Four years ago the Baylor Men’s Basketball team received its first ever No. 1 ranking (I wrote about it here!) and while that 2017 squad was incredible to watch (going from unranked to No. 1 with a 15-0 record), this 2021 group is almost scary good. Most analysts and rival school fans assumed the Bears would struggle after losing Jared Butler, Davion Mitchell, MaCio Teague, and Mark Vital from their National Championship team (can you believe that happened this year?) but even with an almost all fresh group of starters, Baylor somehow looks just as good if not better than the winners who took all! After soundly crushing then-ranked No. 6 Villanova, 57-36, on Sunday and then-ranked No. 1 Purdue lost to Rutgers on a buzzer beater, the Bears earned their first unanimous Associated Press No. 1 rating (taking all 61 first-place votes) in program history yesterday! Following the release of the AP Top 25 the Bears also placed No. 1 in the Coaches Poll, however 2 of 32 votes for first place went to Duke and Alabama. Baylor currently has the nation’s longest active win streak with 15 consecutive victories and for the past 35-straight weeks, they’ve been ranked in the top 10 in the country. The No. 1 Bears are one of just seven undefeated teams in the country at 9-0 along with No. 8 Arizona (9-0), No. 10 USC (10-0), No. 11 Iowa State (10-0 somehow), No. 19 LSU (10-0), No. 23 Colorado State (10-0), and San Francisco (10-0). They’ve recorded victories over Incarnate Word (87-60), Nicholls State (89-60), Central Arkansas (92-47), Stanford (86-48), Arizona State (75-63), VCU (69-61), Michigan State (75-58), UAPB (99-54), and most recently Villanova. The Bears’ wins against Arizona State, VCU, and Michigan State led to their Battle 4 Atlantis tournament title (joining Villanova as the only teams with two of the tournaments’ championships). Although the Bears suffered a great loss losing four of their best athletes after last season’s end, this No. 1 team isn’t going anywhere!
