To be frank, it’s a little difficult to write these previews, knowing that in a normal world, Florida likely would’ve had Keyontae Johnson available. Before we even really get started here, a reminder for Vol fans to be praying for his recovery and for the best possible outcome.
Alright, back to the rivalry. Tennessee has defeated Florida on four straight occasions. Mike White, who was about $250K in assistant money away from being Tennessee’s head coach, is 1-5 against Rick Barnes. And I have to say, this is one of my favorite sites on the Internet at the moment.
Here are the things to know about these Florida Gators:
Based on the roster they had heading into the season, Bart Torvik’s site had them ranked 10th. I know, I know: sounds ridiculous. But Bart’s site also nailed how good Texas would be when a lot of others doubted.
That said, the Gators are now ranked 37th and freefalling on the same site.
The Gators are as close to a schizophrenic team as Tennessee can draw this year. They’ve got five 90+ Game Scores on Torvik’s site (that’s very good)…and five performances of 72 or worse (that’s not good).
The only player who was on Tennessee’s roster the last time Tennessee lost to Florida (2017) is John Fulkerson.
Mike White is 1-5 against Rick Barnes and 56-34 against all other SEC competition.
Here is a game information section to relieve pressure from Grant Ramey’s mentions.
THE OPPONENT: Florida (6-4, 3-3).
THE CHANNEL: ESPN. Dick Vitale is on the call, just FYI.
Could this be the first of multiple games? Could it be the only time Tennessee actually plays Vanderbilt? Could they play Vanderbilt four times while not playing South Carolina once? Pretty much anything is on the table in the silliest season in college basketball history.
As a heads-up, this is the exact preview I wrote for Tuesday’s fixture, which was cancelled about eight hours before tip-off, much to the chagrin of the person writing this post. All I’ve changed is the final score prediction, given that the game is now in Knoxville and not Nashville. I am begging both of these schools to simply ensure the game gets completed, lest I lose my mind.
A quick note here as well: Vanderbilt hasn’t really announced who in the program tested positive or if anyone has to sit out for contact tracing purposes, so if a player is mentioned in this post and they don’t play, that’s probably why.
Game information section:
THE OPPONENT: Vanderbilt (4-5, 0-3).
THE TIME: 6 PM ET.
THE CHANNEL: SEC Network.
THE SPREAD: Tennessee -18.
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Texas A&M is a basketball team that plays their games in College Station, TX. They are coached by Buzz Williams. Through 1.3 seasons at Texas A&M, his two teams have ranked 131st and 98th in KenPom. Please let this be an easy one.
Five things worth knowing:
Texas A&M is 6-0 at home…
…and 0-3 on the road.
The Aggies are 1-3 against KenPom Top 100 teams, with the one win being a two-point win over Auburn. The three losses were to #81 TCU (73-55), #33 LSU (77-54), and #62 South Carolina (78-54).
Emanuel Miller is the only Texas A&M player in their top six minute-getters to have an Offensive Rating above 100 (essentially, CBB’s Mendoza Line). His is 119.9.
The Aggies are, amazingly, one of three teams in America to have a sub-300 offensive Turnover Percentage and a top-25 defensive Turnover Percentage.
Here’s a game information section:
THE OPPONENT: Texas A&M (6-3, 1-2).
THE TIME: 2 PM ET.
THE CHANNEL: ESPN2.
THE LOCATION: College Station, TX.
THE SPREAD: Has not yet been posted at the time of writing.
To click ahead to a certain section, use the guide below:
As disappointing as Tennessee’s Saturday was, you could make the case Arkansas had an equally disappointing outing. The Razorbacks entered their second SEC game 9-0, having beaten Auburn by double-digits on the road earlier in the week, and drew a Missouri team Tennessee had just demolished days prior. It was all setting up for Arkansas to make their case as, at worst, the second-best team in the SEC.
Then the game started, Arkansas could barely buy a bucket despite being dominant in terms of shot volume, Missouri hit just enough shots to stay in front the whole way, and a golden opportunity for Eric Musselman’s team was blown, 81-68. Now, the SEC race is as muddled as it can possibly be (as long as you still assume Tennessee is the favorite, of course). As many as five teams have a legitimate shot to be the 2 seed, which means a team like Arkansas will probably finish anywhere from 2nd to 6th in the conference and it’ll be entirely dependent on how many close games they can steal. I’m excited to see how that goes; hopefully Tennessee stays above the fray.
Five things to know about the Arkansas Razorbacks:
They have played just one KenPom Top 50 team; that was Missouri, who they lost to.
Like last year, Arkansas ran roughshod over a very weak non-conference schedule, with the toughest opponent either being #102 North Texas (69-54 win) or #113 Abilene Christian (85-72 win). There’s nothing wrong with demolishing bad teams, of course, and that’s generally a good sign. But considering Arkansas did the same thing last year only to crap out in SEC play, it’s worth holding out.
Arkansas only has one player in their rotation who was on the team last year: Desi Sills.
Four freshmen play for Arkansas, as do five transfers. Literally the rotation is 90% new, which both speaks volumes about the fact Musselman has them in the KenPom Top 40 and also makes me wonder if that’s a sustainable system at all. (He did something very similar with his final two teams at Nevada.)
Arkansas and Tennessee are two of just three teams in America to rank in the top 25 in both offensive TO% and OREB%. (Iowa is the third.)
Below is a game information section, which should relieve some pressure from various beat writers’ mentions:
Look: this university gets literally anything and everything it wants in the football world. Isn’t it nice that they aren’t also elite at basketball?
Five things you need to know:
Alabama’s 0-2 against Tier 1 opponents, but 3-1 against Tier 2 opposition.
When Alabama tops 1 PPP offensively, they’re 6-0. When they don’t? 0-3.
Nate Oats is entering his second year as head coach at Alabama after a nice four-year run as Buffalo’s head coach, which followed an 11-year run as Romulus High School (Michigan)’s head coach.
Oats owns three of Buffalo’s four NCAAT appearances, along with their only two NCAAT wins.
They are Alabama, and Tennessee is Tennessee.
The below game information section is used to alleviate pressure from Grant Ramey’s mentions.
THE OPPONENT: Alabama (6-3).
THE TIME: 6 PM ET.
THE CHANNEL: ESPN2! Finally!
THE SPREAD: Tennessee -9.5.
