College basketball is back with a bang, with an opening day that started at midnight in a small gym in South Carolina and concluded with a Hawai‘i game that tipped just as the calendar flipped to Tuesday on the East Coast. While many of the nearly 200 games were blowouts (we’ll get to that later), there were some needle-moving results: The preseason No. 1 team got tested, a Top 25 team got knocked off by an unranked squad and one of the biggest upsets by point spread in college hoops history went down in the SEC. 

Here are five overreactions from the season’s first full 24 hours: 

Florida validates its No. 1 ranking 

The No. 1 spot in the preseason AP poll has become a bit of a kiss of death in recent years; over the last decade, just one (2021 Gonzaga) made the Final Four, while five didn’t even escape the NCAA tournament’s second weekend. But in a showdown with a very talented Miami team that headlined the opening night slate, Florida showed it has staying power at the top of the polls. 

The Gators’ frontcourt looks as dominant as ever. Thomas Haugh was the best player on the floor with 19 points, and the Alex Condon/Rueben Chinyelu duo largely silenced Miami’s offense going to the rim. This was billed as a battle of two of the nation’s best frontcourts (especially once Miami got Malik Reneau eligible for a fifth year via lawsuit), and Florida clearly won that war. 

But the story for Florida last season was its three-point shooting. The Gators were 16–0 last season when shooting 32% or better from distance and just 11–8 otherwise. The buzz out of Gainesville was that Todd Golden felt his team should be much improved from distance, and shooting 11 of 26 from three in the opener helps validate that. Five threes came from the Gators’ bench unit, another question mark coming in. 

Other teams might have the ceiling to pass Florida eventually, but the Gators felt like as safe a bet to be a title contender as any in recent history in the preseason. Night 1 backed that up in a big way. 

UCLA might be back 

It has felt in some ways like the UCLA program has been stuck in neutral ever since Jaylen Clark’s late-season Achilles tear in 2023 that derailed a team that had national title upside. There has been quiet optimism in Westwood that this season’s team might be primed for a breakthrough, and the Bruins made an early statement with a neutral-court win over Arizona to open the season. UCLA controlled this one most of the way, then held on late after the Wildcats surged back to within one point with just over three minutes to play.

Holding Arizona under 37% from the field felt like a major statement, particularly after Mick Cronin’s team struggled defensively at times last season. Freshman Swiss Army knife Joe Philon, billed as an impactful defender, was a ridiculous +26 in his 12 minutes. And Arizona looked largely baffled offensively outside of Ivan Kharchenkov, who exploded for over half of the Wildcats’ 75 points. 

On the other end, Texas Tech transfer Jaylen Petty made a strong early impression with 13 points and seven assists, providing the Bruins with another shotmaker in the backcourt they desperately needed. 

Without overreacting too much to one-game sample sizes, UCLA feels like a team with the potential to contend with the best in the Big Ten. And if that’s the case, we could see the Bruins playing deep into March.

Penny Hardaway’s big bet pays off 

It’s no secret that Hardaway entered the season under significant pressure to win to keep his job. But Hardaway wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, even backstopping more than $2 million of the Tigers’ roster budget for 2026–27 with his own money should he fail to raise it himself, and that investment paid off in a major way with an upset win over Iowa State to open the season. And the Tigers did it without arguably their best player in 24-year-old big man Nemanja Popović, who is required to sit out the first six games of the season as a condition of his eligibility being granted by the NCAA.

This is a Memphis team light on big names; its roster isn’t stocked with the former five-star recruits or high-profile transfers who have often defined the Hardaway era. But the Tigers are experienced (their top six in minutes were all in at least their fourth college season) and seem to have found some gems in the backcourt. Northwestern transfer Jayden Reid and SEMO transfer Luke Almodovar combined for 44 points, cutting up an Iowa State defense that has annually been one of the nation’s best. 

The nonconference slate is far more important for Memphis than most teams given the dearth of résumé-building opportunities available to the Tigers while playing in the American. Hardaway took on a murderer’s row of an early season schedule to account for that, but winning without Popović figured to be a huge hurdle. To get a needle-moving win like this away from home could be the difference in the Tigers’ season.

