The Kansas bench celebrates a bucket by Tyler Self during the second half, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016 at Allen Fieldhouse.

When Kansas and Indiana help usher in another season of college basketball Friday night in the Armed Forces Classic on ESPN from the Stan Sheriff Center in Honolulu, college basketball analyst Jay Bilas will be courtside, eager to soak up every second of the game that matches the No. 3 and No. 11 teams in the country.

“It’s a tremendous amount of talent that’s gonna be on the floor in that Indiana-Kansas game,” Bilas said during a Monday conference call. “And to have those two powerhouse college basketball brands squaring off against each other will be incredible.”

The reasons for Bilas’ excitement about the KU-IU showdown are many — and mostly obvious — but instead of trying to determine how the rest of the 2016-17 season will go based off of the result of this one game, 2,500 miles off the mainland, Bilas plans to enjoy the action and make judgments later.

“You have to take it with a grain of salt,” Bilas said of his method of evaluating teams based on these early-season classics played so far from home. “There are times when the travel can make things very difficult and maybe the team doesn’t perform at its optimum level, and there are other times where you see a team play unbelievably well early in the season and then they fall off later on.”

The 2015-16 Indiana Hoosiers are a perfect example of the former and that fact was not lost on Bilas, the consummate college hoops junkie.

“Indiana, last year, lost early on in Maui and then they got their doors blown off in the ACC/Big Ten (Challenge) and then they won the Big Ten,” Bilas pointed out. “A lot of people had ’em dead and buried before December and it clearly wasn’t the case.”

One of the reasons Bilas refuses to put too much stock in what he sees in games in Maui, Honolulu, Okinawa, Japan, and other distant locations is the fact that teams in early November still are mixing in new pieces, developing their identities and, in some cases, moving past the loss of the previous season’s top players.

Kansas is a mixed bag of those three things and Bilas believes he knows why.

“I think the thing that makes it harder to gauge is, a lot of these teams, they’re relying on freshmen,” he said. “Our game is such now that the overall quality of the landscape is oftentimes determined by the quality of the freshman class. That’s one of the reasons I’m more excited for this year than I have been in several years. We’ve got an unbelievable level of talent in the freshman class that’s coming into college basketball. Their names might not be known yet, but, when people see ’em, they’re going to be blown away by how good these players are and how ready they are.”

KU’s Josh Jackson is a prime example of that, but so, too, is freshman center Udoka Azubuike, who was ranked No. 31 in the Rivals 150 last year. Bilas’ claim suggests that for every Jackson or Markelle Fultz or Jayson Tatum in this year’s class, there are five or six Azubuikes.

“Nationwide, this is the deepest, most talented freshman class I’ve ever seen since I’ve been doing this,” he said. “Now, that doesn’t mean that the top five players are as good this year as they were in 2003 or something like that. But what it does mean is you can pluck a player that’s ranked from 25 to 35 and I’m not sure you can match that in years past at that level. It’s really an amazing number … And it’s spread around pretty good. Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, UCLA, Michigan State, the rich got richer. But there are some really good freshmen spread around, too, that are a little further down the food chain.”