The good, the bad, and the worst of my 2023-24 preseason predictions
Ignore the part where I said UConn would be second in the Big East, please
Well, hey, the season is over. Sad! But it was a really, really fun season, even if I thought the NCAA Tournament was a little underwhelming. I have a few story ideas in mind but I’ve taken a couple weeks to myself just to rest. As a reminder: 119 articles in 153 days, totaling around 275,000-280,000 words in a five-month run. That’s like writing nearly three full books in five months and having a full-time job at the same time. It nearly took me down this year, but I survived.
I have actual good content coming soon. But! In the meantime, I wanted to continue a tradition I started a couple years back: looking at how my preseason predictions did. I feel like I do a reasonably good job of owning the good and the bad takes I make online, so here’s a space where I can own everything all at once.
There’s a few different ways to break this down: conference predictions (got 13 of 32 correct), Tennessee-specific ones, or the most fun way, which is to cover the 51 predictions I felt comfortable enough to throw in a clickbait-y column.
How’d those do? Some were terrific. Some were horrific. You be the judge.
Four teams from the preseason AP Top 25 miss the NCAA Tournament. Exactly what happened! Preseason #13 Miami, #14 Arkansas, #21 USC, and #22 Villanova all failed to make the eventual NCAA Tournament. In USC’s case they’re part of a weird pattern of preseason #21s flopping; it’s the 18th time in 39 tries the preseason #21 has missed the NCAA Tournament. No other rank has a hit rate above 12-for-39.
Those four teams: Florida Atlantic, Alabama, Miami, and USC. 2-for-4, not bad. FAU kind of sucked post-December and really should’ve been closer to missing the NCAAT than they were. I’ll admit defeat on Alabama: you just have to assume that every year, the fact they turn every game into a math equation in their advantage gives them a very high floor. If they ever miss a Tournament under Nate Oats it would take a lot of bad close game luck.
The overall #1 seed is Purdue. It was UConn, but until the day before Selection Sunday this was the case. Not bad. 1 seed that made the title game.
Houston wins at least one of the Big 12 regular season/conference tournament titles. Please look at this and tell me I didn’t cook. Goodness.
The first coach fired in-season is Kenny Payne. Tony Stubblefield at DePaul got the axe on January 22. Other coaches left of their own will more or less but this was the first actual firing.
A team outside of the preseason KenPom top 100 makes the NCAA Tournament as an at-large, that team being Syracuse. This was a swing-and-a-miss on the pick itself, but the actual prompt worked out again. Utah State (#101) got in as an 8-seed and won a game. Syracuse did have a reasonably good season.
A team inside the KenPom top 10 fails to finish in the top 25, that team being Alabama. Nope, finished 14th, which was technically not top 10 but hey. This actually ended up being Kansas, who finished 27th.
The Game of the Year is Cornell vs. Colgate on December 30. No, obviously, but it was fun enough. The best game of the year, per KenPom, was Denver/South Dakota on January 25, a 111-110 2OT decision.
We get a new AP #1 before the end of November. Easiest prompt ever. Kansas lost in Maui and Purdue became #1 on November 27.
St. John’s and Rick Pitino prove to be a media circus at every step of the way. Correct. This season alone, Rick called his team “so non-athletic we cannot guard anybody without fouling,” doubled down on the comments, then somewhat apologized. The Johnnies began the year by getting housed by a to-be 8-24 Michigan team at home, then proceeded to win 10 of 12 and nearly beat UConn on the road. Then they lost 8 of 10. Then they beat future 3-seed Creighton by 14 at home. Then they nearly toppled UConn in MSG. It was a wild ride, peaking with missing the NCAAT by a hair and Rick calling the committee “fraudulent.” Fun!
This is Dana Altman’s final season at Oregon. Apparently not? I guess a surprise Pac-12 Tournament run combined with a Round of 64 win over analytically-uninclined South Carolina was enough to convince him to hang around for Year One in the Nü Big Ten.
The best conference is the Big 12, but the most entertaining Big Six conference is the SEC. I think this one was correct. The SEC held the second-best player in America (Dalton Knecht), two of the 3-5 best offenses (Kentucky/Alabama), arguably the two best freshmen, some of the best scorers, some of the most unique stories and rebounders…I’ve written about Tennessee for seven seasons and this was the most fun version of the SEC I can immediately recall. It felt like the mid-2000s again, and I liked that.
The best and most entertaining non-Big Six conference is the Mountain West. Correct, moving on.
Texas is screwed out of a season-shifting win at Houston on February 17 by way of officiating hijinks. Didn’t happen, they just got demolished instead. But Texas did take one on the chin at West Virginia in January where the Mountaineers shot 20 more free throws and committed 13 fewer fouls. Oklahoma didn’t have a “refs screwed us” game that I’m immediately recalling, though.
DePaul nearly goes Defeated in the Big East, squeaking out a win on February 24 against Georgetown to finish 1-19. Poor guys. 0-20.
The At-Large Chicago State meme is forgotten about before Christmas and the Cougars go 10-19. Correct again; they went 13-19. But it was still a great season for them and Gerald Gillion was able to move on for more money elsewhere, so it’s a success.
The biggest year-over-year turnaround is California, who jumps from 270th in 2022-23 KenPom to the top 70 this year. Cal DID take a huge jump to 121st, but they weren’t the biggest bounce of the year. That would be McNeese State, who went from 335th to 67th under Cowboy Will Wade.
For at least the first month of the season, every game involving Ole Miss contains a graphics package showing a timeline of Chris Beard’s arrest. Didn’t happen. No one seemed willing to touch this subject, which led to every broadcast sort of dancing around the fact the guy got canned from a preseason top-10 team just months prior.
The leading scorer in the nation is James Bishop IV at George Washington. James had a good year (18.3 PPG), but the honor went to Zach Edey (25.2 PPG), who I did at least have as a top-10 contender for this.
Tyler Kolek becomes the first Big East player since Omar Cook in 2000-01 to average 10 PPG/8 APG AND play 1,000 minutes on the season. SO CLOSE. Kolek ended up at 15 PPG and 7.7 APG.
The national leader in made threes is Reyne Smith at Charleston. Great year for Reyne - 111 made threes, 39% 3PT - but not the leader. That would be Jack Gohlke at Oakland, who made 137, or 20 more than anyone else. What a king.
Stanford finally, blissfully sneaks into the NCAA Tournament…barely. They absolutely did not. One of my biggest swings and misses. Awful team!
The two hardest teams to figure out all season long are Texas Tech and Iowa State. No perfect way to measure this but I think both of these were serious misses. Texas Tech was more or less a “did they score” team all year long, Iowa State was the same with an elite defense. Nothing shocking from either. But Texas A&M is the OBVIOUS winner here; no team confounded more or puzzled greater amounts.
San Diego State follows up their shock run to the title game with a boring, respectable year of playing like a borderline top 25 team. Not only did they do that exact thing, they went right back to the Sweet Sixteen. That’s seven NCAA Tournament wins in two years, or second only to UConn. Not bad!
The team with the most success in following up their surprise(ish) 2023 NCAA Tournament run is Creighton. So my definition of ‘surprise’ here is that you were a 5 seed or deeper and cracked no less than the Elite Eight. That gave you a pool of Creighton, FAU, Miami, and San Diego State. Creighton had the best regular season and got a 3 seed, peacefully departing in the Sweet Sixteen. Reasonable and good follow-up to their best run ever, I’d say. The success rate here went Creighton > SDSU > FAU > > > > > > > > > > > (900-foot gap) > > > Miami.
The most successful first-year head coach: Ryan Odom at VCU. Made A-10 title game but Danny Sprinkle at Utah State is an extremely obvious winner here.
The coach with the hardest first year: Ed Cooley at Georgetown. I think this is a winner. Cooley and G’town could only beat DePaul in conference play, going 0-18 against the actual Big East-level teams they played. 9-23 was below pretty much everyone’s hopes, but not that far off my roster expectation of 13 wins. We’ll see if Year Two will be less painful.
Long Beach State is the best team in the Big West for the first time since 2012. LOOK WHO WAS RIGHT!!!! IT ONLY TOOK FOUR MONTHS OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AND THE COACH GETTING FIRED AND COMPLETELY FORGETTING THEY EXISTED BUT
At least one team’s season is derailed by midseason gambling suspensions. As far as I am immediately aware, this didn’t actually happen. But as I’d feared we DID get a gambling story mid-year, this one centered around a Temple basketball team that made a shock run to the AAC title game.
Kentucky fails to make an eighth straight Final Four, creating just the second 9+ season Final Four gap in program history. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm! Mm-hmm.