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There’s only so much I can say about a team Tennessee has played 25 times and beaten 24, so I’ll leave it relatively short. If you are somehow unfamiliar with them, the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles play basketball in Cookeville, TN. They haven’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1963, but they’ve won their conference’s regular season title as recently as 2005. When they do make it back to the NCAA Tournament, it’ll be a great day for basketball in this state.
For…reasons, they hired John Pelphrey, who is 9-29 in his first 38 games as head coach. Cookeville is home to a Popeyes just off of exit 287, which is actually the Popeyes where I first experienced the chicken sandwich. Thank you to my friend Nathan for capturing the moment; the photo is available upon request.
The below section is to alleviate pressure from Grant Ramey’s mentions.
THE OPPONENT: Tennessee Tech (0-7).
THE TIME: 7:00 PM ET.
THE CHANNEL: SEC Network Plus, online-only.
IF YOU HAVE A CABLE SUBSCRIPTION: You can either go to espn.com/watch and enter in your cable info that way by following the instructions, or if you have a Roku/Amazon Fire thing, go to the ESPN app and do the same thing.
IF YOU DON’T: Uh…call someone you know that does? Or listen to Bob and Bert?
THE SPREAD: Tennessee -28.5.
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Appalachian State, as you may have heard, is a school in Boone, North Carolina. They are best known for dropping the match into the batch of lighter fluid that was Lloyd Carr-era Michigan football and causing my dad to have chest pains for the better part of the last two decades. Other than that…
Just kiddin’. The Mountaineers have made the NCAA Tournament once in the 64/68-team era (2000, lost to Ohio State 87-61). They probably won’t do it this year, but their current coach, Dustin Kerns, is the first head coach to make them respectable and solid in over a decade. Pretty good, if you ask me. Finally, on December 15, Tennessee gets to play an opponent that isn’t in the KenPom top 75.
Game information
This is a short section that will hopefully alleviate pressure from Grant Ramey’s mentions.
THE OPPONENT: Appalachian State (4-1).
THE TIME: 7:00 PM Eastern.
THE CHANNEL: SEC Network.
THE SPREAD: Tennessee -18.5.
If you’d like to jump ahead to a different part of the preview, use the provided menu:
Content! Beautiful content. The ACC has achieved what the most daydream-prone among us have hoped for: pure, uncontrollable chaos. Nothing about a 346-team NCAA Tournament (11 of Division I’s 357 programs are ineligible for this year’s Tournament for various reasons) is normal at all, and all it can bring is something wild. Imagine the takes if 1 seed Villanova loses to 346 seed Mississippi Valley State in the shocker of a lifetime!
Of course, that exact scenario takes numerous leaps of logic to achieve. A straight 346-team tournament isn’t possible without either a laundry list of byes or play-in rounds. Everyone knows the NCAA Tournament loves money, and such a massive loss to a star team would be a monetary dent in terms of viewership and advertising dollars, both of which the NCAA needs in droves (apparently!) after the cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Tournament. That’s why I’d offer The Will Warren Somewhat Sane Solution. It is not the Everyone’s Easy Solution That Just Adds a Couple Extra Games.
(Quick aside: you can just turn the Field of 64 into the Field of 256 by having one play-in round for teams seeded 167 through 346, protecting the top 166. It’s not a bad idea, but forcing the top teams to win eight straight games instead of six both seems a little nuts and seems like it could massively overwhelm host cities. We’re assuming no/limited crowds for the purpose of this experiment, and having even 16 teams podded up in one city probably means at least a couple of hotels at full capacity. I went to school for English, not Hotel Management, so maybe this is actually fine, but who knows.)
Here is the Official guide to a plan I cooked up yesterday afternoon, along with questions I still have to answer:
1. A ladder system that protects the top 32 teams.
In order to ensure that proper respect is paid to teams that have a lot of success during the conference-only regular season (another assumption that I’m running with), I’ve instituted a system that gives the 32 best* teams a free run to the Field of 64. It’s how it would work in a normal season, so it seems fair to keep this part. What this means is that 32 teams out of the remaining 314 will have to play their way into the Field of 64 by way of our 1-to-346 seeded ladder system.
What’s a ladder system? Think of it the way they run it in the Korean Baseball League.
The fifth-seeded team plays the fourth-seeded team.
The winner plays the third-seeded team.
That winner plays the second seed…
And finally, that winner gets to play the first seed.
It’s a testament to how well you can sustain your success if you make it all the way up the ladder, and it rewards those who’ve had full-season success as opposed to those who get hot for a few games. How does our ladder system work?
2. Six play-in rounds, spread out over 10-14 days at neutral sites, that slowly whittle the field from 346 to 64 teams.
Bear with me here. This is pretty nuts, I’ll admit, but so’s the idea of a 346-team college basketball tournament in a sport ripe with variance. Anything can happen in any one game, which is why we’re introducing this ladder system as opposed to the 166-team protection. This enables full-season success to matter, while allowing a team to run their way from the bottom to the big time if they’re hot. It attempts to simulate Conference Championship Week in some form, though with more rounds than any individual conference championship.
Here’s how it works. Teams are reseeded by round; i.e., if the #334 team wins in the first round but no team below them wins, they will play the #212 seed in the second, and so on.
Teams seeded 257-346 (90 teams total) will play each other from top to bottom – 257 vs. 346, 258 vs. 345, 259 vs. 344, etc. – in order to eliminate 45 teams. This leaves us with 301 teams after one round.
Teams seeded 212-256 (45 teams) will play the first round winners to eliminate another 45 teams, giving us 256 teams after two rounds.
Now, we could go right into a 256-team field and stop here. If we don’t, we have a third play-in round that gets the field to 192 teams by way of teams seeded 129-211 playing the second-round winners.
For the fourth round, teams seeded 65-128 will play the third-round winners, pushing the field to 128 teams.
The fifth round features the teams seeded 33-64 and the fourth-round winners for a total of 48 games being played, eliminating 48 teams to get to 80.
Now – finally – our final play-in round allows for teams seeded 49-80 to play each other for the right to be in the field of 64.
This is very much silly, but it also works. Teams are forced to climb their way up the ladder system to earn their spot in the NCAA Tournament in a system that somewhat simulates conference tournaments with much less structure and more chaos. You like chaos, right?
3. Alternately, the same plan, but with four play-in rounds and a 128-team field.
This allows for a shorter time period and is less complicated. Again, teams are reseeded after reach relevant round; if #340 beats #263 but no other team below them wins, they would play #212 in the next round.
Teams seeded 257-346 (90 teams total) will play each other from top to bottom – 257 vs. 346, 258 vs. 345, 259 vs. 344, etc. – in order to eliminate 45 teams. This leaves us with 301 teams after one round.
Teams seeded 212-256 (45 teams) will play the first round winners to eliminate another 45 teams, giving us 256 teams after two rounds.
A third play-in round that gets the field to 192 teams by way of teams seeded 129-211 playing the second-round winners.
For the fourth round, teams seeded 65-128 will play the third-round winners, pushing the field to 128 teams.
The Tournament is then seeded where 1 plays 128, 2 plays 127, and so on, with aims at ensuring region vs. region play.
Question: What about automatic qualifiers from non-Big Six conferences? We’ll have to work that out. Ostensibly, we could turn the Top 32 into the 32 conference champions/standings leaders at season’s end and it would work out just as well. Then, the final 32 spots are made up of the 32 teams that survive our ladder/play-in system. However…doesn’t it feel kind of weird to have a field where, say, 272nd-ranked-in-KenPom North Carolina Central is guaranteed a spot but 3rd-ranked Baylor isn’t? To be determined, folks. Though if you’re the third-best team in college basketball, you should be able to win against whoever you draw no matter what.
Question: How do we ensure smaller, lower-seeded schools can actually play each other? There’s a clear issue here, and I’m not totally sure how to resolve it under this format. For instance, what if Albany (in New York) draws Florida A&M (very much not in New York) in the first round? That’s a lot of travel costs we’d have to work out, and it likely isn’t worth it for Florida A&M. The best thing we can do is have one city be the host to as many games as possible, similar to the actual Field of 64. Perhaps for this specific example, the two teams could play in Washington D.C. at a neutral site. Someone smarter than me probably has an idea on how to do pods for this, and obviously, the 256-team field is much easier to work out. But it’s also not nearly as protective of those who’ve earned the right to be there.
Question: How long would both plans take? For the six play-in round structure, I think it could be accomplished over the course of 10-14 days – AKA, how long conference championship “week” usually takes – at multiple neutral court sites. We’d have to stuff 314 teams in no more than four cities, but I’d say it’s at least somewhat doable. For the four-round structure, we could realistically accomplish this in anywhere from 6-10 days. Again, this stuffs a lot of teams in no more than four bubble cities, but it also cuts the number of play-in teams from 314 to 218. However, it creates much more variance.
Question: Maybe a 96-team field? Sure! The in-between plan, which the NCAA almost implemented ten years ago. Just take the four-round plan listed above and add a fifth-round between teams seeded 65-128.
I don’t really know the source of the image, but I assume it originated from a message board. Most of these things do. Anyway, I have some thoughts about it:
Graphic design is clearly not this person’s passion. This thing looks like garbage – “All-Time” and “College Basketball Tiers” are not centered appropriately, black-on-gray almost always looks sad, and the team logos remind me of going to SportsLogos.com in 2005 to look at old logos.
While some tiers are pretty good, others are…questionable. If you know much about college basketball history, it’s hard to question Tier 1 at all. Those five programs are the winningest in college basketball history, and no one else really comes all that close. As crazy as it sounds, the weakest selection is UCLA, a team that’s won more national titles than everyone else but has a lower WP% than anyone else in this group of five. But Tier 2, which features a Georgetown program with one appearance past the Sweet Sixteen since 1996, and UConn, a team with four titles but almost no pre-1990 success…that’s problematic.
I think it’s probably accurate on the whole but could be tweaked to be better. Also, I’m bored and still in the house.
So, with that in mind and with little else to do after my day job ends at home, I set off to form a more perfect list, with tiers still in the mix. There’s a few different ways to fix this image, but on the whole, it’s a good start; this is more about tweaks than wholesale change. Here’s my theoretical fixes to this theoretical image.
More thoroughly define the “tiers” of teams. We won’t change the “blue bloods” tier, because it’s basically flawless. However, “great” needs a better definition. Do “great” programs get there on the strength of continuous success? Do they get there because of title runs that mask periods of inadequacy? The same goes for “good” and “solid”, which are very close to being the same thing. Here’s my proposal: Tier 2 turns into Mostly Great, Tier 3 is Occasionally Great, Mostly Good, Tier 4 Solid and Reliable, and so on.
Make separate lists for high-major and mid-major programs. The original image starts to hit a bit of a mess when it ranks these two separate classes with vastly different resources beside each other. For instance, Iowa and Penn rank alongside each other as Tier 4 programs all-time. At a very specific brand of face value, it makes sense; Iowa’s been to 26 NCAA Tournaments in its history, Penn 24. Here’s the issue: one of these teams plays a much harder schedule. Iowa ranks 13th all-time in Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System; Penn ranks 134th. We can’t realistically mash these two teams against each other unless it actually makes sense to do so. An important qualifier: Gonzaga will rank as a high-major in the last five and last ten years lists, as will every AAC team. While the AAC isn’t quite on the level of the Big Six typically, it’s close enough that they’re above being a mid-major conference. Gonzaga, meanwhile, is a new-era blue-blood.
Make an additional list for the last five years. That way, we have an all-time list, Ken Pomeroy’s 23-year list, and a reading of how programs look to recruits in 2020-21. While UConn may rate out as the 19th-best program on Pomeroy’s list, it’s much harder to make that argument when narrowed to the last five years, when recruits have actually paid attention to college basketball. The average recruit for the 2021-22 season would’ve been about 13 years old in 2015, and it’s hard to expect a then-seventh grader to be following college basketball all that closely beyond a loose understanding of who’s been good in March.
Without further ado, here’s our All-Time, Last Five Years, and Last Ten Years lists.
All-Time College Basketball Tiers (Big Six + select MMs)
Tier 1: Blue Bloods. Same as the original – Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and UCLA.
Tier 2: Mostly Great. These are teams that, for most of their history, have been yearly NCAA Tournament fixtures, finish in the AP Poll Top 25, and occasionally win a title. This tier contains ten teams: Indiana, Louisville, Michigan State, Villanova, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio State, Michigan, Syracuse, and Arizona. For the most part, these teams have routinely been March fixtures, making deep runs and winning a good amount of conference titles. Historically, Indiana has been closer to Tier 1 than Michigan State, but five years from now, that probably won’t be the case anymore. Cincinnati, of course, looks like a questionable pick. But think about it: in 24 of the last 29 years, they’ve made the NCAA Tournament. They’ve finished ranked in the AP Poll 15 times. They do own a pair of national titles in the early 1960s, and other than the 1980s, they’ve consistently won their conference or contended for it every year post-World War II. They’ve yet to go beyond the Elite Eight since 1992, but I’m not sure it really matters; they are basically always a threat.
Tier 3: Occasionally Great, Mostly Good. Teams that make the NCAA Tournament a good amount of the time and every now and then make deep runs, sometimes winning a title. However, their success is not as sustained as Tier 2, and there may be lengthy periods in their history where they were mediocre-to-bad. Along with this, their identity lies in consistently being good, not great. This is the largest tier, with 29 teams included: Purdue, Iowa, NC State, Notre Dame, Maryland, Oklahoma, Marquette, Wisconsin, Memphis, St. John’s, Tennessee, Kansas State, UNLV, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Utah, Florida, BYU, Arkansas, Providence, Alabama, West Virginia, Dayton, Gonzaga, Virginia, Georgetown, Temple, Connecticut, and Texas. (A reminder that these aren’t really in any specific order.) Collectively, these 28 teams own 12 of the national titles in the 35-year period of the 64/68-team field, which is a good chunk of the pie. However: those top five teams own the other 15. (Tier 2 has eight titles among its ten teams, or just under one per program.) The most controversial inclusion here will obviously be Connecticut, a team with four national championships since 1999. However: the program had two NCAA Tournament appearances between 1967 and 1990, didn’t make a Final Four until 1999, and has had lengthy periods in its history – one of which they’re currently in – where the program was irrelevant on a national scale.
Tier 4: Solid and Reliable. Rare is it that these programs are outright bad, but even rarer is it that they’re truly attention-grabbing. These programs largely have lived for being an 8 or 9 seed with the occasional Sweet Sixteen run. Seventeen teams are in this tier: Minnesota, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Florida State, USC, Washington, California, Iowa State, UAB, DePaul, Houston, Xavier, LSU, VCU, Pittsburgh, Western Kentucky, Saint Joseph’s, and Texas Tech. Remember that these are all-time, not recent; from 1976 to 1992, DePaul made 14 of 17 NCAA Tournaments and finished in the AP top 10 seven different times. If you’re 55 or older, you likely remember a time when DePaul was legitimately one of the six or so best college basketball programs. The flipside goes for VCU: they have a higher WP% than most of the teams in Tier 3 and some in Tier 2…but they’ve finished ranked in the AP Poll three times ever and the 2011 Final Four run is the only time they’ve advanced past the Round of 32. Likewise, Texas Tech had never advanced past the Sweet Sixteen until they hired Chris Beard. At one point in time, Western Kentucky was a yearly top 15 program or so…but the last time they were ranked period was 2001-02. They’re never bad, but they haven’t gotten anything above a 16 seed since 2009. We’re still giving them the honorary nod.
Tier 5: The Murky Middle. Odds are that these teams suffer from one of the following: a mediocre all-time record; not a ton of NCAA Tournament appearances; few deep March runs; few conference titles. They exist in a weird middle range where they’re not openly bad and not very good. Chances are that these teams have some good stretches in their past, and they’ve had flashes of greatness, but they aren’t often a consistent March fixture. Fourteen teams are in this tier: Oregon State, Oregon, Nebraska, Georgia Tech, Auburn, Clemson, Colorado, Tulsa, Arizona State, South Carolina, Mississippi State, New Mexico, Seton Hall, Georgia, and Virginia Tech. Some of these teams have made a Final Four recently, and Oregon and South Carolina even made it in the same year. That’s nice! It also doesn’t excuse the fact that South Carolina has just two NCAA Tournament appearances since 1998 or that Oregon went from 1961 to 1995 without a single March appearance. (Phil Knight cures all, it seems.) Oregon State has made just one NCAA Tournament appearance since 1990, but for serious stretches of time (1975-1990, mostly), they hung around the top of the Pac-8 (and then Pac-10) yearly. In true Oregon State fashion, their 1980-81 and 1981-82 teams went a combined 51-7 but failed to make the Final Four both times. They haven’t won a Tournament game since, and odds are their brief 2016 Tournament appearance is the first time anyone under 30 has ever thought about Oregon State basketball. Seton Hall barely got in here, because despite being thoroughly mediocre from roughly 1957 to 1987, they do own a national title game appearance and have made several March appearances over the last three decades. The last truly great team they had was in 1992-93, though.
Tier 6: Baylor. They don’t really fit anywhere else, to be honest. It’s really hard to neatly find a spot for a team with seven 20+ loss seasons, multiple 20+ year NCAA Tournament droughts, and also two Elite Eight runs and a team that likely would’ve gotten a third this year. Historically, their lows have been lower than just about anyone in Tier 5…but so have the highs. We’ll punt.
Tier 7: Don’t Buy or Sell, It’s Crap. For the most part, these programs have a mediocre history and have won little of serious substance. Sometimes, one of these teams will pop up out of nowhere en route to a 3 seed and a self-immolation in the Sweet Sixteen. Seven teams go here: Miami, Boston College, Washington State, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Penn State, and TCU.
Tier 8: Despair. This is the lowest of the low. These teams, for the most part, have never experienced serious success, and just making the Tournament feels like a heroic feat. Never mind actually winning a game! I get sad thinking about these programs. Five teams stand out here: Rutgers, Northwestern, South Florida, Southern Mississippi, and Tulane. Northwestern did make the NCAA Tournament in 2017, and Rutgers was well on track to do it in 2020. That being said…both schools would’ve been rapturously excited to be an 8 or 9 seed, because it would’ve been Rutgers’ first visit in nearly 30 years and it was Northwestern’s first visit ever. South Florida, Southern Miss, and Tulane are three mid-major programs with three post-1984 NCAA Tournament runs each, and it really feels like all three programs should be better…but they just aren’t. South Florida has lost fewer than 10 games in a season once in 47 seasons, Southern Miss’ only sustained success in my lifetime was immediately undone by Donnie Tyndall’s NCAA troubles, and Tulane hasn’t touched double-digit conference wins since 1997.
