23-24 A10, the deepest the conference has been in years?

[big5explorer]

I've always been a big believer that the Out of Conference (OOC) games early in the season are more meaningful for a conference than for any individual team. Once conference play starts, teams within a conference beat up on one another and conference rankings tend not to change very much.

Here's a site I have referenced for conference strength for a while, and 8th is the best the A10 has been in years. While we may not have (m)any Top 25 teams this year, the conference is going to be deep, and there are few if any easy wins within the conference. Thinking the A10 gets 3-4 teams into the Dance this year.

realtimerpi.com/rpi_conf_Men.html


Some other thoughts of the conference rankings:

The MAAC (#26) and Patriot( #33) are awful this year.

The West Coast Conference(#13) is St. Marys and the Zags, and a bunch of dreck yet again.

The American (#11) is top-heavy, and absolutely shouldn't get more, or even an equal number of bids as the A10 this year. The bottom half of this conference is horrible.

The Ivy League (#10) might be as solid as it has been in decades. Deep, at least.

The Mountain West (#7) may get 4-5 teams into the tourney, and maybe twice as many as the A10, but probably shouldn't as the top teams are going to pad their conference record against a weak bottom of the league.

The SEC (#1) is really good and really deep this year. Probably better than their football conference. Toss a coin for most SEC games this year to determine a winner.

[crayzeeguy]

Thanks… Interesting how heavily weighted the rankings are based on the top 1-2 teams in each league.

[GlitterBro #2]

The NET conference rankings matter more. I'm seeing 2 max for the A10 right now. Dayton and St. Joe's unless both have some really bad losses. Maybe a 3rd sneaks in winning the A10 tournament,provided St. Joe's makes it to the finals and Dayton to the semifinals.

www.warrennolan.com/basketball/2024/net-conference

Based on current NET rankings an ideal scenario for the A10 would be St. Joe's beating Dayton in the semis and losing in the finals. Then 3 could get in and the finals loss wouldn't hurt St. Joe's too much if they've beaten Dayton.

[MisterD]

Ideal scenario would be St. Joseph’s of PA needing just one A-10 tourney win to make the dance and La Salle destroying them so thoroughly they forfeit with 5:00 to play.

[JoeFedorowicz]

Gets Billy Lange fired 👍

[23won]

Another great big5 post, big5!

While this is logical, the numbers at year end always skew to the football schools and that's where the MWC gets 2x more than they deserve.

I see us at 2 bids, the American at 3-4 (with FAU in and Memphis in solid Quad 1 ground), WCC at 2, MVC 2 and most others at 1.

[giveansk1]

KenPom has the A-10 8th in conference strength which is a solid improvement over when I last checked. 2 bids looks more likely than it did a couple weeks ago. Dayton is the only at-large profile at the moment but 7 teams are in the top 100 now. Getting the conference more Quad 2 wins will help alot. NET is still moving a ton and appears to be gammed a bit by crushing terrible teams, but other than for Quads, it doesn't appear that the committee really follows the actual rankings for selecting teams (For Example if a team is 51 vs. 61 in NET it typically isn't a big deal).