Last week VCU joined the A10 which provided the perfect opportunity to present my “way-too-early” projections for the A10 and CUSA. But what should be the lead for a column on the MVC and WCC?

I thought about writing about how the Missouri Valley Conference keeps missing out. VCU stole Wichita St.’s thunder in the NCAA tournament and the A10 added Butler before the MVC even contemplated expansion. I thought about writing about how the West Coast Conference has been strictly boring this off-season. There have been zero coaching changes, and no team shuffling (Pacific won’t join until next year). And as great as he looked in his debut, BYU’s Matt Carlino is no Jimmer Fredette. Still nothing inspired me.

Then I ran into Luke Winn’s Tuesday column on conference realignment. The first thing that struck me is how the WCC is now a Top 10 conference. The eight teams in the WCC in 2010-2011 had a 10-year Pythagorean Winning Percentage (PWP) of 0.5346. The conference added BYU with a 10-year PWP of 0.8266 and Pacific with a 10-year PWP of 0.5704. Combined the new 10 team 10-year PWP will be 0.5674 which would put the league behind the A10 but firmly in the Top 10 of college conferences. And the MVC was already in the top 10. If you care about college basketball, there is no question you should care about these two leagues.

For an explanation of the column headings, click here. Roster information is updated through May 14^th.

BYU returns a respectable 69% of its possessions from last year, but the Relative Value (RV) column shows that BYU’s returning roster is made up of the least efficient offensive players on the team. Goodbye Noah Hartsock. It was a nice run Charles Abouo. Some people will miss the memories from their Sweet Sixteen run in 2011, but what BYU will really miss is their offensive efficiency. So why does the model still pick BYU for 2^nd in the league? First, Dave Rose gets some lingering credit. Rose has now made the NCAA tournament six straight years and my model accounts for coaching ability.  And BYU also gave a lot of possessions to freshmen last year.

San Diego is my ultimate sleeper team. Fully 47% of the Toreros possessions last season went to freshmen and while that led to some growing pains for Bill Grier’s team, Johnny Dee and Christopher Anderson have the potential to be special players. Dee made 79 threes last season and Anderson got to the free throw line at an elite rate. Combine their perimeter play with the efficient play of Dennis Kramer inside and you have the building blocks for a surprise team. San Diego struggled on the full season last year posting a 13-18 record and posting miserable Margin-of-Victory numbers (MOV). But by the time the WCC season rolled around San Diego was already playing better basketball. The Toreros finished 7-9 in league play and the growth potential for this team remains significant.

Rex Walters seemed like he might be building something at San Francisco, but the team has seen a number of players transfer. Perris Blackwell, Avery Johnson, Khalil Murphy, Justin Raffington, Charles Standifer, and Michael Williams all departed putting the Dons squarely in rebuilding mode. Luckily UCLA transfer De’End Parker should be eligible due to a family medical hardship waiver.

How is Gregg Marshall still at Wichita St.? After taking Winthrop to three straight NCAA tournaments and earning the rare NCAA victory at the Big South school, all he did was turn Wichita St. into a top 10 margin-of-victory team. I am more than a little skeptical that Wichita St. can finish 12-6 in a year in which the team loses 5 key seniors. But Carl Hall and Demetric Williams are back, and the model gives Marshall a ton of credit for building teams. The last three years the Shockers have finished 12-6, 14-4, and 16-2 in the MVC, and that is the track record of an elite coach. But 7 footers like Garrett Stutz don’t grow on trees, and I’m nervous that his defensive presence will be impossible to replace.

The model is very pleased to see Barry Hinson check in at Southern Illinois. It might take some time to rebuild the Salukis, but the former Missouri St. coach has won in this league before and he will win again. It is hard to believe a Saluki team that once dominated the league hasn’t won 7 conference games since 2009. By focusing on defense, Hinson will have Southern Illinois more competitive in his first year.

Speaking of elite coaches, Ben Jacobson is only two years away from his Farokhmanesh moment, and he brings back every rotation player except Johnny Moran this off-season. Northern Iowa will clearly be a factor. But Doug McDermott is back and that is pretty much all you need to know to be excited about Creighton. The Blue Jays will be the favorite even if last year’s defense was a little suspect.

The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.

-- Joe Posnanski

As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.

In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.

In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.

At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.

So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.

In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.

And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.

We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.

In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.

Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.

Defense is very difficult to incorporate into any projections. On the one hand, we do it implicitly. When we say John Calipari will have the second best team in the country despite starting a ton of freshman, when we say Bill Self will have his team in the Top 20 despite losing his best players, we implicitly know that these are great defensive coaches. They consistently bring together new groups of players and get them to play great team defense. But defense is not all coaching and hard work. The top defensive teams also happen to have the best athletes. As hard as Virginia fifth-year senior Mike Scott works, he is never going to have the same natural shot-blocking ability as Kentucky freshman Anthony Davis.  Talent matters.

The biggest problem is that almost all our measures of individual defense are extremely poor. Blocks and steals are correlated with better defense, but there are tons of great defensive players who have never posted great stats in these categories. Certainly in my attempts to predict team offense and team defense, the offensive statistics have about four times the predictive power of the defensive statistics.

As such, when we evaluate defense, often they only key piece of information to incorporate is the past defensive performances of the coach. And since the talent levels can vary so greatly between schools, I am mostly focused on defensive performance at the current school. Here are the top defensive coaches at their current schools: 

For the coaches with one or two years of data, the jury may still be out on whether these are “great” defensive coaches, but often the experience at the previous team is informative. In particular, Clemson head coach Brad Brownell has had dominant defensive teams at UNC Wilmington and Wright St. too.

Many of these coaches have reputations as great defensive masterminds. But I do not think people give enough respect to Roy Williams, Rick Barnes, and Frank Martin for teaching solid defensive principles. North Carolina may run up and down up the court and create chaos, but they still emphasize getting stops. North Carolina doesn’t mind if you shoot in the first ten seconds, but they would prefer if you take a shot with John Henson’s hand in your face. 

Last year’s A10 standings

Xavier regularly wins NCAA tournament games, but last year was a huge breakthrough for Temple. The Owls won an NCAA tournament game for the first time since 2001, and head coach Fran Dunphy broke a personal 0-10 streak in NCAA tournament games. The two top teams from last year should be favorites again, but there should be plenty of movement in the rest of the A10 standings:

First, if you have been following my previews this month, you know I think St. Joseph’s will be substantially better. They hit the magical double-play. Not only did Phil Martelli’s squad give a ton of minutes to freshmen last season, they return the absolute most efficient players on the team. Langston Galloway and Carl Jones are one of the most formidable back-courts in the country, and if St. Joseph’s can have any success developing its front-court, the Hawks should be able to field a winning A10 team for the first time since 2009.

But St. Joseph’s isn’t the only lower division A10 team to keep an eye on this year. St. Louis also has a chance to be substantially better. Last year was supposed to be the breakout year for the Billikens, but off-season suspensions to the team’s best players meant Rick Majerus was forced to use a very young lineup and take his lumps yet again. But all those minutes given to young players should pay dividends.  The key may be forward Dwayne Evans. At only 6’5” he is clearly under-sized for a major basketball league. But he rebounds like a 6’10” player. And as he learns to refine his offensive game to match his rebounding skills, he could become the classic mid-major star.

The team going the other way is obviously Richmond. Chris Mooney had a veteran squad that made it to the Sweet Sixteen last year, but with Kevin Anderson, Justin Harper, Dan Geroit, and Kevin Smith graduating this off-season, Richmond will have to work its way through a rebuilding year.  The good news is that because of Mooney’s emphasis on defense, the wait may not take that long.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Dayton faces a mixed bag this year. The departing Chris Wright and Juwan Staten were the team’s least efficient players last year. And on paper, Dayton should be better without them. But because of Staten’s star potential and Wright’s role in the offense, new head coach Archie Miller may still have a tough time replacing these players.

In 2005-06, it was fair to ask whether Duquesne basketball would ever be relevant again. The team had not had a winning record in over a decade, and the 1-win conference seasons were more common than the 7-win seasons. But over the last 5 years, Ron Everhart has done nothing but transform Duquesne into a consistently competitive and dangerous A10 team. This year Duquesne loses two extremely productive seniors in Bill Clark and Damien Saunders, but with the emergence of A10 rookie of the year TJ McConnell at point guard last year, Duquense will remain relevant in the A10 race once again. 

Last year’s MVC standings

I rarely say that a coach needs to be replaced, but I think it is time for Southern Illinois to replace head coach Chris Lowery. The major problem has been a complete drop-off in team defense. While Lowery seemed to continue the swarming man-to-man defense of Bruce Weber and Matt Painter in his first years with the Salukis, with Weber and Painter’s recruits and systems long gone, the Southern Illinois defense has fallen off the map:

Southern Illinois

Most people have correctly evaluated Wichita St., Indiana St., and Creighton as possible at-large NCAA bids out of the MVC (Missouri St. loses too many key players to be a likely contender). But for the MVC to become a multi-bid league again, the league has to do better in non-conference play. A 1-8 performance in the MWC-MVC challenge last year, coupled with a lack of success in the early season tournaments, meant that by last January it was already clear the MVC was going to be a one-bid league.

The MVC often has had trouble scheduling non-conference match-ups with the BCS leagues. Creighton in particular, has a surprisingly weak non-conference schedule this year. But there are still plenty of key non-conference games where the MVC can prove itself this season.  First, the MVC has a great chance at revenge in the MVC-MWC challenge thanks to all the talent (and team) defections in the MWC.  And the early season tournaments provide some more opportunities.  Indiana St. faces a bunch of terrible major conference squads at the Old Spice event. Even if beating Texas Tech or DePaul might not earn a ton of RPI points, Indiana St. has a legitimate chance to beat 3 BCS teams in three days in Orlando. And Wichita St. has a golden opportunity in Puerto Rico in a field where Maryland lacks depth and Purdue and Colorado are replacing their stars. Throw in the possibility of Illinois St. upsetting a young Illinois team in Cancun, and Northern Iowa sneaking up on Providence in the South Padre Island event, and the opportunities are there for the MVC to be major conference killers once again.