2023-24 college basketball previews: West Coast Conference

historians know it as the Original Pac-2

PREVIOUSLY: Intro: Parallax, Previews Part One, Previews Part Two, Previews Part Three, Previews Part Four, Previews Part Five.

“A surfing competition involving Gonzaga University and Saint Mary's University basketball players, digital art”, no I don’t know why the bulldog is in the water other than that’s their mascot but it clearly is in some sort of Lisa Frank mode what is going on

Hello! This is Part Six of our multi-week conference preview series. Today’s previews cover the AAC, West Coast Conference, and Mountain West, which are ordered using KenPom’s conference rankings. These are all separate posts, because we are finally to the portion of these that are both pretty long and require their own address. This one is for the West Coast Conference. You know the one.

All of these conferences, barring a disaster, will get two teams in the 2024 NCAA Tournament. The problem is I cannot guarantee any of them get more than the two. There’s interesting-enough depth in each to where a third could emerge, but on opening night, it’s more likely than not that these are multi-bid conferences in a very specific sense.

I’ll even throw you a bone on these, today only, by giving you my order of finish for free:

West Coast

Tier 1a

1. Gonzaga

Tier 1b

2. Saint Mary’s

Tier 2

3. Loyola Marymount

4. San Francisco

5. Portland

6. Santa Clara

Tier 3

7. Pacific

8. Pepperdine

9. San Diego

To get the rest, you gotta pay up. It’s just $30 for a year, $20 for those with .edu emails, or $5/month for five months ($25) if you remember to cancel by March whatever day. I won’t be offended if you do.

Let’s go.