Taking a look into college basketball and where teams are at thus far in the season

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That's T-R-A-F-A-L-G-A-R.com slash unlock. Gary Parrish, CBSSports.com, Ion College Basketball Podcast is joining us on the Adam Gold Show. Before I talk to you about basketball, do you feel left out this time of the year because everybody just wants to talk about the Super Bowl and we don't give you a chance to talk about the Super Bowl? Well, because I have a two-hour show five days a week, I talk about Super Bowl, Grammys, whatever I want every single day. I have other outlets where I can share opinions about whatever I want, but typically, yes, I'm going to be a guest on somebody's show and it's less Chiefs 49ers and more, say, Carolina Duke.

Who have you got in the game, by the way, on Sunday? I'll take the Chiefs if only because, you know, my little guys, it's sort of interesting watching them grow up. We don't live in a market with an NFL franchise. I guess technically the Tennessee Titans would be our best option, but my kids don't care about anything in Nashville. But they've really latched on to Patrick Mahomes. It reminds me of how when I was growing up, every young person had a Michael Jordan jersey. I think now young people have really, like, you're going to look up in 20 years and there's going to be millions of 25-year-olds all over the country in every state that call themselves Kansas City Chiefs fans and that is because of the stardom. At least it's mostly because of the stardom of Patrick Mahomes.

So my little guys, they'll be in their Mahomes jerseys and I guess I'll root for them. Did they like Taylor Swift? They love Taylor Swift.

They like Travis Kelce. You know, they started playing Madden and that's sort of how they got into it and then YouTube. YouTube is such a big deal, but it's just, it's interesting to see because my kids don't watch Sports Center, right? They don't even turn on, you know, televisions in any sort of traditional way. They're just constantly on iPads and YouTube and it's interesting to see what infiltrates their world.

Like, how do they find out about things? And clearly Patrick Mahomes has reached a level of superstardom where he breaks through in a way that, you know, different other professional athletes do not. Like, I don't think my kids have, well, they do because they play Madden, but this is my point. Under normal circumstances, they would have no idea who Brock Purdy is, but they are very aware of Patrick Mahomes. Yes, we're all aware of Patrick Mahomes. Like, if you watch any TV, because of the commercials, because he's in basically every commercial now, and so is Travis Kelce.

I would argue that Kelce might be in more commercials than Patrick Mahomes. Gary Parrish, all right, we'll talk basketball. Eye on College Basketball podcast, if you are a fan of college basketball, that should be a must stop, like, several times a week. So let's get to the game Saturday night. I do want your take on the game itself, but I want to start big picture first. Because there was some, I don't know why, but there was some thought that maybe North Carolina, because the ACC is not vintage, that Carolina isn't a true national championship contender, which I disagree with. I think they absolutely are. What's your view of the Tar Heels nationally?

Well, let's just start with the big question. Is North Carolina a national championship contender? I don't think there's any doubt. I mean, you look at the roster, and the roster suggests they should be. You look at the resume, and I think it's a number one seed resume at this point. I would have Carolina as a number one seed along with Houston and UConn and Purdue right now.

You know, they looked apart. They really handled Duke with very few issues over the weekend. The slip up at Georgia Tech, obviously you don't want that happening, but it was just a one point loss on the road.

Those types of things do often happen. But, I mean, top 25 in adjusted offensive efficiency, top 10 in adjusted defensive efficiency. They shoot it okay enough from three. They've got an incredible point guard and an accomplished and experienced big who went for 25 and 10. I don't know that I'll pick Carolina to win the title, but can they?

Absolutely they can. There's no question. All right. Now, again, big picture, and it's not always great to judge somebody on your, not your worst day, but certainly not a day that you want put in the time capsule.

Because I think just listening to John Shire after the game, he was disappointed in one major element of the game. What are your thoughts on Duke? I think Duke's good, but that's where I would stop it. I think Duke has the potential to be great, but I don't think Duke is great, and I don't think Duke has been great at any point this season.

I mean, we're pretty deep into this thing now. It's February 5th, and Duke is five and five in the first two quadrants. Like just five and five in the first two quadrants. You know, for some context, if you look at Purdue right now, Purdue is 15 and two in the first two quadrants. Duke is five and five, and that's what separates the great from the good. Um, UConn is clearly great. I think Houston is clearly great. Kansas is getting great. Tennessee is right there on the verge of that. Duke is right now looks like a really talented basketball team that's closer to good than great.

