Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas. Other than Duke, where have the other teams gone?

It’s pretty easy to answer; they’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs as teams such as Auburn (25-1), Michigan State (25-4), St. Johns (22-6) and Ohio State (21-6) have risen to the challenge to replace them, for this year in college basketball anyway.

Filling out the NCAA Tournament brackets in March will be a tough task. Normally I do well in the pools, but this is not a normal year.

On a normal year, if you picked any two of the dynasty teams mentioned above for the Final Four, you were in good shape.

However, UNC hasn’t been this “off” since 1991-92 when they lost 10 games, a travesty for that school. Currently, they have only seven, but being ranked 14th is a sin on Tobacco Road.

Kentucky is in the same position. The defending national champs (which is a fluke considering they weren’t that great last year) have looked anything like it, with seven losses. They have the same team for the most part, but after their seven losses, have finally dropped out of the top 10 in the polls.

Kansas is just Kansas. Always good in the regular season and not the tournament, when it counts – but suck in the regular season this year.

They are unranked for the first time in over 100 weeks and they lost a lot of people to the NBA. Paul Pierce and Raef Lafrentz are gone, and now they’re left with Eric Chenowith and Ryan Robertson. Wow! I don’t see a national championship in the near future, at least until Nick Collison joins the team next year to save the day.

All this leaves Duke, the other giant in college basketball. They are undefeated in the Atlantic Coast Conference and have steamrolled nearly everyone in that conference.

Of course, that conference is down this year with the loss of players like Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter of the Tar Heels. If they were still playing with the Heels, Duke would have one loss in the conference. However, the conference has three ranked teams, which is still pretty good.

What about the Cinderellas? Auburn hasn’t been competitive for many years, yet their only loss this season is to Kentucky.

They’re ranked second in the nation with a 25-1 record and are an underrated, very solid team who routs opponents in the meantime. The Southeastern Conference is usually one of the toughest around, and if things hold up and they fare well in the SEC Tournament, a one seed in the tournament is a guarantee.

Less spectacular but nonetheless good are the Michigan State Spartans.

With Mateen Cleaves running the show and a few pep talks from Magic Johnson, the Spartans are a top-five team. They’ve played some close games in the Big Ten, but they’ve had some blow-outs as well (both games against Iowa).

They’re 25-4 and have to be the odds-on favorite to win the Big Ten Tournament. If that happens, they could get a No. 1 seed in the Big Dance but will be no worse than a two seed.

St. Johns is also a surprisingly good team. In a conference I’ve always thought was a cheesecake league (Big East), the Red Storm are taking it by storm.

Unable to overthrow Connecticut, they are second in the conference and ranked seventh in the nation despite six losses. That is probably a result of a tough schedule or the highly-acclaimed (NOT!!) RPI ratings which are about as popular and confusing as the Bowl Championship Series rankings.

You can also make a statement for Big East foe Miami (FL). The Hurricanes are a team on the rise. They’ve slowly gotten better over the past few years and now are better than respectable. They beat the Connecticut Huskies on their home floor, a place where they’d lost only nine times in the last nine years.

Back to the Big Ten. The Ohio State Buckeyes have made one hell of an improvement. Winning only one conference game last year, they are suddenly ranked 10th in the land at 21-6 and will contend for the Big Ten title.

They are also probably a three seed come tournament time and deserve it. They’ve gotten stellar play from Michael Redd and Scoonie Penn and have defeated a lot of good teams this year.

Notice that most of these teams don’t have player-of-the-year candidates or first team All-Americans. One can wonder how these teams have done it.

Well, it’s not really that complicated. They’ve done it through great teamwork and hard work. They are the “middle class” of the college teams, getting by through determination.

The play of these kinds of teams can only help recruiting for them and they’ll probably get better before they get worse.

So where are the Tar Heels, Wildcats (Kentucky), Purdue Boilermakers and the Kansas Jayhawks? Never underestimate these teams when it comes to crunch time, but they are simply having down years.

Duke looks like the favorite to take home the trophy when the 64 teams are narrowed to one, but there will probably be more upsets in this year’s Big Dance than normal, because this is not a normal year.

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Chad Drury is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown.