The 2024-25 men's college basketball season has only just begun. We're two-and-a-half weeks into the five-month journey to crown the next national champion.

But we've seen enough to jump to conclusions that fly in the face of preseason expectations.

After months of enough offseason portal watching, injury-update checking and exhibition-box-score dissecting to concoct a "definitive" ranking of teams heading into the season, most of it goes straight into the trash as we have knee-jerk reactions to early surprises and upsets.

Has Gonzaga supplanted Kansas, Duke and UConn as the favorite to win it all?

Is Marquette's successor to Tyler Kolek going to win the school's first-ever Wooden Award?

Does the ACC kind of stink?

And is Penn State on the fast track to its best season in six decades?

Lots of juicy overreactions to talk about, but let's start with the coach who has always been a lightning rod for overreactions.

John Calipari to Arkansas Was the Rarely Seen Win-Win Divorce

Is Arkansas the instant title front runner that Kentucky was when John Calipari first took that job 15 years ago?

Well, no. It took 20 games for Cal to suffer his first loss with the 2009-10 Wildcats, while the 2024-25 Razorbacks never led for a second against Baylor in their second game of the season.

But is it already readily apparent that Arkansas is a whole heck of a lot better than last season? And can you squint and see this team becoming one of the legitimate threats to win it all once it gets healthy and comes more fully together as a team?

Definitely to both.

However, don't think for one second that Kentucky is losing any sleep reminiscing about the way things used to be.

We wondered through several years' worth of 'hot seat' talk if it would be a serious "careful what you wish for" situation when Big Blue Nation finally drove its second-winningest coach out of town, but the Mark Pope era has gotten out to the best start imaginable.

Kentucky beat Duke on a neutral floor, and it has averaged 100 points in its other three games. The offense is prolific, and there's a toughness/confidence at a teamwide level that hadn't been there since Wisconsin broke the Calipari mystique in 2015.

Instead of pinning its hopes and dreams on 4-6 highly touted 18-year-olds, Kentucky is super old, super deep and mighty impressive.

For now, there's only one meeting scheduled between these teams on Feb. 1. But if you believe in script writers for sports, be sure to let them know we need at least one more in the SEC tournament, and ideally a rubber match in the Elite Eight.

Kam Jones Will Win National Player of the Year

Tyler Kolek was a phenomenal lead guard for Marquette over the previous two seasons.

But when an oblique injury caused Kolek to miss the final three games of the regular season as well as Marquette's three-game run in the Big East tournament, we were treated to quite the sneak preview of what "lead guard Kam Jones" could do for this program, averaging 20.8 points, 4.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists in those six contests.

Through the first five games of the current campaign, though, Jones has upped all of those marks to 22.6 points, 6.0 assists and 5.6 rebounds, punctuated by a 17-point, 13-rebound, 10-assist triple-double in Tuesday's marquee victory over Purdue—just the third triple-double in Marquette history, and the first since Dwyane Wade's in the 2003 Final Four.

Jones was already a prolific scorer, draining 195 three-pointers over the previous two seasons. But he has become one of those stars who really should be touching the ball on every possession.

Heading into the season, Jones was tied with Baylor's VJ Edgecombe and Gonzaga's Khalif Battle for the ninth-best odds of winning the Wooden Award, according to Sports Betting Dime's tracker. At +3500, he wasn't a long shot, per se, but definitely well behind the collection of RJ Davis, Cooper Flagg, Hunter Dickinson and Mark Sears in the +700 to +800 range.

That gap has to be gone now. Jones is the heart and soul of what is going to be a Top 10 team come Monday. Dickinson and Flagg might still be the co-favorites, but Jones belongs right there with them.

Gonzaga Is Finally Going to Win a Title

It has been a few years since we've been able to ask what seemed to be the every late-November question of whether this is the best Gonzaga team Mark Few has ever had....

But could it be?

The Zags certainly made a deafeningly loud opening statement like never before.

They did beat No. 6 Kansas by 12 on a neutral floor to open the 2020-21 campaign, but beating No. 8 Baylor by thirty-freaking-eight points is on a whole different level of incredible.

We'll find out soon enough just how good this year's Baylor actually is, but that is an all-timer of a November result, up there with Kentucky beating No. 5 Kansas by 32 in the third game of its 38-1 campaign and Duke beating No. 2 Kentucky by 34 in Zion Williamson's collegiate debut.

