2023-24 college basketball conference previews, part 1: #32 (NEC) through #27 (Patriot)
Our 27th-32nd ranked conferences range from "actually interesting" (Southland, SWAC, MEAC) to "plays basketball" (Patriot, OVC, NEC)
Welcome to PREVIEW MONTH (or really PREVIEW THREE WEEKS) here at the newsletter. Over the next three weeks, you’re going to get coverage on all 32 conferences. I’ve done as much research as time allows on every team in here and have tried to find interesting statistical nuggets for each.
Conferences are presented in reverse order of their KenPom ranking. This means that today, I’m covering the bottom six conferences in Ken’s rankings, from 32nd (NEC) to 27th (Patriot). It makes as much sense as anything, so we’ll go with it. These six conferences are separated from those ahead of them because of the following things: it is a near-lock that the very best any of them can produce is a 15 seed, and all six are very unlikely to produce an NCAA Tournament winner this March. Even so, they all have something going on of interest. Well, except the NEC, so that one is free for all to read.
Actually, as a sort of introduction to the product, I’ve elected to make the first three conferences (NEC, MEAC, SWAC) free for all to read today. Beyond that, the remaining 29 conferences will all be behind a paywall. If you’d like to read more about what is offered behind said paywall, you can go to the subscription link below, but I really do think $30 ($20 for students/faculty/anyone with a .edu email) for what’s going to end up being about 150 posts this college basketball season is more than worth it. Subscribe below.
One last thing: all of the conference-related images for these previews were generated via Bing AI. Having had to navigate image rights and how fair/unfair it is to use someone’s image that isn’t my own in the past, I would prefer to not do that for something as simple as basketball writing. So: here’s some stupid stuff I came up with on a whim via an image generator. All prompts for said images are provided in the caption if you’d like to produce your own.
If any errors exist, please let me know. Otherwise, let’s get a move on. Too much yapping!
32. Northeast Conference
Tier 1
Sacred Heart
Fairleigh Dickinson
Central Connecticut State
Wagner
Tier 2
Merrimack
Stonehill
Tier 3
LIU Brooklyn
St. Francis (PA)
Le Moyne
NEW COACHES: Fairleigh Dickinson (OUT: Tobin Anderson (Iona); IN: Jack Castleberry)
Well, it finally happened: the NEC, for the first time in its existence, won an NCAA Tournament game. Maybe you heard about it. You remember that, right? Little old Fairleigh Dickinson shocking the world as a 16 seed, toppling 1 seed Purdue and their National Player of the Year? Some could describe that as the most impactful win any team had last year. It catapulted FDU’s head coach into a new gig at Iona, the one previously held by Rick Pitino. The knock-on effect from that remains quite huge.
Anyway, the NEC now has to follow up that magical March as a whole this year. They’ll be projected to be the second-worst conference in college basketball, which is indeed a spot ahead of where they finished last year. It remains a conference lacking shooting or pleasantly-watchable offenses, and it’s probably no coincidence the real winner of the conference (Merrimack; ineligible for postseason play) had far and away the best defense to offer.
For 2023-24 purposes, however, this is roughly shaping up to be a three-tiered conference: four teams at the top who wouldn’t be surprise winners, two towards the back end replacing lots of lost talent, and two bottomed-out programs with little obvious to cheer about.
Of that top four, the team I like most is Sacred Heart, a team that returns 85% of its 2022-23 minutes and an eminently plausible NEC Player of the Year candidate in Nico Galette (15.2 PPG, 6.6 RPG ‘22-23). Behind them, all in roughly the same pack, are Fairleigh Dickinson, Central Connecticut State, and Wagner. FDU’s case is obvious: they were the second-best team and return the terrific Ansley Almonor (13.7 PPG), a reasonable pick for POTY, plus two other starters. After years and years of horrendous plays, CCSU appears to be moving in the right direction under Patrick Sellers, who has the second-oldest team in the conference and a quality lead scorer in Kellen Amos. Wagner has a high floor of returners and a built-in base of great play under previous coach Bashir Mason, but under new HC Donald Copeland, their 2022-23 saw just the fourth season in 12 years where they didn’t win 10+ conference games.
Merrimack and Stonehill are of equal quality to me: weak (for D-1 standards) rosters that are elevated by possibly the two best coaches left in the conference. Merrimack’s Joe Gallo runs one of the best defenses in the nation, while Stonehill’s defense under Chris Kraus was the best in conference play last season at forcing tough twos. A scenario where one but not both finishes top 3 is realistic. I have no comment on LIU or St. Francis (PA) other than Rob Krimmel, a good guy, probably should have jumped ship after the COVID year. Le Moyne comes up from D-2 and I am probably underrating them, but they went 27-30 over the last two years in roughly the 5th-best conference at that level and would’ve rated 8th-best out of 9 in the NEC last year.
THE PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Nico Galette, Sacred Heart. Best player on best team. Runner-up: Ansley Almonor of FDU.
THE BREAKOUT PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Cameron Tweedy, Fairleigh Dickinson.
