DURHAM, N.C. -- The only extra weight worth carrying around this time of year comes from second and third helpings at Thanksgiving dinner. The weight of expectations? In November? Let someone else lug that stuff around.

Stanford ended any chance of another undefeated season from Connecticut on Monday, claimed the top spot in one of the polls Tuesday, then promptly lost at home to aspiring contender Texas on Thursday. Kentucky rallied from a deficit against Baylor early in the week, then hung on for dear life against Central Michigan to close the week in a game in which Chippewas star Crystal Bradford didn't do all that much to torment the visitors.

Notre Dame trailed Michigan State at halftime. Tennessee keeps winning easily enough but until recently was a couple of fouls from having to recruit players from the stands. Texas A&M grinds out wins without Courtney Williams.

It isn't easy at the moment to be one of the teams people seem to expect to be on hand for the Final Four in Tampa, Florida.

Duke has been a team with those expectations in the past. And it usually buckled under them.

Oh, sure, there were always mitigating circumstances.

In three successive years, the Blue Devils ran up against Brittney Griner, Maya Moore and the Ogwumike sisters, respectively, in regional finals. Even Pat Summitt, John Wooden and Red Auerbach would have blanched at a run like that. Then the Blue Devils lost Chelsea Gray to season-ending injuries in back-to-back seasons, their misery compounded in the second instance when Alexis Jones also suffered an injury that cut short her campaign.

There were always perfectly reasonable explanations. But Duke was always watching from afar come the Final Four.

At some point, people stop expecting things of you just because of the name on the jersey.

Amid all the hubbub this past week of upsets, near misses and the hot potato of the No. 1 ranking, the Blue Devils quietly dispatched Old Dominion and Marquette, two teams squarely in the nondescript category -- not nearly bad enough to raise questions about a soft schedule but not good enough to lend the games much luster.

Against Old Dominion in her hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, this past Thursday, Duke senior Elizabeth Williams totaled 22 points, 8 rebounds and 5 blocks in 39 minutes. Coaches and teammates alike seem eager to point out that Williams is in the best shape of her life, that she dazzled on the team's mile-and-a-half conditioning run and that the injuries that plagued her in the middle two seasons of her time in Durham are distant memories.

They are eager to point out they still have one of the nation's best players, not to mention one of its best people.

"I feel that she's the best student-athlete in the country," Duke coach Joanne P. McCallie sad. "I realize we're all trying to rank kids and stuff, but I think that Elizabeth -- a pre-med major with her GPA and what she's doing, plus with her basketball ability, we want to talk about this more. We don't talk about it enough. If a player is just a great player, that's all that seems to matter.

"I don't know, I don't think there will be another Elizabeth Williams to come by in the next 10 years."

In the same game against Old Dominion in which Williams starred, fellow senior Ka'lia Johnson put up the seventh triple-double in team history with 18 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds. Redshirt freshman Rebecca Greenwell scored more points in her first three college games than any Duke player since Alana Beard. But even as the team figures out what it is and how its parts fit together, the team of which comparably little is expected will follow the lead of an almost overlooked All-American.

"Definitely get it in the post," Johnson said of the team's potential strengths. "We have threats in the post, and the more and more we hammer it in there -- I mean, as a basketball player, if I'm getting killed on the inside, I'm going to sag off inside. That's going to leave people like Becca, like Sierra [Calhoun] to hit that open shot. It's really simple, I think. Get the ball inside. If they start doubling, get the ball outside. If we start hitting, you can't stop us.

"On this team, we don't really have that Chelsea Gray flashy pass, Alexis Jones flashy passing. I mean, that's great; I love that they did that. But if we do the fundamentals and the basics, we'll be just as successful, even more successful."

Expectations will come if Duke somehow successfully navigates a schedule in the coming weeks that includes games against Texas A&M, Nebraska, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Connecticut. If not, skeptics will cast their eyes and expectations elsewhere.

After years of people waiting to see what they would be in March, the Blue Devils might not mind if people simply forget about them until then.