Gonzaga did nearly come crashing back to earth in its subsequent game against Arizona State, which was too close for comfort for about 37 minutes, but got back on the saddle with a 59-point win over a decent UMass Lowell team and a 13-point true road victory over San Diego State in which they never trailed.

If you want to say Kansas has the best early resume with victories over North Carolina and Michigan State, that's fair. And if you want to argue that Auburn beating Houston in Houston was more of a feat than what Gonzaga did to Baylor, I suppose I'll allow that.

This Gonzaga team looks scary good, though, and could just about cement itself as the favorite to win it all over the course of the next few weeks.

To win the Battle 4 Atlantis, the Zags will likely need to go through West Virginia, No. 16 Indiana and No. 17 Arizona. And after getting back from that, the Zags will get No. 9 Kentucky in Seattle and No. 2 Connecticut in New York.

If they're 10-0 after that (which they could be), the 39-0 talk will get quite serious.

Kyle Neptune's Days Are Numbered

Before this season began, Kyle Neptune was already on probably the hottest seat in the country.

Prior to Jay Wright's abrupt retirement in 2022, Villanova was one of the best programs in the nation, if not the singular best one.

In its final nine years under his tutelage, Villanova went 263-53 (.832 winning percentage), winning two national championships, appearing in a third Final Four and finishing every season in the AP Top 25—usually the Top 10.

But since Neptune took the reins, the Wildcats have become a punchline.

This wasn't even remotely a situation where the previous coach left the cupboards empty and it was all but destined to take at least a year or two for the new coach to get things back on track. Aside from Collin Gillespie and Jermaine Samuels, Neptune inherited the entire 2022 Final Four team, with highly touted recruits Cam Whitmore, Mark Armstrong and Brendan Hausen all opting to stick with their commitments to Wright/Villanova.

They went 17-17, including four losses to teams outside the KenPom top 100, ending their season with an immediate NIT exit at the hands of Liberty.

The following year wasn't any better. Villanova went 18-16, including an embarrassing 0-3 record in the Philadelphia Big 5 games against Penn, Saint Joseph's and Drexel. The Wildcats were, once again, immediately ousted from the NIT.

That left Neptune on thin ice, and opening this season 2-3 with losses to Columbia, Saint Joseph's and Virginia was likely the final straw.

Villanova just hired a new AD on Tuesday, with Eric Roedl officially beginning that new role in early January. While it's unlikely he'll immediately fire Neptune in the middle of Big East play, one of his first orders of business is probably going to be an 'ultimatum' type of conversation with the men's basketball coach.

UTRGV Is Going To Be This Year's Cinderella Story

You might think that, even for a knee-jerk reactions article, it is way too early to be thinking about potential Cinderella candidates.

But let's make sure we talk a bit about the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley before the Vaqueros are completely forgotten about for four months.

With the exception of two games against McNeese in Southland Conference play, UTGRV does not play another game this season against an opponent of any consequence. The Vaqueros could (and perhaps should) win their next 13 games before the first showdown with McNeese, and you could probably count on one hand the number of diehard college basketball fans who would even notice at a national level.

They impressed while they could, though.

Playing at then-AP No. 15 Creighton on the third day of the regular season, the Vaqueros gave the Bluejays all they could handle. They simply had no answer for Ryan Kalkbrenner, who went for 49 points and 11 rebounds in a 99-86 game that was way closer than that until the closing seconds.

Twelve days later, UTRGV almost stunned Wisconsin in a back-and-forth affair played entirely within a 12-point window. They had a chance to win it in the closing seconds but fell just short.

In both games, they shot a ton of threes and caused problems with their ball pressure, but had the misfortune of fouling the wrong guys. Steven Ashworth went 17-for-17 in leading Creighton through a 26-for-29 effort. Likewise, John Tonje was a perfect 10-for-10 while Wisconsin shot 27-for-32.

They're old, they're scrappy, they can make it rain from distance and they've already proven multiple times they can hang with a contender. They could be this year's No. 14/15 seed that shocks the world.

The ACC Is a Hot Mess

There has been a lot of early discourse about the Big East being a big disappointment, but that's mostly just thinly veiled mockery of Villanova's horrendous start, with some "Wow, so, Seton Hall is even worse than we thought, huh?" peppered in there.

In reality, seven of the 11 Big East teams are still undefeated (including DePaul), and four of them feel like legitimate Final Four threats (including St. John's). Some of the wins were closer calls than they should have been, but there's still a reasonable expectation that at least five Big East teams will dance.

The ACC is a different story, as only three of the 18 teams in that mega conference are presently ranked in the top 40 on KenPom.