Okay! That was fun. Let’s now move on to the Last Five Years lists. Below are the same tiers, but simplified to the last five years only. The first list is high-majors + AAC + Gonzaga; the second list is mid-majors only.
The Last Five Years of College Basketball Tiers (Big Six, AAC, and Gonzaga)
Tier 1: The New-Age Blue Bloods. Hey, remember when the first list had an easy, widely-agreed-upon definition of Blue Bloods? That doesn’t exist right now. New powerhouses have risen up to become the best programs in college basketball. There’s a new top five program list in college basketball: Virginia, Kansas, Duke, Villanova, and Gonzaga. Four of the last five national titles belong to this group, and the teams without a recent title (Kansas and Gonzaga) have made at least three Elite Eights from 2015 onward. The most controversial exclusion(s?) from this list are covered in Tier Two.
Tier 2: Mostly Great. Same criteria: for the most part, these squads have been yearly NCAA Tournament fixtures, with half of them making a Final Four run and seven of the ten owning at least one Elite Eight visit. These ten programs are Michigan State, Kentucky, Purdue, North Carolina, Michigan, Louisville, West Virginia, Baylor, Cincinnati, and Texas Tech. A quick rebuttal to those who would like MSU and Kentucky in Tier 1: while the argument could exist, it’s hard to back it up statistically. Michigan State did make the Final Four in 2015 and 2019, but their 2016-2018 performances – Round of 64, Round of 32, Round of 32 – don’t measure up with those of the top five. Kentucky, meanwhile, hasn’t been to a Final Four since the 38-1 team and has slowly started to lose the edge they’d built in recruiting for years. They’re the class of the SEC, but the SEC hasn’t been one of the three best Big Six conferences since 2006-07, per KenPom. The Big East, a non-football conference with a significantly smaller budget than the SEC, is a clearly superior conference. Then again, those schools generally don’t make coaching hires as bad as the SEC’s.
Tier 3: Occasionally Great, Mostly Good. Teams that make the NCAA Tournament a good amount of the time and every now and then make deep runs, sometimes winning a title. Along with this, their identity lies in consistently being good, not great – the average team in this group has had one, maybe two top-4 seeds, but on the whole, they’ve not typically been one of the 16 best teams in the field. In a couple of cases, a team has made a deep run in the Tournament but has had a few down years otherwise. Tough selections were made in this one. Included in this group: Florida State, Oregon, Florida, Maryland, Xavier, Wisconsin, Houston, Wichita State, Creighton, Butler, Arizona, Seton Hall, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas State, Ohio State, and Auburn. The toughest selections were on both ends here: Florida State would have made it four straight NCAA Tournament bids this year, with three of those being top-4 seeds. They had a solid case for the Mostly Great tier. However: they haven’t topped 14th in KenPom in any of these seasons, and they started this parameter of time by missing the Tournament. They’re more good than great. Auburn, meanwhile, went 12-24 in SEC play over the first two years of our search. Objectively, they were bad, and it would’ve taken something heroic to even get them to touch this tier. The Final Four run in 2019 is just enough to push them into Tier 3; their 25-6 record this season belied them being the seventh-luckiest team in all of CBB. (Their “real” record would’ve translated to something like 22-9 and about 10-8…meaning with a less-unusual run of wins in coin-flip games, they could’ve been the sixth-best team in their own conference.)
Tier 4: Solid and Reliable. Rare is it that these programs are outright bad, but even rarer is it that they’re truly attention-grabbing. These programs largely have lived for being an 8 or 9 seed with the occasional Sweet Sixteen run. This tied for the largest group at 20 teams deep: Kansas State, Marquette, Miami (FL), Virginia Tech, Indiana, Clemson, Texas, Notre Dame, Iowa, Syracuse, Providence, TCU, Arkansas, SMU, UCLA, Texas A&M, Oklahoma State, USC, and LSU. None of the top-end teams were serious threats to enter Tier 3, but LSU was a real threat to fall to Tier 5. They would’ve made the NCAA Tournament this year as an 8 or 9 seed, which would be fine…but their first three years of this run resulted in zero NCAAT runs and a 21-33 SEC record. Will Wade is a fantastic coach that will almost certainly get fired for something other than coaching, so I think they’ve done enough to rise into Tier 4. The team that statistically should be here but isn’t is South Carolina. The Gamecocks are a strange case: in the five years of this search, they never went worse than 7-11 in conference and did make the famous Final Four run in 2017. However: that’s their only NCAA Tournament run under Frank Martin, and it’s the only time they’ve ranked higher than 58th in KenPom under him. LSU has two seasons that are better, and even though their lows were much lower than South Carolina’s, they got the nod. South Carolina is solid and reliable, but not in terms of actually being a good Big Six program. One last note: SMU is the only mid-major in this tier, and it sounds ridiculous when you see their last three KenPom finishes: 84th, 107th, 88th. The first two years are what got them here: 16th in their tournament-banned 2015-16 (likely would’ve been a 5 or 6 seed) and 11th in 2016-17.
Tier 5: The Murky Middle. Odds are that these teams suffer from one of the following: a mediocre record; few NCAA Tournament appearances; fewer deep March runs; no conference titles. They exist in a weird middle range where they’re not openly bad and not very good. Like Tier 4, this group is 20 teams strong: South Carolina, NC State, Penn State, Alabama, Utah, Mississippi State, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona State, Georgia, Northwestern, Ole Miss, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Temple,Memphis, UConn, UCF, and Tulsa. A lot of AAC teams slid in at the end. They haven’t ranked as well on KenPom/Torvik, but their overall records were enough to get them in here as opposed to Tier 6. In particular, Tulsa and UConn were problematic cases: both have only been to one NCAA Tournament in the last six years, and neither would’ve made this year’s field. That said, Tulsa did post three 12+ win seasons in the AAC in our search and UConn had four Top 100 finishes. Outside of Tulsa’s 2016-17 and UConn’s 2017-18, neither has really had a truly forgettable season. I’ll allow it.