Central Michigan HC Tom Crean. Unfortunately (?) didn’t happen. CMU had a decent season and hung around in the MAC race for a good while. Maybe there’s something there. If there isn’t, I’ll run this one back in 10 months.
There is at least one mention of the Sickos Committee on an NCAA Tournament broadcast. Didn’t happen. Thank God.
A future first-round pick on a roster bound to miss the NCAA Tournament opts out of the conference tournament, setting a new standard. Didn’t happen, which did help us avoid a lot of #discourse. Trevon Brazile at Arkansas shut his season down with, uh, ‘knee soreness,’ which I would argue is a nice way of saying “I would prefer to not play basketball for this team anymore.”
Arizona State finishes 10th or worse in the Pac-12. 11th. EVERY SINGLE SEASON, the collective basketball media fools themselves into thinking Bobby Hurley is a good basketball coach. Every year. I cannot believe the media ranked this team 6th in the Pac-12. They wouldn’t be the best team in a two-team zombie Pac-12! Please stop doing this. I beg.
Minnesota HC Niko Medved. Ben Johnson had a pretty good year and held off the hot seat, so he gets ‘24-25 to prove it. Medved surprisingly turned down a few different offers and stayed at Colorado State, which was very cool to see.
A team at 90% or above to make the NCAA Tournament misses the NCAA Tournament. From this list. The answer: USC.
A preseason top-9 team wins the national championship. This one weird trick using the preseason AP Poll is now 21-for-27 since 1997. UConn started out 6th.
Yale enters the AP Top 25 for the first time since 1949. Sadly, Yale had a pretty pedestrian regular season (by their standards), but they turned it on late, got a 13 seed, and pulled off a shock upset of Auburn. Not bad.
Saint Mary’s cracks the AP Top 10 for the first time in school history. Didn’t happen, but got pretty darn close. They were 15th in the final pre-tournament poll.
Zach Edey wins National Player of the Year again. This was too easy. Who was the serious contender supposed to be? I think it was Donovan Clingan or Hunter Dickinson but neither came close.
Dillon Jones at Weber State is the mid-major Player of the Year. Depends on how you view these things but this one largely came true. Jones is the only mid-major player currently in the top 50 of the ESPN NBA Draft Big Board, was the Big Sky Player of the Year, and averaged 17 & 11.
One of the ten remaining programs that hasn’t finished outside of the KenPom top 100 in 27 seasons falls off the list. I pegged Oklahoma State as the second-most likely contender for this in preseason. Unfortunately, it came true for them, as they finished 114th and fired HC Mike Boynton.
Leonard Hamilton retires. I guess not? I did learn that he has one year left on his contract, so maybe he finishes out ‘24-25 and hangs it up. He’ll be 76 after next season and Florida State has missed three straight NCAATs.
The state of Tennessee’s basketball programs have multiple new coaches in 2024-25. A little overzealous but ended up right. Vandy fired Jerry Stackhouse and hired Mark Byington; UT Martin’s Ryan Ridder left for Mercer.
Colgate goes undefeated in conference play. Nope. A pathetic 16-2. That’s all?
A 6 seed makes the Final Four. We were all relying on Clemson, the last 6 seed standing, to make this come true. They came up a hair short against Alabama in the Elite Eight, so 30 years since the last time we saw a 6 seed in the Final Four, the streak continues.
A 14 seed makes the Sweet Sixteen. Oakland came EXTREMELY close, pushing 11-seed NC State to overtime, but that was it. We’ll get there soon enough.
A team makes the field of 68 with a losing record. Speaking of very close! Montana State made the Tournament with a 17-17 record. We nearly had our sub-.500 team…but no dice. Next year.
Two of the longest NCAA Tournament droughts in history end: Toledo (1980) and Duquesne (1977). This was almost the shot call of a lifetime had Toledo held up their end of the bargain. Unfortunate.
FOUR TEAMS make the NCAA Tournament for the first time: Grambling State (SWAC), UMass Lowell (AmEast), Sacred Heart (NEC), and SIU Edwardsville (OVC). Grambling got in, but the other three came up short. The only other newcomer was Stetson for the Atlantic Sun, which was fun.
I didn’t make a national championship prediction, but as a joke I picked Tennessee. Didn’t happen, but hey, Elite Eight was pretty good.
