From the highs of the SEC and Drake's quest for perfection to the lows of Arizona and the ACC in general, the first two months of the 2024-25 men's college basketball season have featured plenty of big winners and losers.

Before the 2024 portion of the campaign wraps up, let's highlight some of the biggest developments and surprises of the first two months.

It could be players, coaches, teams or entire conferences.

Winners might be players or teams drastically exceeding preseason expectations or things that were great about what was largely the nonconference portion of the season. Losers either failed to live up to lofty hype or have been way worse than we imagined they could be.

Selections are presented in no particular order aside from oscillating between winners and losers.

Winner: Southeastern Conference

With nonconference play almost officially in the books, the SEC is collectively 170-22 with 29 Quad 1 wins and just one loss outside of the top two Quadrants, that being South Carolina's season-opening loss to North Florida.

A staggering 40 percent of teams in the current AP Top 25 hail from the SEC, including four of the top six.

There will be plenty of cannibalism taking place in the next few months, as someone has to be on the losing end of each of the 144 games to be played before what promises to be a sensational SEC tournament.

Good luck trying to find a bad loss among those 144, though.

Based on current NET rankings, only the nine games played at South Carolina will not be Quad 1 opportunities for the road team. And even that might change, as the Gamecocks are presently 84th in the NET and road games against the top 75 are Quad 1 affairs.

For more than half of the games, it's also a Quad 1 opportunity for the home team.

It's almost inevitable that a couple of teams will crash and burn, going 6-12 or worse against that gauntlet and missing the NCAA tournament as a result. But in our Christmas Eve projection of the field, we had 13 of the SEC's 16 teams in, plus two more among our first three out. Only South Carolina isn't a serious threat to dance at the moment, and it's getting difficult to imagine a scenario in which fewer than 12 SEC teams make the tourney.

Loser: Arizona Wildcats

There are a handful of preseason AP Top 25 teams who have fallen well short of expectation, saddled with quite a few early losses.

Preseason No. 10 Arizona is the only one that hasn't beaten at least one opponent worth a darn, though.

That's not for lack of opportunity. The Wildcats are sitting at 6-5 with losses to Duke, UCLA, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and West Virginia. That's five Quad 1 games for a team that has yet to win a Quad 1 or Quad 2 game this season.

Against the Badgers, Arizona couldn't buy a stop on defense, allowing 103 points in a game that had a combined total of 87 free-throw attempts.

Against the Bruins, Arizona couldn't buy a bucket on offense, shooting 2-for-16 from three-point range and committing 22 turnovers en route to a 57-54 loss.

The good news for all the #BearDown fans in the audience is that the predictive metrics still adore the Wildcats. They're 26th in the NET, 24th on KenPom, 14th on Torvik and seventh in BPI. Couple that with the fact that they have suffered no remotely bad losses and they could skyrocket comfortably back into the at-large mix with just a few quality wins.

The bad news is they have 20 Big 12 games still to come, including two each against Iowa State, Texas Tech and Baylor. And with five losses already on the ledger, Arizona likely needs to go at least 11-9, perhaps even 12-8 in league play, simply to avoid having too many Ls come Selection Sunday.

Given how they've fared thus far against quality opponents, good luck with that.

Winner: Jeremiah Fears, Oklahoma

For the most part, the first two months of the college basketball season have done nothing to impact the projected lottery for the upcoming draft. A little bit of shuffling within that group, sure, but of the top 14 that our Jonathan Wasserman had one week before the season began, 12 were still penciled into the top 14 of his Dec. 17 mock draft.

One of the two newcomers is Georgia's Asa Newell, who has ascended slightly since opening the year projected for the No. 23 pick. But the much more noteworthy riser has been Oklahoma's Jeremiah Fears, who wasn't even projected to be drafted two months ago.

Nor should he have been, given how consistently reclassifying lead guards have struggled as freshmen over the years.

Fears has hit the ground running like few before him, though, averaging 18.0 PPG, 4.7 APG, 3.4 RPG and 2.2 SPG in leading the Sooners to their 12-0 start.

It most certainly hasn't been stat-padding against weak competition, either. Fears went for 20 points against Providence, 26 against Arizona and 30 in the come-from-behind victory over Michigan, including the game-winning four-point play with about 10 seconds to go.

He's nowhere near the volume shooter that Trae Young was as a freshman at Oklahoma in 2017-18—in part because Fears has a much more capable and more experienced supporting cast than Young had—but he is making a similar overall impact on a team that wasn't projected to dance before the season began.

