San Diego State’s spring semester doesn’t begin until next week, but the men’s basketball team is in midterm week.

The Aztecs have played 15 games. There are 15 left on the schedule — 14 in the Mountain West regular season, starting Saturday against UNLV at Viejas Arena (5 p.m., CBS Sports Network), and at least one in the conference tournament.

How are their grades?

Most consider the season a success so far, even amid the heightened expectations from back-to-back trips to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 (and, in 2023, well beyond).

When you lose all five starters, when your best player gets hurt and misses the season’s first half (and perhaps all of it), when your roster ranks 225th in Division I experience and 310th in minutes continuity, when three freshmen and three sophomores are in the nine-man rotation, when you’re playing one of the nation’s hardest nonconference schedules, when you lag behind most power conference programs in NIL resources, that usually isn’t a recipe for success in a college basketball world increasingly skewing older and richer.

And yet the Aztecs are 11-4 overall, 4-2 in the Mountain West, 34th in Kenpom and anywhere between 33rd and 43rd in the other metrics that the NCAA Tournament selection committee leans on. Most bracketologists have them solidly in the 68-team field.

They have wins over No. 10 Houston and then-Nov. 21 Creighton on neutral floors as well as at preseason Mountain West favorite Boise State. Three of their four losses have come against teams currently in the Associated Press top 25, and the other was on the road at New Mexico in what the Kenpom metric rates the nation’s fourth-best homecourt advantage.

“I love the energy about this team,” said sophomore guard Miles Byrd. “We come to work every single day, whether that’s game day, practice, off day, film, whenever we’re around the team. It’s a very locked-in mindset, ready to work, but still having our fun.

“But with any young team, you obviously still have a lot of things to clean up.”

Here’s the midterm report card:

Offense

“Obviously,” coach Brian Dutcher said, “we’re still probably at a C or C+.”

The season started well enough, with a free-flowing offense that featured five different leading scorers in the first month of games. In the last eight, though, the Aztecs have become more predictable, and only Byrd and Nick Boyd have led them in scoring.

Over the first nine games, the Aztecs ranked 67th nationally in offensive efficiency. In the six since, they’re 263rd while scoring, on average, 12 points less per 100 possessions.

SDSU ranks eighth in offense in conference games, above only Wyoming, Fresno State and Air Force — teams that are combined 2-16.

However, the Aztecs’ base offense hasn’t been as awful as the numbers indicate when you consider offensive rebounding and free throws, areas where they have struggled.

They’re not generating as many second-chance opportunities, which generally produce points at a higher rate because you get put-backs under the basket or kick-out open 3s against a defense in disarray. Their frequency getting to the line is the second lowest by an Aztecs team in 20 decades, and when they do get there they’re shooting 67.7%, which ranks 301st nationally.

Conference games bring more detailed scouting reports, more available film and a double round-robin schedule. Familiarity, so far, is not their friend.

“As you get down the road in the conference, everyone knows every set play,” Dutcher said. “You don’t score on your set plays that much, so you have to be able to play after the play. That’s what we did when we went to the Final Four. We found something that worked once a play was over that was dangerous. We have to find what that is with this team.”

Defense

This is sort of like a freshman in his first semester getting a straight A in an upper-division physics class. It’s been that good, that surprising.

Defense is a pillar of this program, but it’s also a complex, sophisticated system that often takes years to master. And this isn’t the 2022-23 team that had a nine-man rotation exclusively of juniors, seniors, fifth-year seniors and a sixth-year senior. This is freshmen, sophomores and first-year transfers.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Aztecs are currently sixth in Kenpom defensive efficiency, up five spots from where they finished in last year’s Sweet 16 run and down only two spots from where the national runners-up finished.

Opposing teams are shooting a mere 35.9%, the third-lowest mark in Division I behind Houston and Tennessee, both ranked in the AP top 10. Eight of their 14 opponents have had their worst shooting nights of the season, and two others had their second worst.

The expectation was that this would be an elite defensive team — just maybe not this soon. One reason for the accelerated learning curve, no doubt, is rim protection. The Aztecs average 5.7 blocks per game, which ranks seventh nationally.

Advanced analytics track the percentage of 2-point attempts blocked, and the Aztecs are currently second nationally at 18.6%, compared to 11.9% and 11.7% the previous two seasons.

That allows for mistakes on the perimeter, with players like Magoon Gwath (2.73 blocks per game) there to erase them. The fundamental D might not be as good, but it doesn’t have to be.

Rebounding

“Yet to be determined,” Dutcher said. “It’s an incomplete.”

This didn’t figure to be a problem with a five-man interior rotation of players between 6-foot-9 and 7 feet. But it’s been a problem.

In the four losses, the Aztecs have been outrebounded by nearly nine per game. In the 11 wins: plus-six.

“When we rebound well, we win,” Dutcher said. “When we don’t rebound well, we don’t. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.”

Coaching

There are several candidates for the best coaching job by Dutcher and his staff in the eight seasons since he succeeded Steve Fisher as head coach.

This season is in the conversation given the sheer amount of teaching and shuffling and agonizing they’ve had to do.

Credit the coaches. Also credit the players.

“I like that they come to work every day, they don’t make excuses and they want to get better,” Dutcher said. “That puts a lot of heat on us (coaches) to make sure we’re making decisions and telling them the right way to play, because they’re going to do what we ask them to do. They’re a really coachable group.”

The second half

The brunt of the schedule is behind them, and the only real regret is the Dec. 28 home loss to Utah State, when the Aztecs blew an 18-point lead in the first half and seven-point lead with 90 seconds left.

“That’s the one we feel worst about,” Dutcher said. “Our worst performance was at New Mexico, but New Mexico had a lot to do with that. They played at an elite level. And it’s The Pit, a really tough place to play. That was the toughest performance, but the hardest loss is still probably Utah State, letting a home game slip away.”

SDSU’s loss to No. 16 Gonzaga came in the season’s second week, and Byrd was scoreless after trying to play on a badly sprained ankle. The loss against No. 13 Oregon was sandwiched between impressive wins against Creighton and Houston.

NCAA Tournament resumes consist of two parts — an abundance of good wins and a dearth of bad losses. Now the Aztecs tackle the second part, with only two Quad 1 games currently left on the schedule (at Nevada on Jan. 25 and at Utah State on Feb. 22).

Otherwise, it’s a bunch of games that you’re expected to win.

“Metrically, we’re doing what we need to do,” Dutcher said. “But there are mostly only landmines left. We have to find a way to worry about our level of play and do what we can to keep winning games.”