It doesn't mean they can't get there, but, you know, again, it's February 5th, and I don't think there's been any moment this season where they quite looked the way you need to look when you're supposed to be competing for the things that the Duke team was supposed to compete for. Gary Parrish, CBS Sports, Ion College Basketball Podcast. He does that with Matt Norlander. We talk to Kanata Edwards, not in the scribe, all the time. He's a good friend, and I know he does very well for you guys.

So I love the way it all comes together. The league, well, let me go to the game first. John Shire was more concerned about the way his team competed or the way they didn't compete in the game. I think Carolina did a lot of that to Duke because of the way Carolina competed. But how did you view the game? What was, in your opinion, the element that Carolina had more than Duke had? Well, just to the simplest of terms, I just think Carolina is the better basketball team. And when Carolina is the better basketball team at home, I wasn't surprised by the result. I wasn't surprised that Carolina won the game. I wasn't surprised that Carolina won the game nearly by double digits and controlled it for pretty much the majority of those 40 minutes.

You know, I'll let John speak to whether his players showed up or not competed or not, but clearly with his post in comments that suggested that whether it's true or not, he didn't believe that it was true. Their biggest, bigger issue, though, was that, you know, Carolina came out and shot above 37% from three and then got a massive, you know, sort of a throwback performance from Armando Baycock, 10 of 13 from the field, 25 points, 10 rebounds. He had not been doing that to people for much of the season.

That's his first 25-10 game in nearly three months. So I think the main thing that Duke ran into on Saturday night is the main thing anybody's going to run into when they go to the Dean Smith Center this season. You are not only on the road, but you're on the road against a team that's better than you.

And that's a hard game to win. It doesn't mean that I don't think Duke will finish top two in the ACC because I do. It doesn't mean that I don't think Duke can advance deep in the bracket once they get there because the roster is, you know, filled with potential. But right now, Duke is not a comparable basketball team to North Carolina, and I thought that was on display, you know, a couple nights ago. The ACC is viewed as, I know this is the way people like to talk about it. The Mountain West Conference will have more NCAA tournament teams than the ACC. Whether that's true or not, when we finally get to the second week in March, or the third week in March when the tournament begins, remains to be seen.

But most brackets have four, maybe five Mountain West Conference teams, and they've got three in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Without saying, are we serious? Let me just say, are we serious? With expert itineraries where everything is taken care of. With Trafalgar, your money goes further, and so do you. Unlock your best self. Discover more at Trafalgar.com slash unlock.

That's T-R-A-F-A-L-G-A-R dot com slash unlock. It might shake out that way. It doesn't mean that the Mountain West is a better league than the ACC. It just means that the Mountain West might have more NCAA tournament caliber teams than the ACC. The ACC was still grayed out as a better league, because the middle and the bottom is going to be better than the middle and the bottom of the Mountain West. At the tip top, I do think it's a reasonable opinion to hold that the Mountain West has more good teams than the ACC has, and that's a real problem for the ACC. And some of it is because, you know, we talked about this before, like Syracuse is one of the biggest basketball brands in the country, but they're not good. Louisville is one of the biggest basketball brands in the country. They're not good. You need some of these big brands that should make people wonder if you can be the best basketball league in the country, which is something people have talked about over the years with the ACC.

You need them to be excellent. Virginia is just okay. That's another problem. You know, it's not enough for just Duke and North Carolina to be in the top 20 of the net. They don't have anybody else in the top 35. That's a problem, and it's why on Selection Sunday, they won't get as many teams as you think that they, or some people might think that they should, and it's why the league has been considered down for multiple years now.

But isn't it just Gary Parrish, ION College Basketball Podcast, CBS Sports is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show. Isn't it really just a math problem that can be gamed? Now, I'm not necessarily calling into question the net here, although it's the same thing. But back, I don't know how many years ago this goes, the Missouri Valley Conference had gamed the RPI system to where they could create a lot more top 25 or top 50 wins in the RPI based on how they formulated non-conference schedules, which builds up better power ratings as you go, you know, better RPI numbers as you get into conference play, and then you just start chewing each other up and it doesn't hurt you as much. Isn't it basically a math problem that maybe the ACC has been late to figuring out, which is on themselves more than anybody else anyway? I do remember what you're talking about with the Missouri Valley and the RPI, and I remember that being a big topic of conversation.

I do believe that it is possible to manipulate some of these computer numbers. And I do think that past success leads to future success because quite literally past success from previous seasons is still a part of the algorithm in some of these predictive metrics, including Kenpop. So if you are good one year, you're set up to be good the next and vice versa is also true. But ultimately, I think the main thing is the main thing and that you have to be good.