Loser: Creighton Bluejays

Let's start with the good news here: Creighton did score a huge nonconference win over Kansas, putting the Bluejays on the short list of teams with at least one win over a school currently ranked in the AP Top 10. Should they manage to buttress that big W with a victory over St. John's or Marquette next week, things might start looking up in Omaha.

Unfortunately, the star of that win over the Jayhawks was Pop Isaacs, who underwent season-ending hip surgery not long after that 27-point performance.

Even with Isaacs, the Bluejays were looking iffy for what would be a fifth consecutive trip to the NCAA tournament, sitting at 6-3 with losses to Nebraska, San Diego State and Texas A&M.

But in their third game without Isaacs, Creighton was ruthlessly embarrassed in a 24-point loss at Georgetown, falling to 7-5 for the year with just the one quality win.

They did rally a few days later for one of their patented "seemingly cannot miss from three-point range at home" victories over Villanova. However, even that 86-79 win was closer than it should have been, considering they shot 14-for-25 from distance while committing a combined total of 15 fouls and turnovers.

Despite opening the season ranked 15th in the AP poll, it's looking unlikely that this shorthanded Creighton team will be participating in the NCAA tournament.

Winner: Bennett Stirtz, Ben McCollum and the Drake Bulldogs

Only three men's college basketball programs entered the current campaign on a streak of at least four consecutive seasons with at least 25 wins: Gonzaga, Houston and the Drake Bulldogs.

As one of four remaining undefeated teams in the country, it sure is looking like Drake will be extending that streak.

Not much was expected from this team this year, though. In fact, with the father-son duo of Darian and Tucker DeVries taking their talents to West Virginia this past offseason, the Bulldogs—who had to replace both their head coach and all six of their leading scorers—were projected for fifth place in the Missouri Valley Conference media day poll.

They did most of that replacing via D-II Northwest Missouri State.

Ben McCollum had been the coach of those Bearcats for 15 years, winning four national championships. And he arrived at Drake with much more than just that coaching pedigree. He also brought with him Bennett Stirtz, Mitch Mascari, Daniel Abreu and Isaiah Jackson, otherwise read as four-fifths of Drake's starting lineup.

That D-II quartet, JUCO transfer Tavion Banks and Wyoming transfer Cam Manyawu have been quite the force for the still-undefeated Bulldogs, with Stirtz playing almost every minute of every game against D-I competition, and Mascari not far behind him.

Drake plays a very physical, yet snail-paced breed of basketball, Virginia-like in their obsession with draining clock on offense, yet extremely un-Virginia-like with their propensity to both draw and commit fouls. It's an unusual combination, but there's no denying the results thus far.

Drake blitzed through Miami, Florida Atlantic and Vanderbilt, each by a double-digit margin to win the Charleston Classic. It also won in overtime at Kansas State. And we shall see if anyone in the MVC can stop the Bulldogs from running the table.

Loser: Most of the ACC

Remember all that SEC praise from earlier?

A whole lot of that league's dominance has come at the expense of the ACC, which presently only has Duke in the AP Top 25.

In 34 tries, the ACC won just four games against the SEC: Clemson's upset of Kentucky, Duke's home win over Auburn and both Pittsburgh and SMU beating LSU on a neutral court. And 19 of the 30 losses were by double digits, so it hasn't exactly been a series of close calls.

It's not just the SEC wreaking havoc on the ACC, though.

Overall, the ACC has gone 10-50 against Quad 1, plus 19 Quad 2 losses, seven Quad 3 losses and six Quad 4 losses.

Duke is obviously quite good and would arguably be a No. 1 seed if the NCAA tournament began today. Pittsburgh and SMU have been pleasant surprises, the latter searching for its first NCAA tournament appearance since 2017, and maybe even its first NCAA tournament win since 1988. Clemson is also looking good for a bid.

Beyond that quartet, though, is an awful lot of disappointment.

None of North Carolina's five losses was remotely a bad loss, but how often does North Carolina have five losses before Christmas? (Almost never. Best I can tell, it has happened just twice in school history, when the Tar Heels went 14-19 in 2019-20 and when they went 8-20 in 2001-02.)

Wake Forest was supposed to be a tournament team, but it already has four losses and might have the worst offense in this entire conference.