THE ALL-CONFERENCE FIRST TEAM IS:
Joey Reilly, Sacred Heart, G
Kellen Amos, Central Connecticut State, G
Max Zegarowski, Stonehill, F
Ansley Almonor, Fairleigh Dickinson, F
Nico Galette, Sacred Heart, F
THE BEST GAME IS: Sacred Heart at Fairleigh Dickinson, January 27. This is a hard conference to watch, but I think one of these two are your eventual conference champion, and this could be the deciding game. This is also a game that features five of the 8-10 best players in the conference, so.
OTHER PREDICTIONS: As usual, someone other than the actual best team in the conference wins the conference tournament. The winner plays in the First Four. Fairfield transfer Allan Jeanne-Rose, now at CCSU, is Bart Torvik’s PRPG! leader in the NEC at season’s end.
31. MEAC
Tier 1
Howard
Norfolk State
Tier 2
South Carolina State
Morgan State
North Carolina Central
Delaware State
Tier 3
Maryland-Eastern Shore
Coppin State
NEW COACHES: Coppin State (OUT: Juan Dixon, IN: Larry Stewart)
Hey, a conference on the rise! Sort of! The MEAC spent the entirety of its 2014-2021 run mired in either 31st or 32nd in KenPom’s 32-conference rankings. Its last NCAA tournament win was the mega-memorable (15) Norfolk State over (2) Missouri one from 2012. But! In the post-COVID era, these guys dropped Bethune-Cookman (SWAC), Florida A&M (SWAC), and North Carolina A&T (Big South) from their roster to get down to eight schools. All they’ve done in the meantime is BREAK THE TOP 30, including a 28th-place finish last year, their best finish as a conference in Ken’s rankings since 2001-02. That is real progress.
Last year’s champion, and this year’s clear favorite, is Howard, one of two teams the conference has this year that I think reasonably could crack the top 200 by year’s end. The Bison started last year in a sort of secondary pack with NC Central behind then-leaders Norfolk State, but they pulled the relatively rare regular season/conference tournament double.
I think this year’s Howard team is a hair better despite losing some key pieces to the portal. The difference this year is that Howard’s returners combine quite well with their portal haul. Jelani Williams (9.2 PPG, 4.6 RPG), Marcus Dockery (9.6 PPG), and Shy Odom (11.4 PPG, 4.7 RPG) may all be first-team All-MEAC guys, but the key addition here is Seth Towns, former four-star recruit of Harvard and brief Ohio State (2020-21) fame. Towns started college basketball in 2016-17; he will be 26 years old on opening night.
Norfolk State is the main rival to Howard’s hopeful repeat. Robert Jones remains a truly underrated coach; how he hasn’t gotten his shot at a higher level is anyone’s guess. The Spartans will have the oldest team in the league (top 7 projected minute-getters all juniors/seniors) and the backcourt leader Christian Ings (9.9 PPG) is remarkably good at hammering the lane. Ings is probably the main threat for a non-Howard player to get POTY since he’s the best player on the #2 team, but they don’t quite have the same level of talent Howard has.
South Carolina State should post their best conference finish since 2015-16, when they went 12-4 in the MEAC. They haven’t cracked .500 since. Still, if you want to watch for a serious year-over-year improvement, I like what these guys have on their roster. Jordan Simpson averaged just 6.9 points a game last year, but he also posted a Steal% of 3%, best in the league of any freshman. The two-way prowess there is quite intriguing. With Simpson on the court last year, SC State was a far better team on both ends, to the tune of being 15 points better per 100 possessions. Winning player!
The group of Morgan State, North Carolina Central, and Delaware State all feels tightly-packed to me. I’ve given a very minor edge to Morgan because their roster has the fewest obvious holes of the three; senior Myles Thompson was a solid three-year starter at St. Francis (PA) and could touch 15 PPG in an offense that’s replacing three starters. NC Central is mostly interesting because they’re very rarely a mid-pack team. LeVelle Moton’s had a >.500 record in conference play in six straight seasons, with the aborted COVID season excluded. Only returning 17% of their minutes from last year is brutal, though.
Delaware State returns the highest amount of minutes of any team in the conference by far; their HC (Stan Waterman) was one of the greatest men’s high school basketball coaches in America before taking this job, which is a bit of a dire place. Delaware has legitimate top-half MEAC upside, but given that all these players are back from a team that went 6-24, we’ll see.
Neither Coppin State nor UMES will factor much into this race in all likelihood. Both lose an immense amount of scoring from 2022-23: Coppin State 91%, UMES 80%. This is mostly a chance to begin anew for Coppin under a new coach that isn’t doing weird off-court stuff. UMES did go 9-5 in MEAC play last year and posted a KenPom finish of 251st, their best since 2014-15. The problem: six of the top seven scorers are gone. Lone returner Chace Davis is interesting because UMES posted a defensive TO% of 26.5% (!) when he was on the court but you can’t build the whole plane out of Chace Davis.
THE PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Shy Odom, Howard. Seth Towns was considered, but Odom was a borderline high-major recruit who already starred out as the 2023 MEAC Tournament MVP. Towns is the best on-paper player by a mile, but that’s on paper.