You've got to get stuff done outside your league. I don't believe the Big 12 is grading out as the best league in the country simply because they figured out how to game the system. I think the Big 12 has more good teams than anybody else in the country, and the byproduct of that is strong computer numbers for the league. So I think there might be a smarter way for some ACC programs to approach non-league scheduling in the spirit of trying to build strong computer numbers. But the most important thing is still the best way to be good in the computers is to recruit good players, develop them, and then have great teams. There's no doubt about that. And you point out Syracuse and Louisville.

I keep saying this to everybody who would listen. If Duke and North Carolina are not great, the league automatically looks down, just like if Ohio State or Michigan were not great. The Big 10 would automatically appear to be not as good, although I would argue that the Big 10 in football is a house of cards after you get through Ohio State and Michigan.

But that's just an editorial comment by me. But this year, it looks like North Carolina looks to be excellent. Duke looks to be at least good. I think Virginia is probably better than you think Virginia is. I think they went through it for a while on the road, but it looks to me like they've kind of figured it out.

And my money would be on Tony Bennett to figure out. Final question. Why doesn't past performance in the NCAA tournament seem to matter? Because while all of these things were going on, while the ACC was getting four teams in or far less than the other power leagues, they keep putting teams in the Final Four. Why doesn't that matter? Because I think.

I think what smart analytics driven person would tell you is that, um. It is better to evaluate basketball teams over. Three or four months as opposed to over a three week tournament that the randomness of the NCAA tournament is what makes it one of the biggest events in the world. And that's what makes it where if you are hiring or firing people or making big decisions based off of what somebody does in a single elimination tournament, you're probably taking a little bit of a short sighted approach. So I. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Like like, I don't think that ACC is just getting lucky to get teams into the final four elite eight while the big 10 is struggling to do those things. So I think it's a little bit different. But largely, I think what?

What? Say Ken Pomeroy or Bart Torvick or any of these people who really look at the data and study it and study it and pour through it. They would tell you that it is much more appropriate to determine whether somebody is a good or bad team based off of 30 games or 35 games as opposed to just a three week tournament we put at the very end of the tournament.

So I think a small sample size is that is never a good way of discussing it real quick. Ken Palm or Bart Torvick, which I call free Ken Palm, which that's exactly right. It's funny, like, you know, Torvick is there for people who don't want to subscribe to me. I don't care. It's $20 a year. Like I don't care. Like it's Kim Kim.

It's Kim's business. I don't care, but I've always thought like he could charge $100 a year and I would still have to buy $500 a year. I would still have to buy it. So I think he could. He could probably increase his prices at some point.

I use them both daily. The main difference between the two is that you can at Kim, I mean at Bart Torvick, you can go sort data and like really if you take this person off this team, what happens then? What happens next? What happens next? What happens again? So like the new like every week, there's like a new big one. People want to look at. So it's like what now? The new one is what is Kansas with Johnny Murphy in the starting lineup? Because they've made an adjustment there and take it off at Ken Palm. You can't really determine that.

But if you take the date where Johnny Murphy. Became a starter and then run the data through the past seven games that he's been starting and what that will spit out is that over the past seven games, Kansas is performing like a top three team in the country right there with somebody like that. But if I ever is interested in just better understanding, you know, not necessarily the sport of basketball or the game of basketball, but certainly all of the data that's available to help determine who is good, who is not and how these teams play and what they are good at and what they're not good at these resources are really worth your time. Yeah, they are tremendous. I just joke about Bart Orvick being freaking bomb.

It means sort of this dude. Can I get a can I get a metric on what Carolina is with Hubert Davis in a blazer? Because I think they've been great since he decided, you know, what Dean Smith wore a sport jacket for every game. I wear a sport jacket for every game and I'm kind of I'm kind of team sport code. I wish I wish more coaches would bring it back.

But that's just because they're wasting a lot of good clothes. I think I I do like the the the fact that we've gotten away from coaches must be in suits on the side lot for every game. But I will tell you, there are times where you see a coach walk in and he's literally wearing a T shirt and it just looks a little less than it than it than it used to look. But for Hubert, listen, if the sport coach working and that's how he's got a team position to win an ACC title and and perhaps get a one seed into the tournament and keep keep wearing the sport coats every game. And if you got a lucky one, you know where that one more than the others because whatever he's doing right now, it seems to be working and I'm super happy for him because I know he wasn't dealing with job pressure coming into this year.

I don't think but after going through what they went through last season, people do start to ask big questions about you and he seems to be providing suitable answers for those right now. Gary parish at Gary parish CBS on Twitter. I on college basketball podcast. Hey, thank you very much, my friend. Appreciate your time. Anytime buddy. Appreciate you having me.