Tier 6: Don’t Buy or Sell, It’s Crap. Generally, this group has few wins of substance and has made no real noise in March. A few of these programs could reasonably be in Tier 5 but didn’t make it for various reasons: a season that tanked their overall stock, a lack of NCAA Tournament runs, or never doing particularly well in conference play. Eleven programs stand in Tier 6: Washington, Nebraska, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Wake Forest, St. John’s (NY), Missouri, Oregon State, Rutgers, and California. Quick: do you remember that Cal actually started this five-year search by being a 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament? Also, do you remember that it ended with a double-digit loss to a 13 seed? That’s the kind of stuff we’re looking at. Washington, in particular, had a good case for Tier 5: they’re objectively better at basketball than probably five of the teams up there. However, their awful 2016-17 season tanked their stock, and the fact they haven’t topped 48th in KenPom since 2010-11 really puts a limiting ceiling on how high they can go. They should break into Tier 5 with another top 60ish season in 2020-21; Torvik projects them 42nd. Among this tier, only Stanford (23rd!) and Rutgers (31st) project higher.
Tier 7: Despair. Making the Tournament would be a heroic feat for these programs. “Success” is not sustained at all, and is best represented by the occasional .500 record in conference play. Only six teams fell to Tier 7: DePaul, Boston College, Washington State, South Florida, Tulane, and East Carolina. None were serious contenders for Tier 6, and you could easily make the argument that the bottom three teams here are closer to a Tier 8 than a Tier 6. For now, they’re together. South Florida’s 2012 NCAA Tournament bid is the only NCAAT bid this decade among these six programs.
Lots of words! Now, the mid-majors.
The Last Five Years of College Basketball Tiers (Mid-Majors Only)
A quick reminder: Gonzaga cannot really be considered a mid-major anymore; they routinely post top 10 recruiting classes and have poured a ton of money into basketball. In fact, Gonzaga puts more money into their basketball program than half of the Big Six programs. They’re a high-major now. As such: this list includes everyone other than Gonzaga and the AAC.
Tier 1: The Mid-Major Blue Bloods. Every year, you can trust these teams to be right at the top of their conference. They’re a yearly NCAA Tournament fixture, and it’s expected for them to make some March noise. These are teams that have routinely graduated from the 13-16 seed treadmill. This group is five teams deep: Saint Mary’s, Dayton, San Diego State, Nevada,New Mexico State, and VCU. Every year, you expect to see these teams in March. While Dayton and San Diego State’s stars are inflated a bit by unusually great 2019-20 seasons, they’re still March regulars and have histories of legitimate success. New Mexico State is the toughest case. They have fewer losses than any other mid-major not named Gonzaga, and a 2019-20 bid would’ve represented their eight NCAA Tournament run in nine years. Despite them not winning a single game in any of those runs, they still get in by virtue of pure dominance of their conference. They’re 80-8 in the WAC since 2014-15. VCU got a real ‘benefit of the doubt’ nod here; they went 8-10 in the A-10 this year and ranked 144th in 2017-18, but all of their six NCAA Tournament bids from 2012-13 onward have been as a 10 seed or higher.
Tier 2: The 12-14 Seeds. Tough one to work on here. Some of these teams are more like 11 seeds when they make the Tournament, but they’re not consistent-enough fixtures to be in Tier 1. Generally, these teams are either consistently great in lower-tier conferences or consistently good in the upper echelon (A-10, MWC, WCC) of mid-major land. Not all of these teams make the Tournament every year, but out of this batch of names, you can expect to see several in your bracket yearly. Tough cuts were made here, but we still ended up with 23 teams: BYU, Rhode Island, Belmont, Vermont, Davidson, East Tennessee State, Buffalo, Yale, St. Bonaventure, Boise State, South Dakota State, Utah State, UNC Greensboro, Furman, UC Irvine, Loyola-Chicago, College of Charleston, Stephen F. Austin, Hofstra, Princeton, Akron, Murray State, and Old Dominion. This group was always going to be huge, simply because there’s a much bigger pool of teams to pick from. Belmont and Vermont had the best Tier 1 cases, as both are yearly March fixtures and routinely win their conference…but neither have the March wins to be a blue blood. It is what it is.
Tier 3: Good-Not-Greats. Wide swath here: maybe these are teams that are always the fourth-best team in the A-10. Maybe they’re pretty good in a weak conference. Maybe they’re just good in an average conference. Either way, there’s a lot of ’em. I think there’s 41 teams here: Fresno State, San Francisco, Winthrop, Northern Iowa, Harvard, Grand Canyon, Wright State, Montana, Louisiana Tech, Georgia State, UT-Arlington, Northern Kentucky, Wofford, Middle Tennessee, Western Kentucky, Valparaiso, UAB, Illinois State, Penn, Richmond, Southern Illinois, Toledo, Kent State, William & Mary, Liberty, Louisiana-Lafayette, Stony Brook, Northeastern, Marshall, Bucknell, North Dakota State, Hawaii, UC Santa Barbara, Monmouth, Eastern Washington, Lipscomb, Ball State, Oakland, Iona, Texas Southern,Texas State, and Merrimack. Exhaustingly long! Texas State barely slid in at the end – they’re 87-69, but have a pair of sub-.500 finishes in the Sun Belt. Still: three 20+ win seasons speak for themselves, and they should be pretty good again in 2020-21. Merrimack has all of one season of D-1 play to their name, but it was so good that I almost felt required to get them in at Tier 3.
Tier 4: “Fine.” Occasionally, one of these teams will have a great season and pop up in your bracket as a 13 seed, but for the most part, they operate outside of the NCAA Tournament. Nothing wrong with that! Generally, you can expect these teams to be consistently solid, and their range of outcomes are pretty easy to nail down. Lots of teams in this one, again: New Mexico, Saint Louis, UNLV, Georgia Southern, South Dakota, Radford, Ohio, Colorado State, George Mason, Cal State Bakersfield, North Florida, Chattanooga, Saint Joseph’s, Chattanooga, Duquesne, Sam Houston State, Weber State, Austin Peay, Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Florida Gulf Coast, Green Bay, Rider, Northern Colorado, Colgate, Towson, Lehigh, Albany, St. Francis (PA), Jacksonville State, Boston University, North Carolina Central, Siena.