BYU’s offense is Kevin Young’s best yet—even without AJ Dybantsa

It’s hard to believe that BYU’s offense could be better this season than it was a year ago, when it was built around a potential franchise-changing NBA talent in Dybantsa. But after the way the Cougars torched the nets in the second half against Ohio State on Monday, it doesn’t feel like such a big overreaction. BYU scored better than 1.7 points per possession and scored on nearly 80% of its trips in the second half to rally past Ohio State in Salt Lake City. 

Rob Wright III looks like one of the nation’s best point guards; he put on an electric shotmaking display with 33 points on just 15 shots. But even on days Wright isn’t dominating, the Cougars figure to put opposing defenses in all sorts of binds with the amount of three-point shooting they can put on the floor. Michigan State transfer Jaxon Kohler is such a difficult cover at center with his ability to stretch the defense and handle on the perimeter, and they surround him with snipers like Collin Chandler, Tyler Betsey and Bruce Branch III. Ohio State looked far from a juggernaut defensively, but it was still an incredibly impressive second half for the Cougars in one of the best games of the day. 

Growing pains incoming for Michael Malone, North Carolina 

It was an inauspicious debut for Malone at North Carolina, with many of the Tar Heel faithful white-knuckling it until the closing moments in an eight-point victory over Western Carolina. North Carolina never trailed in the game, but spent much of the second half locked in a one-to-two-possession game before a late 13–2 run sealed it. 

Getting outrebounded 41–32 by a SoCon foe is less than ideal. It’d be less concerning if North Carolina hadn’t gotten outrebounded 36–30 by Charlotte in an exhibition last week and bludgeoned by 22 on the glass against Indiana earlier in October. In a time in the sport when the best teams are going all-in on size and physicality, the Heels are seriously lacking in that regard. And early returns from the Heels’ portal pickups in the backcourt have been just O.K. thus far. 

Is it a stretch to say North Carolina will miss the tournament (even an expanded 76-team one) in Malone’s first year? For now, yes. But this is clearly a flawed Heels group that right now fails the eye test as an upper-tier ACC squad.

Tip-ins 

• East Texas A&M closed between a 28.5- and 30.5-point underdog Monday vs. Oklahoma … and somehow beat the Sooners outright. Perhaps more sobering is realizing that the Sooners’ roster budget isn’t far off from the $17.5 million that East Texas A&M spent to operate its entire athletic department in 2025. That one will hurt for Porter Moser, who entered the year under some pressure to win. 

• Gonzaga won the game, but Purdue should feel better about itself after seeing junior big man Daniel Jacobsen put up 22 points and hold his own against one of the best frontcourts in the country. The 7'4" junior may be finally putting it together at the perfect time.

• Penn State hitched its wagon to 23-year-old Croatian forward Roko Prkačin, a former NBA hopeful whose prospect status fizzled in recent years playing professionally in Europe. He had a remarkably impressive debut with 28 points on 12-of-14 shooting in just 20 minutes, although his free throw shooting form is grotesque. 

• Former elite recruit Isaiah Miranda has bounced around, now on his fifth college stop at Grambling State. He entered Monday having scored just 84 points across 23 career games, but had 29 points on 10-of-12 shooting to knock off Northern Illinois in a game that tipped off around 3 a.m. ET as part of The Field of 68’s fabulous marathon to open the season. Perhaps he needs to play all his games in the middle of the night! 

• And finally, a plea to college coaches to get the non–Division I games off the schedule. Sixty-three squads opened their season against non-D-I foes, and the D-I teams went 63–0 in those games with an average margin of victory a hair over 40 points. The biggest margin? D-I newbie West Florida’s 85-point win over Southeastern Baptist. Meanwhile, Albany wound up in a surprise dogfight with D-III Rhode Island College, winning by just seven points. It’d be one thing if teams filled in their schedules with the occasional good Division II team, many of whom are just as good as the dregs of D-I. But these walkovers against NAIA, NCCAA and other fringe institutions are a waste of everyone’s two hours outside of being a meaningless record-padding exercise for coaches.

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