• If we cut through the niceties, Oklahoma State plays an inexcusable schedule. Seven of its first eight games this season are at home, almost exclusively against teams that will be fortunate to crack the RPI top 200 (four of those seven visitors didn't make the top 300 a season ago, including the teams that finished Nos. 345 and 347 out of 347).

So, although on Saturday the Cowgirls rolled over Missouri State by 41 points, it was the visit earlier in the week to North Carolina that provided the only meaningful look at the team until late December. Roshunda Johnson's 3-pointer that tied the score against the Tar Heels with less than a minute to play couldn't stave off defeat, but the sophomore's overall performance with 22 points and seven assists ought to turn heads. Handed the unenviable task of replacing Tiffany Bias this season, Johnson faded down the stretch after a promising start a season ago and ultimately totaled just one more assist than turnover. Her gaudy numbers this season (31 assists, 12 turnovers) are coming mostly against a garbage schedule, but she did her part and quite a bit more in a real test in Chapel Hill.

• It took just two minutes for the season to serve up a depressing injury. That's how long Wright State senior Kim Demmings was on the court in the Raiders' opening game Nov. 14 before leaving with a knee injury. The team announced this week that she was to undergo surgery Thursday and miss the rest of the season. Demmings was the nation's No. 2 returning scorer this season and the driving force behind Wright State's first NCAA tournament appearance. Without her, in addition to departed seniors Ivory James and KC Elkins, the Raiders are missing 57 percent of their scoring from last season. Tay'ler Mingo scored 24 points in Saturday's win against Southern Illinois and is averaging 22.8 points this season.

• With hundreds of Division I teams to track, the Wrap rarely ventures into Division III basketball. Yet it still wanders there with greater regularity than Amherst College loses at home. Amherst beat Baruch College 73-63 Sunday, just as it beat the previous 99 opponents who dared venture into LeFrak Gymnasium. Those 100 consecutive wins break the NCAA all-division record by a women's squad previously held by a team from about 50 miles south of Amherst: Connecticut. We could point out that the University of Massachusetts, also located in Amherst, won 22 home games in the same span, but that would just be mean. So instead we'll point out another similarity with Connecticut. In winning the 2011 Division III national championship, Amherst became the first New England school in 25 years to win a title in the division.

• Coaching milestones are often meaningful only in revealing our fascination with large round numbers divisible by other large round numbers, but at least in the case of Northwestern's Joe McKeown, 600 wins is an arbitrary milepost with scarce company. Only 10 active women's coaches have more wins and a better winning percentage (his was .687 after win No. 600) than McKeown, who Friday picked up career win No. 600 against Kent State. The Wildcats are also 3-0 for the sixth consecutive season under McKeown, who accumulated many of those wins at George Washington. That's another number that means as much as you want it to mean, but consider the program averaged 6.2 wins per season over the preceding decade. It's also worth watching this tribute, if only so as to guess how much longer Texas A&M coach Gary Blair kept talking.

• Speaking of coaching milestones, one was reached for the first time in Division I women's basketball when father coached against son as Middle Tennessee's Rick Insell took on Mississippi's Matt Insell. That dad got the upper hand might be less meaningful beyond the family's Thanksgiving dinner than the performance of the player who did the most to fuel the win. Playing her first game this season after a suspension, Cheyenne Parker totaled 25 points and 10 rebounds for the Blue Raiders. Almost all of the elder Insell's long run of stars have been undersized. Six-foot-4 Parker, a transfer from High Point, is anything but.

Stephanie Mavunga, North Carolina: What does North Carolina's sophomore post care about time zones? If it's Wednesday on the East Coast, she'll give you 18 points, 11 rebounds, 2 blocks and 2 steals against Oklahoma State. And if it's Sunday in the Pacific Northwest, no matter, she'll go for 23 points, 16 rebounds and 6 blocks at Oregon. Put her in Hawaii or Newfoundland and she will probably still give you a double-double. Actually, we'll soon find out whether the former is true. While Allisha Gray kept doing the kind of things that are going to make her an All-American, hitting shots at a ridiculously efficient clip and not turning over the ball, Mavunga gave the Tar Heels some much-needed production inside.