THE BREAKOUT PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Jordan Simpson, South Carolina State.
THE BEST GAME IS: Any time Howard and Norfolk State tangle with one another.
THE ALL-CONFERENCE FIRST TEAM IS:
Marcus Dockery, Howard, G
Jamarii Thomas, UNC Wilmington, G
Christian Ings, Norfolk State, G
Seth Towns, Howard, F
Shy Odom, Howard, F
OTHER PREDICTIONS: Howard goes 12-2 in conference play. Kenny Blakeney catapults into a new job. Norfolk State - who plays all of Wichita State, VCU, UTEP, and Tennessee on the road - covers the pregame spread in 3 of those 4. The All-MEAC first team has three Howard starters on it. Both Jordan Simpson (SCST) and Martez Robinson (DSU) take serious steps forward and make one of the first two All-MEAC teams.
30. SWAC
Tier 1
Texas Southern
Alcorn State
Jackson State
Tier 2
Grambling State
Tier 3
Arkansas Pine Bluff
Bethune Cookman
Florida A&M
Southern
Alabama State
Alabama A&M
Tier 4
Prairie View A&M
Mississippi Valley State
NEW COACHES: none
Among the stranger decisions the Pacific 12 has made as a collective in the last few years was agreeing to play a slate of road games against SWAC schools. Last year they played three games at SWAC teams; all three were losses, some of them of the really embarrassing variety. Having not learned their lesson, or possibility out of the goodness of the heart/love for the sport, the Pac-12 is doing it again this year, playing road games at all of Southern, Florida A&M, and Alabama State.
The good news for the Pac-12 is that those are unlikely to be Tier 1 sides. If they had drawn Jackson State, Texas Southern, or Alcorn State on the road, it would be tough sledding. The SWAC has earned a reputation as an excellent place to transfer to over the years for those who couldn’t quite hack it at the high or mid-major levels. TSU and Alcorn are nothing to sneeze at in this regard. TSU will start a pair of terrific transfers in Kenny Hunter and Jonathan Cisse, while Alcorn’s mix of homegrown talent with outside transfers is pretty intriguing.
Hunter in particular is a fun figure. Here’s a fun search on Bart Torvik’s website: players who posted a >120 Offensive Rating, >12% OREB%, >18% DREB%, >6% Block%, and a >1.5% Steal% as a freshman or sophomore. Does this mean literally anything? Maybe not, but hard to complain when you share membership on this list with dudes like Wendell Carter or Xavier Tillman.
Jackson State were well on their way to a #1 ranking here, but Daeshun Ruffin’s season ended before it began with a brutal injury. Instead, they’ll have to figure out life without the player that would have been the most talented in the entire conference. The good news is that they still have Romelle Mansel in their frontcourt. Of the 37 players who registered 16+ MPG at any school last year, Mansel ranked 5th in Block%, 2nd in eFG%, 2nd in 2PT%, 4th in total rebounding percentage, and had the 2nd-lowest foul rate for a frontcourt starter. Jackson State’s defense was a borderline top-200 unit with him on the court last year. That may not sound like much, but considering they finished #283, it showcases why he matters.
Very rarely do I think a team is in their own tier, but I think that might be the case with Grambling State. There’s a real case for this team to be ranked anywhere from 1st to 8th; no other team in the top four has a floor nearly that low. Grambling will have the second-oldest team in the league, but they don’t have a go-to scorer or really anything in the way of quality scoring, period. They’re likely to have the league’s best defense, but points could be hard to come by. I don’t know what that gives you, really.
Tier 3 is a six-team pack of 7th-place teams that all need to finish somewhere from 5th to 10th. The most interesting of these is Florida A&M, who has the breakout candidate of the year in Dimingus Stevens (a late bloomer last year who posted an insane 114 ORtg on 29% Usage). Tier 4 is mostly just depressing to look at, especially for Prairie View, who returns 5% of scoring from a year ago.
THE PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Kenny Hunter, Texas Southern.
THE BREAKOUT PLAYER OF THE YEAR IS: Dimingus Stevens, Florida A&M.
THE ALL-CONFERENCE FIRST TEAM IS:
Byron Joshua, Alcorn State, G
Joe French, Arkansas Pine-Bluff, G
Jourdan Smith, Grambling State, F
Romelle Mansel, Jackson State, F
Kenny Hunter, Texas Southern, F
THE BEST GAME IS: Texas Southern at Jackson State, January 22. I mean: Mansel vs. Hunter. That’s a really really fun frontcourt battle to the death.
OTHER PREDICTIONS: The big SWAC over Pac-12 upset this year is Texas Southern over Arizona State. Florida A&M only loses at home to Oregon by 8, though. For the seventh time in eight years, this conference has the most foul calls per game in America. Texas Southern probably manages to win the conference tournament for the millionth time, regardless of conference record.
OKAY! Free previews end here. If you want to read about the other 29 conferences, sign up right here. If you have a question about signing up, email me at statsbywill@gmail.com or send me a message on Twitter. If you can’t make the $30/year happen financially, give me a shout and I can get you to a pay-what-you-can model.