Barstool Hoops Mailbag: College Basketball Season Preview

Your Friday basketball mailbag is here. I’ve been doing these for the last 2 years and decided to set on just one day a week so people know when to expect it. Again, this will cover all basketball as we’re starting to see the growth of the sport and it turning into a year-round event. With college basketball starting in 2 weeks we’ll be doing these every Friday going forward. You can submit all questions on Twitter @barstoolreags. Let’s get into the questions for this week.

To me this is a no-brainer. You start Bagley and Carter. Duke’s starting lineup should look like this: Duval, Allen, Trent, Bagley and Carter. Those are the five most talented players on the roster and it allows you to spread the floor, something Duke loves to do. You then bring Bolden, Tucker, O’Connell and DeLaurier off the bench. As to why I’d start Bagley and Carter? First, I don’t trust Bolden. He was wildly inconsistent last year, debated a transfer this past offseason and simply doesn’t provide nearly as much as Bagley or Carter. I’ve talked about Bagley quite a bit. I think he’s still going to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft. He’s a guy who is a monster rebounding, can play multiple positions and has an outside shot. He was inconsistent during AAU play with his shot, but the form is there and I think he’ll end up shooting about 36% from the 3-point line. K loves to spread the floor on offense and play a 4-out, 1-in style. You can do that with this lineup, more than you can with Bolden in there. I’m a firm believer in playing your best talent together, even if they are all young and let them figure it out as the season goes on.

Illinois is about to be back, but not #back. The reason why? Brad Underwood is one of the 15 best coaches in America. I’ve talked to people I trust more than my own stupid brain about Underwood and I feel comfort in knowing this is a general consensus among them as well. The dude can coach. More importantly he can really coach guards. The key for this team is going to be how consistent can the guard play be. Underwood’s system calls for strong guard play as he likes to play a space and pace style. Looking at his first four years as a head coach (three at Stephen F. Austin and 1 at Oklahoma State), he’s been in the top-60 offensively every year. He’s been in the top-11 in assist rate all but one year. He’s been in the top-65 of 3-point shooting for three of the years. He also preaches crashing the offensive glass. His four teams have ranked 4th, 53rd, 14th and 12th in the country when it comes to offensive rebounding percentage. When you go look at Illinois roster there is a lot to like here, especially within Underwood’s system. He has a core of freshmen Trent Frazier, Mark Smith and sophomore Te’Jon Lucas to play the guard spots. Throw in a guy like Leron Black to get your offensive rebounds and this team is a year away. You’ll see a big jump in improvement from last year to this year, simply because of Underwood, but this team feels like an NIT team. Next year is the year where they can get back to the NCAA Tournament and year 3 is when you can start really declaring Illinois as #back. Also, the hiring of Orlando Antigua as an assistant coach with an emphasis to recruit in Chicago was one of the smartest things Underwood did.

Value? Sure. But, I don’t like the bet at all. Providence will be a much improved team, but they are still the clear No. 4/5 team in the Big East behind Villanova, Xavier and Seton Hall. The one thing to remember with the Big East and the Big 12 is those are the two conferences where it truly feels like the best team wins due to the round robin format. You don’t have to worry about an unbalanced schedule going in your favor or against you in these leagues. Each team gets a home-and-home and those are the ones where the best team wins the conference. If you want to bet against Villanova in the Big East, take Seton Hall or Xavier. I think in the ACC you can look at a team like Notre Dame or Miami for some decent odds. I wouldn’t bet against Kansas in the Big 12. If you want odds in the Pac-12 take USC over Arizona.

It’s hard to find a lot of weaknesses with this roster from top to bottom. I’m not as worried as big man depth because they have Ayton, Ira Lee, Ristic, Akot and Pinder that are all 6’7″ or taller. I’d be more worried about depth at the wing spot because after Trier/Alkins/Randolph there’s not a whole lot that I love. The other ‘weakness’ is how Parker Jackson-Cartwright can be inconsistent. I’ve answered this before, where you can win a title with him as your point guard but he needs to have a TO rate percentage of under 20, something he’s never done during his three years at Arizona. The one thing you don’t have to worry about with PJC is buying into the system and trying to do too much. He has one of the best assist rates in the conference and is nationally ranked when it comes to that. As for a failed season, I hate judging it strictly on the Final Four/NCAA Tournament. It’s just way too fluky of an event to judge an entire season on. To me a failed season would be not winning the Pac-12 regular season or conference title and getting less than a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. This is a team that is one of the three best teams in the country heading into the season and should stay that way.

I’m going to go with no here. PSU became a lot more competitive last year thanks to Pat Chambers recruiting the hell out of Philadelphia and Roman Catholic in particular. He ended up getting 3 guys from Roman Catholic, all of whom were at least a 3-star. That’s what Penn State had to start doing in order to compete in the Big 10. However, when I look at this year’s team and more importantly their schedule, I don’t know where the quality wins come in to get them into the field. They aren’t going to win the Big 10, so they have to be an at-large. The only non-conference game that seems to hold some significance is if they get Texas A&M in the Legends Classic. Other than that it’s a very weak nonconference schedule. Remember, while they did improve last year, they still finished 12th in the Big 10, a league that was down last year. The conference isn’t going to be dominant this year or anything but who are they better than right off the bat? Rutgers and Nebraska? They are for sure worse than Michigan State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Minnesota, Maryland, Purdue and Iowa. This was a conference that only get seven teams in the NCAA Tournament last year.

