2024-25 College Basketball Thread

Steph Curry isn't walking through that door ...

 

Neither are Mike Miloy, Lefty or Terry Holland.

Davidson integrated UNC basketball by recruiting and almost signing Charlie Scott, who had already been accepted by the Wildcats for admission. Dean Smith couldn't let him get away so he signed him as UNC's first Black player.

 

Of all the conference transfers of the past two decades, none baffles me like Davidson College going from the SoCon to the A-10.

 

Really? That one's nothing compared to the Pac-12 schools migrating eastward. But the bottom was always going to fall out once McKillop, who'd raised them from the edge of Division I, left.

 

That's a big one. But little says "Atlantic Coast Conference" like Pacific-coast-based Stanford and California.

 

Davidson held its own in the A-10 for quite a while. It’s not so much that they went in over their heads but that the tectonic plates shifted with NIL.

 

Also Davidson doesn't take grad transfers (I believe) because it doesn't have Masters programs.

 

I could be way wrong but my impression is they draw a big chunk of their student body from the northeast. If so having your athletic teams in that footprint is also a help from an awareness standpoint and also to keep touch with alumni who moved back north.

 

Yep. Only mitigating factor there is that the Big Ten had set the precedent with USC et al.
It’s never gonna seem normal to me.

 

Davidson is not like Duke in this regard. In the Fall 2022 freshman class, the most recent with available data, 44.8% of the group came from the South and 21.2% from the Northeast.

 

Nobody is quite like the University of New Jersey at Durham, but that’s still a pretty significant chunk of out-of-region students.

Funny thing is, the first time Davidson left the SoCon in 1988 their complaint was being unable to keep up in a league dominated by public schools. (Furman was the only other private member then.)

 

The SoCon of my college days (UR, Furman, ECU, W&M, The Citadel, App State, VMI) was a very good league. Davidson had withdrawn in football at that point. We withdrew after the 1975-76 school year.