2023-24 college basketball conference previews, part 1: #26 (MAAC) through #22 (Big South)

We're hearing these are conferences that will "make you think" and "invite discourse"

PREVIOUSLY: Intro: Parallax, Previews Part One.

Hello! This is Part Two of our multi-week conference preview series. Today’s previews cover the #26 (MAAC)-#22 (Big South) ranked conferences, using KenPom’s conference rankings.

These five conferences offer the reasonable chance of being consequential in March. Three of them have won at least one NCAA Tournament game in the last ten years. Odds are that one of the teams listed here will finish the year just inside KenPom’s top 100. Potentially, one of them could even win a game in the NCAA Tournament, because it’s likely that at least four of the five eventual champions are 15 seeds or better. One might even be a 13 seed! You simply never know.

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 was outlined yesterday, 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.

Onward!