Hall of Fame basketball coach Roy Williams made no effort to hide his disappointment after North Carolina’s fifth loss already in this Covid-tainted season.

“I’m about as frustrated as you can get right now,” Williams said after an 82-75 loss at Florida State over the weekend. “I talk to my guys in caucus about what I want them to do at the end, and they look at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

On the same day, John Calipari, Williams’ Kentucky counterpart and Naismith Hall of Famer, endured another two-hour session of skipped pleas as his Wildcats fell to 4-8 with a seven-point loss. in Auburn.

“There were parts of the game that I was proud of those guys,” Calipari said amid the program’s worst start in 94 years, “and there were other points of the game that I’m like: “What in the world are we doing? ‘ ”

Meanwhile, a third Hall of Fame coach, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, returned from a recent quarantine to see his Blue Devils drop seven points to Virginia Tech. Duke, which has already had six games postponed or canceled due to Covid-19, fell to 5-3.

A combined 17-16 with conference play only heating up, these three college basketball blue bloods are absent from this week’s AP Top 25 poll. The last time this happened was on Christmas Day 1961, when the poll listed only 10 teams per week.

How long ago was that?

JFK was still in his first year in the White House, a little-known former aide named Dean Smith was in his first season as Tar Heels coach, and Andy Williams had a smash hit with a song called “Moon River.”

In the nearly six full decades since UNC, Duke and Kentucky were all absent from the AP poll, those three programs have combined to win 14 NCAA tournament titles. Half of them have come since 2001.

In the full history of the AP basketball poll, spanning 1,213 total weeks, this is only the 14th time the traditional three powerhouses have gone unranked.

You could blame that on inexperience, except that all three programs thrived in this unique era. A disjointed start-of-season schedule may have made recruiting a group of relative outsiders more difficult, especially with off-season pick-up games banned due to the pandemic, but you now expect the talent comes into play.

“This generation, who knows if it will be here tomorrow?” Williams said after a late rally failed with three freshmen and a redshirt freshman on the field. “A lot less thinking about, ‘Oh, three freshmen and we’re going to have these guys for four years.’ It’s a different world.

Kentucky, whose 1-6 start included a 12-point loss to UNC on neutral ground in Cleveland, has improved defensively but Calipari’s players still look confused on the offensive end.

“Nobody wanted to shoot,” Calipari said after Auburn’s loss. “They let (punches) pass until I yelled at the guys, ‘Shoot the ball!’ That’s what it is.

Even Calipari isn’t ruling out a late-season push for the NCAA Tournament, but with the schedule likely to remain in flux from week to week, things may have to get even worse for this blue-blooded trio before the light does not turn on.