2023-24 preseason tournament previews: odds and predictions for all November tournaments
non-bracketed events/MTEs not included, they aren't real, they cannot hurt me
Normally I wait until Thanksgiving week to do this, because historically, 90% of these preseason tournaments did not begin until the week of Thanksgiving. But! Here we are in 2023 and seemingly half of these are done by next Tuesday.
Preseason tournament week(s) is awesome because everyone overreacts to what happens, but also because it gives us a truly wonderful amount of good games. I broke it down in the offseason how good this makes the month of November and frankly, how it makes whimpering about the opening week of college basketball a little much. This is 2022-23 and the chart is the number of year-end Top 100 KenPom FanMatch games:
Thanksgiving week and pre-Thanksgiving week were responsible for 22% of the best games of the season and almost 30% of the best pre-NCAA Tournament/conference tournament games of the year. This is a delightful time of the year. To celebrate, I’ve broken down the odds for every single preseason tournament that will be played over the next 10 days.
For the tournaments that are worth fully breaking down, we’ll break the field into the following:
FAVORITES: Teams who enter with a 25% chance or better to win their tournament. (Maui excluded.)
DARKHORSES: Teams somewhere in the 10-25% range. (Maui excluded; this became 5-20%.)
UNDERDOGS: Everybody below 10%.
For tournaments with four teams (come on!), those ranges become 40%, 15-40%, and <15%.
ALL ODDS LISTED ARE VIA BART TORVIK’S WEBSITE. I’m working on building a sheet that does this same thing using KenPom’s numbers, but Bart’s numbers are very close to Ken’s for the most part and the KenPom odds really wouldn’t meaningfully differ in most cases. If upsets happen, they happen.
Also: for TV schedules this week, I first recommend the brilliant catch-all post by Blogging the Bracket that has every single event happening. Past that, my long-time king Matt Sarzyniak puts up updated CBB schedules within minutes of the end of a game.
Also also! This year’s REQUIRED PREDICTIONS BY JOURNALISTIC LAW are all randomly assigned. The only one of these I personally care enough to actually put together a full post on is Maui for obvious reasons (see you Sunday for that); the others were a pretty simple process.
Go to RANDOM.org;
See what number comes up between 1 and 100;
Match that to the odds on the chart.
Look, man, it makes as much sense as anything else. Lastly, the first tournament - Maui - is free. The rest are behind a paywall.
A-GRADE TOURNAMENTS
These are the A-grade tournaments, the ones you absolutely have to watch while ensuring your extended family does not start a discussion about a sensitive subject that causes a rift for years to come. If this begins, simply shout “game’s on!” and it will stop. Maybe.
Maui Invitational
Bethune-Cookman is used as a Chaminade substitute, as Chaminade is not in Torvik’s database.
Monday–Wednesday, November 20–22: Honolulu, Hawai‘i (PDF Bracket; Relocation release)
FAVORITES: Kansas (34.8%), Purdue (27.2%), Tennessee (20.1%). I have fudged these to include Tennessee because I can. Also, because it seems like they might just be really good. Anyway, this Tournament has five of the current AP Top 11 teams in it. There’s a team in here with the fifth-best odds to win it that ranks #11 nationally. It’s absolutely insane.
Anyway, there is about an 80% chance your Maui winner is one of these three. Someone is required to survive this insane field. Kansas (Chaminade) and Tennessee (Syracuse) get the closest thing to first-round passes that you can get here, but Purdue must get past Gonzaga and likely Tennessee to even make the final, where they would most likely play Kansas. The less-bad option is playing Marquette, currently 4th in the AP Poll and 11th on KenPom. I’ve never seen a tournament field like this in my life.
DARKHORSES: Marquette (8.4%), Gonzaga (5.9%). This probably represents the low end of plausible winners. These are two top 11 teams nationally, and Gonzaga is top 5 on KenPom at this moment. The problem more lies in the respective draw for each. Marquette sort of got jobbed here as the AP #4 team. They draw UCLA, the third-weakest opponent, but then would have to get past Kansas in the semis just to reach the final…where they could play any of Purdue, Tennessee, or Gonzaga. I mean.
UNDERDOGS: Everyone else. The goal if you’re UCLA or Syracuse is simply to get a win on the island. Now, it’s worth noting that UCLA actually has good odds to win their first game, but even if Syracuse somehow beats Tennessee they’d then play the winner of Purdue/Gonzaga. That’s probably not happening two days in a row, but I’ve seen crazier. Either way, you gotta win one. Can’t let Chaminade go 1-2.
THE BEST POSSIBLE TITLE GAME IS: There’s so many good options here but I think you have to go with Purdue-Kansas, right? The two best big men in the sport facing off with two questionably good backcourts surrounding them would be a really, really fun thing to see. Any combination of Purdue, Kansas, Tennessee, Marquette, and Gonzaga would make for a great final though.
REQUIRED PREDICTION BY JOURNALISTIC LAW: Purdue over Kansas, which is really boring but I’m struggling to go elsewhere unless you want Tennessee over Kansas. I think the winner of that game wins the whole thing.
BELOW THE LINE ($): the other 30 something tournaments, somewhat ranked by watchability. Almost 6,000 total words! For $30 a year! Exclamation…