Pittsburgh has been a pleasant surprise, winning its first five games by an average margin of 28.6 points. However, we're talking about five home games against teams that range from "borderline top 100" to "probably bottom 25 in the nation," so let's see how these next four games against LSU, UCF/Wisconsin, Ohio State and Mississippi State go before we invest much of anything in the Panthers' hot start.

The ACC's other two top 40 teams are Duke and North Carolina, who lost to Kentucky and Kansas, respectively, in their lone opportunities to prove anything good thus far. That isn't to say the Tobacco Road squads have been disappointing, but the flagbearers have yet to plant any flags.

Clemson got smoked by Boise State and Wake Forest got waxed by Xavier. They were supposed to be in the mix for third-best ACC team, but it's possible neither one is good.

Syracuse is one of the league's seven undefeateds, but maybe the most disappointing 3-0 start ever, beating Le Moyne by four, Colgate by two and Youngstown State in double overtime. The Orange's dance-missing streak still feels likely to extend to four years.

Inevitably, there figure to be at least five teams from the ACC in the NCAA tournament, as we have to get to 68 somehow. Not the start this league was hoping for, though.

Big 12 "Gaming" the NET Will Be a Talking Point Yet Again

Through Wednesday morning, there were seven teams with an average scoring margin of at least 32.7 points per game.

Four of those teams—Texas Tech, Cincinnati, Iowa State and Houston—play in the Big 12, which was at the epicenter of last year's running argument about the impact of scoring margin on the NET rankings and whether it's harder/more impressive to beat a decent team by 15 or a terrible team by 50.

Those four teams have played a combined total of 14 games: 13 wins by a minimum of 16 points each against teams that presently rank in the bottom 50 percent nationally on KenPom, and Houston's five-point loss to Auburn.

For their combined zero victories over top-180 foes, they rank third, seventh, ninth and 10th on KenPom.

Plenty of teams do this to some extent—many more try to do it and fail miserably—but it does seem to disproportionately be these turnover-forcing Big 12 teams who make a mockery of the system by demoralizing teams who never had a prayer. (In Houston's most recent win over Louisiana, the Cougars had 17 steals to ULL's 15 made field goals.)

And while Iowa State was the focal point of last year's ire with the efficiency-based rankings, get ready for Cincinnati to wear that crown this year.

This would be nothing new, of course. When Mick Cronin was at Cincinnati, he practically built his legacy on annihilating pathetic non-conference schedules. Per KenPom, Cincinnati's NCSOS ranks from 2010-11 through 2018-19 were: 334, 338, 304, 294, 108, 197, 167, 294 and 243. The Bearcats got a No. 10 seed or better in each of those nine years and went a combined 6-9 with one win over a single-digit seed.

That doesn't make this year's Cincinnati schedule any less laughable.

The upcoming road game against Villanova looked solid before the season began, but yikes. Now, it seems the toughest non-conference games the Bearcats will play are the home games against in-state, way-too-early-bubble teams Xavier and Dayton. And even in league play, they'll only have one game each against Houston, Iowa State, Kansas, Texas Tech and Arizona.

Should be quite the adventure, trying to figure out whether Cincinnati is actually one of the 10 best teams in the country.

Watch Out for Penn State

Speaking of teams running a freight train through weak schedules, Penn State has something percolating once again.

The Nittany Lions under Mike Rhoades are the polar opposite of what they were two years ago under Micah Shrewsberry. That 2022-23 team led by Jalen Pickett played at a snail's pace, rarely committing or forcing turnovers, neither creating nor allowing many second chances and keeping free-throw attempts to a minimum on both ends of the floor. They wanted one field-goal attempt per possession and were happy to allow the same, trusting that their superior shooting percentage would win the day, which it often did.

Now, they play at a break-neck pace with full-court pressure, lots of blocks and a physicality on both ends of the floor that results in plenty of stoppages for free-throw attempts.

Basically, they went from Tony Bennett-era Virginia to Shaka Smart-era Virginia Commonwealth—which checks out, since Rhoades was at VCU for six years before his arrival in State College.

Penn State won its first three games against Binghamton, UMBC and Saint Francis by a combined score of 303-182, prior to just squeezing the life out of Virginia Tech with 16 steals in that 22-point victory.

The Nittany Lions were picked in the preseason to finish 17th in the Big Ten, and it would be preposterously knee-jerky to declare them a serious threat to win the league after two weeks of blowing out not-great teams.

Exceeding expectations well enough to achieve a single-digit seed in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001, however, might be in play.