Running 2023-24 NCAA Basketball Thread

And JMU wins by three.

 

Funny game. Bradley takes the first half, 40 - 22. UAB takes the second half, 40 - 22. Overtime. Bradley wins 73 - 71.

 

That's a pretty crazy stat, even when you normally play the Little Sisters of the Poor more often than not

 

Watched VCU get absolutely smoked by McNeese last night. Will Wade apparently was sitting in a hotel somewhere furiously fapping it, since he's currently suspended from coaching.

 

Also, congratulations to Mercer and South Alabama for losing to non-DIs at home yesterday.

 

Early season mismatch score of the day:

St. Mary's 107
Stanislaus State 28

Stanislaus was 9 - 58 from the field (15.5%) and outrebounded 58 - 16.

 

Ha, I was thinking of you when I saw that result. At the other end of the conference, URI has handily beaten Assumption (non-DI) and Central Connecticut (NEC), so they're now going to win 20+ games. They might do that, because the schedule looks like absolute dog shit, but they're coming into the year with 0 holdovers that were decent, and 3 transfers that even played D-I basketball last year. I think any team with depth is going to smoke them.

At least it looks like Fordham sucks again.

 

Didn't Fordham almost win the A-10 last year and have more than 20 wins? I know the A-10 wad down and their schedule wasn't even strong enough to merit an NIT berth, but they didn't suck, did they?

 

I think he meant nature was healing.

 

They lost their top two guys from last year's team, who combined for 66.5 MPG and 32.6 PPG. They racked up 25 wins, but I believe their SOS was around 330th before conference play started. They brought in Japhet Medor, who likely replaces the production lost at one spot, but Josh Rivera is a significant downgrade from Khalid Moore to me. I'm of the mindset that everything broke right for them last year, and they kind of slide toward the middle or bottom this year.

 

I understand that they want to bring in some tin cans to put on a show for the locals. But take a look at some of the opponents last night for Division I programs.

• Spalding
• Fort Lauderdale
• North American
• Kansas Christian
• John Jay
• Erskine
• Piedmont
• Covenant
• Sarah Lawrence
• Southwestern Adventist
• Penn State - Wilkes-Barre
• Champion Christian
• Johnson (Fla.)
• William Carey
• Jarvis Christian
• Blue Mountain
• Saint Mary of the Woods

And my two favorites:

• Toccoa Falls
• Northwest Indian (not Northwest Indiana, Northwest Indian)

 

It's pathetic, my former beat was the opponent for one of those schools, but there's a reason behind it.

The big one is that the schedule is tightening to get the chance to play up. With rare exception, the upper echelon of mid-major schools, especially if they're any good, are just not having phone calls returned by the Power Six schools. The Power Six love loading up home games against the low-majors, conferences ranked in the 20s and below. Mid-majors (rightly) bitch to high heaven about it as they are then forced to look elsewhere.

That we know.

What mid-majors don't like to talk as much about is their refusal to schedule one another, especially at that upper echelon level. Just like the Power Six programs, they (mainly, their coaches) want some easy wins too, as well as a representative home schedule, and since there's no SOS penalty and losses don't count against non-D-I schools? They've found loading up on D-II, D-III and NAIA teams is the way to go. It's become much more common in the last half-decade.

I hate it. I think the NCAA should find a way to count these games against you if you play them. I know mid-majors would bitch to high heaven about it, but they could schedule home-and-home's against each other - as they did relatively regularly not that long ago.