For the sake of argument we’ll use the Blue Ribbon top-25 since the AP and Coaches poll aren’t out yet. Note, this top-25 SUCKS, but it’s something to at least use here:

So missing from that list who could be a Baylor, is Oregon. The Ducks do lose a ton in Dillon Brooks, Tyler Dorsey, Dylan Ennis, Casey Benson, Chris Boucher and Jordan Bell. However, they have a guy in Troy Brown, who is good enough to go out and win them a bunch of games. While Dana Altman can be criticized for how he’s handled some off the court shit, the one thing that he can do is coach his ass off. Talent wise, I think Oregon is more talented than the likes of Virginia Tech and Northwestern, but due to roster turnover it will take them longer to gel and figure out how to play together. That 1-2 punch of Payton Pritchard and Troy Brown though will pay off come February.

I’m going to go with Villanova, Seton Hall, Xavier, Providence, Butler and Marquette as locks for the NCAA Tournament. I’m going to immediately rule out Georgetown, DePaul and St. John’s, which leaves Creighton as a bubble team. I think Creighton will be good enough to get some wins and get into the NCAA Tournament, which means I’m going say seven teams get in, which is the same number as last year. Again, Providence has the talent to win games, but the NCAA Tournament goes on matchups. I don’t think they’ll get out of the first weekend if you’re asking me blind, because I don’t think they are one of the 16 best teams in the country. They should win a game this year though.

This team is going to bad. In fact I’m going to use a KFC phrase here and say just go ahead and cuncel the season on the Panthers. That’s how garbage this team is going to be this year. They lose Jamel Artis and Michael Young, who made up about 85% of their offense. The other 15% was Cam Johnson, who transferred to UNC in what was a messy situation from the get go. However, I think they get at least one win. They get to play North Carolina State and Syracuse back-to-back at home, which they should win at least one of those games. However, can we all make an agreement not to talk about Pitt basketball? Kevin Stallings was such a boring/bad hire. This program should never be this bad and yet here we are.

I touched on Duke earlier, so I’ll focus on UNC here. Yeah, they are not going to be that big team that we are used to seeing. The departure of Tony Bradley set them back in that area, so expect to see a small lineup by UNC standards. There’s two things that are important for a Roy Williams team. The first is a point guard that can run his system. He demands his point guard to know when to push and when to get into the secondary fast break. He has that in Joel Berry. The second thing his team needs are bigs that can rebound the shit out of the offensive glass. His teams have ranked in the top-27 in offensive rebounding percentage for 15 of the last 16 years. Where does that come from this year? Luke Maye, Cam Johnson and Theo Pinson aren’t those guys and there are 3 likely starters on the wing and post. I think you’re going to see UNC really push the tempo this year and let Berry dictate the floor.

Simply put, no. There are two legit title contenders in the West this year in Arizona and USC, with Arizona being one of the three favorites for it all. This is one of those things that I always laugh about though. People love to throw out the stat of freshmen teams that win titles or make a Final Four yet we never see this stat or the Big 10 not winning a title since 2000 during that time too. Makes you think.

I think you need to define struggle a little bit here, because relative to expectations, this team should be a Sweet 16 team at best. You’re losing 4 of your top 6 guys from last year’s team and most preseason expectations have UCLA as the third team in the Pac-12 and ranked somewhere between 15-22. Also, Alford has been at UCLA for four years. He’s made the NCAA Tournament three times and made the Sweet 16 all three times. It’s not like he’s failing miserably out there. He’s also consistently getting recruits, this year it’s Kris Wilkes and Jaylen Hands who are the prized recruits. My other question when it comes to this sort of thing is what coach is UCLA getting that is a guarantee better coach than Alford? If you can answer that and get that guy then sure a failure season can lead to that.

The ceiling here is winning the Big East and making a run to the Final Four. They have that sort of talent with Trevon Bluiett and JP Macura leading the way as seniors. The real thing here though is with Bluiett. What you think of him and his game is pretty much your perception of Xavier. If you think he can be the guy that we saw in March last year, it’s hard to really knock this team. If you think he’s the inconsistent player that will disappear at times, then you probably think they are closer to the 20th best team in the country than 5th. As for their floor, I think it’s similar to last year. An inconsistent regular season, slogging through some games and finishing up just sneaking into the NCAA Tournament as a double-digit seed. I don’t see that with this team though. I’m really high on Paul Scruggs and think he can be an absolute star in the Big East, but the coaching staff has been really high on Marshall this offseason. So you’re not wrong in terms of the development of those two determining a lot. Xavier needs to have a 3rd guy to go-to in order to help out Bluiett and Macura. They had that with Sumner when he was healthy and then a nice set of roleplayers in Reynolds/Farr/Davis/Abell from a couple years ago. This team feels more like that. I think they are more like the 15th best team in the country and should be a top-4/5 seed in the NCAA Tournament.