They're going to need that kind of production when they open their holiday-week stay in Hawaii with a game against Stanford on Friday. Mavunga was active in the first half of last season's NCAA tournament game against the Cardinal, helping the Tar Heels jump to a lead, but two quick fouls early in the second half made her a nonfactor.

Designated shooter off the bench isn't the role most envisioned for Ariel Massengale when she arrived at Tennessee, but whether it was for a few days or the start of a longer run in the role, it fit the senior rather comfortably this past week. Returning from a suspension (and a concussion that kept her out of the final 16 games a season ago), Massengale came off the bench in both of her team's games this week and scored a team-high 41 points in the process, 21 against Oral Roberts and 20 against Winthrop.

Massengale still led the Lady Vols in assists a season ago, despite missing almost half the season, but coach Holly Warlick sounds like someone in no hurry to push Jordan Reynolds off the court at the moment. Tennessee needs the 3-point shooting, so if the current arrangement frees up Massengale to be a shooter for at least portions of games, everyone wins. Except the other team.
• espnW player of the week: Lili Thompson

Green Bay: Regular readers know that Green Bay operates in this space with the basketball equivalent of most favored nation status. Weeks like this are why. Weeks like this are the reason the only program with more consecutive winning seasons than Green Bay, at 37 and counting, is the one that decorates Thompson-Boling Arena with eight national championship banners and hums "Rocky Top" on a loop.

While certain ranked teams occupied themselves this past week with games against Belmont, Jacksonville, Morehead State and even NAIA Concordia University, Green Bay played on the road at Vanderbilt and Purdue, hosted Duquesne and came away with two wins to improve to 3-1 on the season. The success included a double-overtime victory at No. 24 Purdue that marked that team's first loss in a home opener in 20 seasons -- a game that came just two days after the Phoenix rallied from a large first-half deficit to force overtime in a loss against the Commodores.

Take a bunch of overlooked players from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario -- because there isn't a player on the roster from anywhere else -- and go play that schedule. You aren't going to win two of three, just like you aren't going to put together 37 consecutive winning seasons. Not with one senior in the starting lineup. Not with a different leading scorer every game. One of the true marvels of college sports is at it yet again.

Mississippi State casts a slightly wider net for its players, from Texas to Nigeria, but the results were equally impressive this past week. The Bulldogs emerged as Preseason WNIT champions after beating West Virginia and Western Kentucky in Starkville. Looking at a schedule that is less than compelling from this point until the start of SEC play, there is a very real chance Mississippi State could still be undefeated when the calendar turns to 2015.

Western Kentucky at Louisville (ESPN3, 7 p.m. ET Tuesday): Louisville has Iowa and Kentucky coming soon after Thanksgiving, but it can't overlook former Cardinals assistant Michelle Clark-Heard's team after the Lady Toppers beat Colorado and Albany in the WNIT. This was a two-possession game midway through the second half last year.

Wichita State vs. Florida Gulf Coast (Thursday): You know a mid-major showdown is going to get mentioned. It's often a lose-lose proposition for programs like these to play each other, a tough game without the credit that comes from playing power conference opponents, so kudos to all involved for this one in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Florida State vs. Washington (Thursday): If you have followed box scores to this point, you know there is not a smidgen of sarcasm in saying Kelsey Plum against Adut Bulgak is must-see basketball. Plum is piling up points for the Huskies, and Bulgak is coming off her third consecutive double-double for the Seminoles and averaging 17.0 points, 10.0 rebounds and 2.3 blocks to make people forget about Natasha Howard.

James Madison vs. Maryland (Friday): Two teams separated by a relatively short drive back home meet in Puerto Rico. Maryland's guards have been trading starring roles, but, coming off 34 points in a win against Pittsburgh on Sunday, there isn't much doubt that Precious Hall is in the lead role for the Dukes.

North Carolina vs. Stanford (Friday): The rematch, minus Chiney Ogwumike and Diamond DeShields. So, you know, not really a rematch. Will Stanford reprise Karli Samuelson's role as the equivalent of a defensive midfielder and stick her on Gray? And can Latifah Coleman, Brittany Roundtree and Jessica Washington make it a fair backcourt fight?