10 key questions that could determine the 2024 national champion - ESPN

The biggest question entering the 2022-23 college basketball centered around North Carolina. Were the 2022 NCAA tournament Tar Heels a sign of things to come that season? The answer was a definitive no — and it ended up being the top storyline for most of the year.

On the eve of a new campaign, there's no single clear-cut season-defining question that will shape the 2024 national championship discussion. There are dozens of intriguing title-related storylines, though, from Duke and Kansas at the top of the rankings to Big East supremacy to Zach Edey to Florida Atlantic running it back to the Final Four.

Right now, everything is on paper, where it's much easier to boil down a team's potential fatal flaws to one or two specific things. That will change over the next six months, of course, but it's still worth trying to address them now.

So, here are the 10 biggest questions that will determine that national championship conversation for the 2023-24 college basketball season.

Baylor's Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua muscles in a tough and-1 bucket while being defended by two people.

In the first year of the post-Mike Krzyzewski era, it took some time for Duke to put it all together. The Blue Devils suffered some surprising losses in ACC play: at Wake Forest, a 24-point defeat to NC State, at Virginia Tech. But they then went on a six-game winning streak to end the regular season and rolled through the ACC tournament, looking like a potential Final Four sleeper. That came to an abrupt halt via their loss to Tennessee in the second round of the NCAA tournament. But now, Scheyer has reloaded and national championship expectations have been placed on his team.

Four starters are back, led by All-American Kyle Filipowski and