2023-24 college basketball conference previews, part 3: #21 (Big Sky) through #18 (Atlantic Sun)

Exciting times out West AND out East

PREVIOUSLY: Intro: Parallax, Previews Part One, Previews Part Two.

Hello! This is Part Three of our multi-week conference preview series. Today’s previews cover the Big Sky, CAA, MAC, and Atlantic Sun, which are ordered using KenPom’s conference rankings. We’re now through 15 of the available 32 conferences.

One of these four conferences actually may produce a win this March. Torvik gives the odds of any one of these four conferences picking up at least one Round of 64 win at 61%, which is like a weighted coin-flip. Could you realistically see 12 seed Charleston or UNC Wilmington pulling one off out of the CAA? What about 13 seed Ohio doing a thing 13-seeded Ohio has done before? Maybe 13 seed Eastern Kentucky finally, beautifully breaking through? Even a surprise entrant, such as theoretical 14 seed Lipscomb, could do it. It’s all on the table, save for any prediction you have about a Big Sky team winning a Round of 64 game. (I simply will not get fooled again. Sorry.)

As a reminder, 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.

Lastly: as has been outlined a few times now, all conference previews from this point forward will be behind a paywall. If you have a financial issue that keeps you from paying the $30/year for the subscription ($20/year for people with .edu emails), let me know and I’m happy to give you a discount. Alternately, I think you can use a free trial for a week or whatever. Just get in touch.

Let’s basketball.