors last season. Boyles led the Gamecocks in scoring (15.5 ppg), rebounding (9.4 rpg) and field-goal percentage (.655). He leads the league in the latter statistic and is second in rebounding.
Games to Watch
Auburn vs. Ohio State on Saturday, Dec. 14 in Atlanta (ESPN2). No one can accuse Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, who knew he was entering this season with a potentially great team, of ducking anyone. So far, the Tigers have played Houston, Iowa State, North Carolina, Memphis, and Duke. They lost only the latter game in one of only two defeats suffered by the SEC in the SEC-ACC Challenge and should be more than ready for a much-improved Ohio State in the Holiday Hoopsgiving triple-header that includes fellow SEC schools Florida and Georgia.
Florida vs. Arizona State on Saturday, Dec. 14 in Atlanta (SEC Network). The Gators, ranked No. 7 in the coaches’ poll and No. 9 by AP, come into this game unbeaten (9-0) and have taken no prisoners, winning by an average of 21.6 points.
Louisville at Kentucky on Saturday, Dec. 14 (ESPN). It’s always special when these two state rivals tee it up, but new coaches on both sides will add some spark to a series that had sputtered the last few years as Louisville dealt with NCAA issues and a revolving door of coaches. Pat Kelsey has given Cardinal fans reason for optimism. Meanwhile, Kentucky’s Mark Pope has built what looks to be a special team from scratch with a pile of transfers and has Big Blue Nation fired up. After rallying to beat Gonzaga last Saturday, they’re No. 5 in both major polls.
Tennessee at Illinois on Saturday, Dec. 14 (Fox). The Volunteers have a chance to keep their No. 1 ranked and stay unbeaten through non-conference play… if they can get past this game. Tennessee’s Rick Barnes has finally got a team with an offense that’s almost the equal of its defense, which is always among the top three or four in the nation. Illinois has jousted with two other SEC teams so far, losing by 13 to Alabama and winning by 13 over Arkansas.
Creighton at Alabama on Saturday, Dec. 14 (SEC Network). The Crimson Tide’s brutal schedule has matched instate SEC rival Auburn’s. After tangling with Purdue, Illinois, Houston, Rutgers, Oregon and North Carolina, now ‘Bama gets to play a Creighton team that bounced Kansas from the No. 1 spot with a 76-63 upset on Dec. 4.
Texas A&M at Purdue on Saturday, Dec. 14 (CBS). With conference shifting still going full-tilt, the Boilers might as well just jump to the SEC—so far this season, they’ve played Alabama and Ole Miss, beating both, and after playing A&M will take on Auburn a week later.