Tier 5: The Somewhat Murky Middle. These are more on the side of lower-tier A-10/WCC/MWC teams, mid-pack SoCon teams, and higher-end Southland squads. The list: Eastern Michigan, Nebraska-Omaha, Utah Valley, George Washington, Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, Indiana State, Missouri State, Tennessee State, UNC Wilmington, Gardner-Webb, Abilene Christian, Northern Illinois, IPFW, UNC Asheville, Long Beach State, Seattle, Brown, Drake, Mercer, Texas A&M Corpus Christi, Coastal Carolina, UC Davis, Nicholls State, North Dakota, North Texas, Wagner, UMBC, Portland State, Wyoming, Norfolk State, Navy, Hampton, Saint Peter’s, and Canisius.
Tier 6: Below-Average-ish. Sometimes, these teams make the NCAA Tournament, but generally, they aren’t very good. A couple of the teams in this grouping actually have conference titles to their name, but play in a bottom-three conference. Teams like: San Diego, Pacific, Evansville, Little Rock, La Salle, UMass, Pepperdine, Cal State Fullerton, South Alabama, Louisiana Monroe, Lamar, NJIT, Arkansas State, Oral Roberts, New Orleans, High Point, Western Michigan, Morehead State, Prairie View A&M, Elon, UTEP, Delaware, Eastern Illinois, Fairfield, Tennessee-Martin, Campbell, Montana State, FIU, LIU Brooklyn, Fairleigh Dickinson, Army, Idaho, Robert Morris, Southern, Hartford, Illinois-Chicago, Mount St. Mary’s, and Sacred Heart.
Tier 7: Forgettable Squads. To be honest, I spend months, even years without remembering the existence of these squads. They’re not truly the lowest of the low, but seasons with serious success are very rare. UMKC, Columbia, Western Carolina, Air Force, Cornell, Miami (OH), UTSA, Eastern Kentucky, New Hampshire, Southern Miss, Rice, Troy, Tennessee Tech, Florida Atlantic, Charlotte, Fordham, UT Rio Grande Valley, Samford, Southeastern Louisiana, Denver, Charleston Southern, Jacksonville, Appalachian State, IUPUI, Alcorn State, Milwaukee, Grambling State, Sacramento State, Dartmouth, Jackson State, Bethune-Cookman, James Madison, UMass Lowell, North Carolina A&T, Quinnipiac, American, Manhattan, Morgan State, and Loyola (MD).
Tier 8: Basement. I feel bad, because no one should be given this designation; any of these teams can make the NCAA Tournament with a bit of March luck. That said, luck doesn’t seem very realistic for many of them. Dartmouth, Houston Baptist, Northwestern State, North Alabama, Western Illinois, Central Arkansas, Youngstown State, Cal State Northridge, McNeese State, Detroit, Portland, Idaho State, Incarnate Word, Drexel, UC Riverside, Holy Cross, South Carolina State, Southern Utah, Lafayette, Niagara, Citadel, St. Francis (NY), San Jose State, Cleveland State, Stetson, Cal Poly, Southeast Missouri State, Presbyterian, VMI, Kennesaw State, Binghamton, Alabama State, Florida A&M, USC Upstate, Northern Arizona, Bryant, SIU Edwardsville, Longwood, Arkansas Pine Bluff, Coppin State, Maryland Eastern Shore, Howard, Marist, Central Connecticut, Maine, Chicago State, Alabama A&M, Mississippi Valley State, and Delaware State. Apologies to all programs involved.
Hopefully, this gives us a better picture of both a long-term and short-term view of college basketball. If you were to extend the range to ten years for your search, I think it could produce somewhat different results, but you’re also theorizing that a current 18-year-old recruit was intently watching college basketball at 8-12 years old. (As someone who has loved basketball for most of my life, I didn’t start watching college basketball beyond occasional March games until age 10, and even that felt advanced.) This should provide a better, more reasonable view of how things look to the current recruiting class.
Located on the northwestern edge of the Houston area is Prairie View A&M, a historically black university and the second-oldest school in Texas. Chances are that if you’re a fan of a high-major basketball team, your team has probably played Prairie View A&M or another SWAC team in November or December of any given year. For years, these were fairly routine exhibitions that saw the home team win by double digits. Prairie View spends most non-conference schedules entirely on the road, almost never playing a home game before Christmas. 2019-20 was a rare exception, and even then, their home opponent was Jarvis Christian College from the NAIA.
For most of Prairie View’s history, they were seen as an also-ran of the SWAC. Prior to 2018-19, they held a 29.3% winning percentage at the Division I level. In their 41 seasons of D-1 basketball, they’d made the NCAA Tournament just once…and held the ignominious distinction of suffering the biggest blowout loss in NCAA Tournament history, losing 110-52 to Kansas. (Fun fact: 1 seed Kansas would go on to lose to 8 seed Rhode Island two days later. March!) Prairie View had never finished SWAC play with better than a 14-4 record, and their highest-ranked team in the KenPom era was 2002-03’s 249th-placed squad.
Then came 2018-19. Almost out of nowhere – though they did go 12-6 in the SWAC the year prior – Prairie View took the SWAC by storm. Gone were the days of being everyone’s favorite opponent to beat up on. They opened the year with a road win at Santa Clara, then went 17-1 in SWAC play and defeated rival Texas Southern to earn an NCAA Tournament bid. They’d go on to lose in the First Four, but it was undeniably the most successful season in Panthers history.
2019-20 looked to present more of the same. The Panthers pulled off a win at UTSA, went 14-4 in conference play to win the regular season title, and entered the SWAC Tournament as the favorite to repeat and earn a second straight NCAA Tournament bid. They had two of the three best players in the conference in Gerard Andrus and Devonte Patterson. Unfortunately, we all know how this ends. Before Prairie View were set to play in the SWAC semifinals, college basketball as we know it came to a screeching halt. The potential of more March memories were lost, and Prairie View will have to replace four members of their starting five.
That said, Byron Smith is already the most successful coach in Prairie View history (52.8% winning percentage; second-best at Prairie View is 37.5%!) and is solidifying his place as a Houston legend. Smith was a two-time member of the All-Southwest Conference team as a player at Houston, has spent nearly his entire professional career in Texas, and has turned the previously moribund Prairie View program into a legitimate force in basketball’s most interesting conference. Also, he’s hilarious, so that’s a bonus.
This interview was lightly edited and shortened for clarification.
Will Warren: Describe your program philosophy in a few sentences.
