NCAA Basketball: 8 bold predictions for conference play in 2019

With the new year comes the start of conference play in NCAA Basketball. Here are 8 bold predictions on what will unfold before the NCAA Tournament.

Bold predictions made before the start of the season are always fun, yet they require a lot of assumptions since no one had played a game yet.

I made eight predictions at the start of the season that still might hold true, but now that we’ve seen each team play a good number of games, it’s time to make some more.

Conference play is a different beast. Despite what we think we know about teams, the rigors of playing at least two quality teams per week and facing true home/road atmospheres will show a team’s true colors.

Last year, both Arizona State and Oklahoma were ranked in the top five during the non-conference portion of the season before they fell apart in Pac-12 and Big 12 play, respectively. On the flip side, we saw teams like Kansas and Virginia emerge as legitimate top teams after facing questions in the non-conference.

There is a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability in college basketball (which is one of the things we love about it), and the only thing we know for sure is that we should expect a lot of unexpected happenings.

What kind of crazy things should we expect over the next three months? Here are eight bold predictions for conference play in this week’s Rauf Report.