But the biggest disappointment has been Miami, which is 4-8 despite playing just six games thus far against KenPom top 200 opponents. After suffering home losses to Charleston Southern and Mount St. Mary's, things have gotten so awful for the Hurricanes that news broke on Thursday morning of Jim Larrañaga's plan to resign, effective immediately.

Couple that with Tony Bennett abruptly retiring from Virginia a few weeks before the regular season began—not to mention still getting used to Cal and Stanford being in this league now—and it is strange, strange times these days in the ACC.

Winner: Oregon Ducks

Of the teams presently ranked No. 17 or better in the AP Top 25, only two did not begin the year as a ranked team.

One of those is Jeremiah Fears and the Oklahoma Sooners, who we've already discussed as one of the biggest winners of the season.

The other is the Oregon Ducks, who were the surprise winners of the Players Era Festival last month, consecutively defeating Texas A&M, San Diego State and Alabama.

After that incredible run in Las Vegas, the Ducks catapulted into the rankings at No. 12, and they have since inched their way up to No. 9.

Oregon is one of five Big Ten teams in that Top 25, but the only one ranked higher than 18th. Thus, from at least that one perspective, the Ducks will enter the new year as the team to beat in their new conference.

It's hard to believe this is the same team that almost lost to Portland one week into the season, and that had to erase a 12-point second-half deficit for a come-from-behind victory at Oregon State nine days after that.

But with former 5-star big man Nate Bittle averaging 13.8 points, 8.6 rebounds and 1.8 blocks per game and finally living up to that recruiting hype in his fourth season in Eugene, the Ducks really have something brewing.

Bittle is one of five players averaging at least 10 points per game for a team that goes a strong eight deep—a team that would be undefeated were it not for Dylan Andrews hitting a buzzer-beating three-pointer for UCLA at the end of what was a disastrous night for TJ Bamba (zero points, three fouls, five turnovers).

We've spent much of the season (and preseason) talking about the lack of a legitimate Final Four threat from the Big Ten, but Oregon might be that team.

Loser: Rutgers Scarlet Knights

As far as individual statistics for the dynamic duo of Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper are concerned, things have gone pretty well according to plan in Piscataway. Each freshman phenom has been as good as—if not better than—was advertised heading into the season, still all but guaranteed to be top-five draft picks in about six months' time.

For Rutgers as a whole, though, yikes.

The Scarlet Knights are doing quite the college basketball impersonation of Major League Baseball's 2022 Los Angeles Angels, when both Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani finished top eight in the AL MVP vote...for a team that finished 16 games below .500.

Harper is top five in the nation in scoring with 23.3 points and 4.2 assists per game, while Bailey is putting up 17.6 points and 7.6 rebounds on average. Yet, Rutgers is 7-5 with embarrassing losses to Kennesaw State and Princeton. It also needed some last-second drama to prevail against both Notre Dame and Seton Hall, neither of which is even remotely in the at-large conversation right now.

No one else on the roster is averaging so much as eight points per game, and the trademarked 'pounding nails' defense that they've played in recent seasons under Steve Pikiell has been nonexistent this year.

Rutgers was ranked 25th in the preseason AP poll because of its two young stars, but the Scarlet Knights might not even finish top 15 in the Big Ten.

Winner: Chaz Lanier, Tennessee

Auburn's Johni Broome is the early favorite for National Player of the Year, but we already knew he could be the star for a title contender.

The more surprising development in the battle for SEC supremacy has been Chaz Lanier taking Dalton Knecht's place as the go-to scorer for an extremely good, still-undefeated Tennessee team.

It wasn't until last year that Lanier was even a serious weapon for North Florida. Through his first three seasons with the Ospreys, he had scored in double figures a grand total of six times. He was eighth on that team in scoring in 2022-23.

After a breakout campaign in 2023-24 of nearly 20 points per game, he passed on the NBA draft, transferred to Tennessee and is putting up similar numbers under a drastically brighter spotlight.

In six games against major conference opponents, Lanier has averaged 22.5 points, shooting a cumulative 26-for-51 from three-point range in those contests. He has scored at least 17 points in eight consecutive games, and he shares the sugar just often enough to keep opponents from relentlessly double-teaming him.

For now, at least. There might come a point where teams don't even bother defending Jahmai Mashack—who has more steals (30) than made field goals (23)—if that's what it takes to stifle Lanier's three-point barrage.

Knecht hit 93 triples for Tennessee last season, but Lanier is on pace for closer to 150, averaging just a shade under eight attempts per game. And if he continues to shoot like that, maybe this is finally the year that the Volunteers make it to a Final Four.