Byron Smith: “I would say we have a very intense program, especially on the court. We’re very, very, very tough in terms of how we play and how we prepare. To clarify, we want to be pitbulls on the court but collies off of it – very kind, good people away from basketball. Our goal is to be gentlemen and great students off the court. We want our kids to affect other people in a positive way. On the court, we want to be the grittiest, grimiest team. We’re going to be the underdog a lot of nights, and we want to be the hardest-playing team on the floor. It gives us an opportunity to win some games we shouldn’t.”
WW: Who are your main influences as a coach?
BS: “For me, obviously first and foremost is my mother. She’s given me the blueprint to be successful in life – being committed, being dedicated, and having strong faith in God. In terms of on the court, to be honest, it’s not anyone basketball-wise. I’ve always looked away from the game for influence. For instance, Herm Edwards (Arizona State football HC) is a huge influence. His philosophy and his process is a great influence on what I do as a coach. I’m old enough to remember him as a player, because his Eagles used to kick my Cowboys’ butt all the time.”
WW: Rarely do you play a home game before Christmas, though this past season was an exception. You typically spend the entirety of the first two months playing true road games, with occasional neutral-site fixtures. What are the positives of these long stretches without home games, if there are any?
BS: “I like to try to give our young people a chance to see the world. Believe it or not, a lot of the young kids that come through our program haven’t had a real chance to travel and see some of these places in America. They have AAU, but you get four and five guys to a room, sleeping on the bathroom sink, all that stuff. We get to go to some really neat places, especially to the West Coast. We fly a lot, but we take bus trips, too. This year, we played at Arizona State, so we got on the bus and drove there, along with then driving five more hours to Los Angeles to play Loyola Marymount. These long road trips give our players a chance to bond before conference play starts. It gives them a chance to learn who their teammates are away from the court. It allows you to know who you’re going to battle with and if you can trust them. If you’re in an alley fight, what guys do I want with me? There’s a lot of educational pieces that come from it. We have to generate revenue for our program, obviously, but it’s way more than going to pick up a check. When January rolls around, we’re probably going to play some of the best basketball we’ve played.”
WW: Thank you for answering that – I’ve long wondered about how teams handle the mental and physical effects of long travel, along with how you handle travel in the first place.
BS: “Let me add something really quick. What we’ve been able to incorporate on these trips is that sometimes, you can win and not have the most points on the board. That’s something that we look to. We set goals as a team, and we want to improve every game. How are we shooting? How have we established our defense? Sometimes, we’ve walked away from a tough road loss and have felt a certain way. Obviously, I don’t get paid to try, I get paid to win, but there are positives from some of these losses.”
WW: You’ve gone 31-5 in conference play the last two seasons, and these two teams are statistically the best in Prairie View’s D-1 history. What’s changed from the day you took the job to now to make this happen?
BS: “In the past, there’s been a bit of a mindset across the league where you’re super-focused on beating your rival. Prairie View and Texas Southern have a big rivalry, and even if Texas Southern is 0-30, if they beat Prairie View, they consider it a good season. That’s not anything I’ve ever subscribed to. I think we’ve raised the bar. We’re getting a lot more national recognition that I don’t think Prairie View really received before. We aren’t Butler or Wichita State, of course, but we’re striving to become that. The culture has changed, expectations have changed, and I do think that we’ve had a good three-year run. In the past, our program wanted to score lots of points but didn’t play defense. Now, we’re a defense-first program. Some nights, the ball’s just not going to go in the basket. How do you win games when that happens? Well, you get aggressive, you deflect passes, you force turnovers, you get rebounds. We’ve also started to attract kids that normally would’ve gone to UTEP or Texas State or Louisiana-Lafayette.”
WW: Your defense is pressure-packed and hyper-aggressive, and this marks the third-straight season Prairie View has finished in the top 10 nationally in turnovers forced. What are some of the advantages of this aggressive style of defense?
BS: “For one thing, it’s kind of like a mosquito on a hot day. We’re always in your face, and we like to piss you off. We’re like a bunch of gnats on a hot day on the lake that won’t go away. One of the things that’s caused us problems that’s documented is that we foul a lot. We are aggressive, and sometimes fouls happen, but that’s part of what we do. We like to take the fight to you. We’re that little kid coming to school that gets bullied a lot and is starting to fight back. It’s not ‘press’ for us, it’s pressure. We deny the wings, we trap the corners, and we swarm the posts. We want our defense to dictate our offense.”
WW: You’ve also been near the top nationally in three-point defense the last three seasons. How do you aim to make opposing three-point attempts difficult?
BS: “We focus a lot on our closeouts. Obviously, everyone focuses on closeouts, but for us, you can be yanked from the game if you have a poor closeout. You may have a hard time getting back in! Closeouts come at a premium, especially if you do them the right way. Even a 28% shooter, if he’s wide-open, that probably goes up to about 35% or 36%. We want to distract guys into taking contested three-point shots because we fly around non-stop.”
WW: Offensively, your teams are consistently great at getting to the line, and two of your players – Devonte Patterson and Darius Williams – drew nearly 7 fouls per 40 minutes. Why do you place this emphasis on going inside and drawing fouls?
BS: “Because we have to! We might be the worst shooting team in the country. (laughs) If you look at our three-point percentage on offense compared to defense, it might be the exact same. We do have good shooters, but if you’re constantly relying on 22-foot shots going in, for us, that means the potential of having a long season. The four seasons I’ve been here, the best three-point shooter on the team has been Byron Smith, the head coach. If you know anybody in the NBA looking for a 50-year-old spot-up shooter, give them my number.”
WW: This year’s team was one of the most experienced in all of college basketball, but you’re returning several key pieces for the 2020-21 squad. What are some steps forward you’re looking for the program to take in the near future?
BS: “We want to sustain our success. We don’t want to go from first to worst, or even from first to the middle of the pool. The name of the game in all facets of life is consistency. It’s difficult year-to-year to stay in the top one or two, but if they do pass the transfer rule, we’re hopeful we might be able to land a couple of high-impact guys that were previously playing in the Big 12 or Sun Belt or maybe even the SEC. Guys like that can walk into this conference and play 30 minutes a night.”
WW: What’s your go-to entertainment during the quarantine?
BS: “I had an Uber driver about seven months ago that ended up being my girlfriend. Congratulate me on that one! She introduced me to Netflix, but to be honest, if you find me at home, 90% of the time it’ll be with Sanford and Son on.”
Here’s a short video containing some of my favorite plays from the Prairie View A&M games I sampled.
Stats by Will 