A-10 Basketball: Rhode Island, Richmond potential surprises in 2019-2020

With so much focus being placed on the A-10 Basketball’s top three contenders, a few teams that should be competitive have found themselves flying under the radar.

Rhode Island Rams

So far this offseason, most pundits have been projecting the same three teams as the favorites to win the A-10 Basketball title: VCU, Davidson, and Dayton. The rationale for that is pretty understandable. VCU will be returning nearly everyone from a 16-2 campaign and adding the conference’s most highly-rated recruiting class (247Sports). Davidson is led by one of the league’s (and the country’s) best coaches as well as two of its top five on-court talents, and Dayton’s roster includes likely Player of the Year candidate Obi Toppin, two other double-digit scoring returnees and an army of big-time transfers.

All three teams should manage to secure double-byes for the A10 Tournament and possibly even national rankings at certain points in the season, but there’s another team that has a similar level of potential (perhaps not to VCU, but to the others) and hasn’t been getting the level of respect they deserve: Rhode Island.

Rhody was the only team to beat both VCU and Dayton last season, and the only potentially noticeable absence on this year’s roster will be Christion Thompson, who hardly led the charge with his 5.7 points and 3.5 rebounds per game. In his place, the Rams will be welcoming one of the league’s best recruiting classes and two solid transfers in former Georgetown Hoya Antwan Walker (no relation to the former Boston Celtic) and Jeremy Sheppard. As a JUCO player last season, Sheppard averaged 17.1 points per game and shot 44% from beyond the arc.

Combine his offensive ability with the steady Point Guard play of Jeff Dowtin, the double-double machinery of Cyril Langevine, plenty of depth, and the resulting roster is one that should run with the A10’s best. The only question mark that could conceivably stop the Rams from having a shot at title-contention is coaching, but David Cox showed up when it mattered the most in year one with a deep conference tournament run and a second win over VCU.

It’s not that the “big three” teams don’t deserve the hype – they do – it’s just that Rhody also deserves more than the meager share they’ve been receiving. From my perspective, there should be a consensus top four with VCU always placed first and the other three filling out the 2-4 spots in varying order. The ceiling is extremely high for this team – just as high as it is for the Flyers and the Wildcats, and it’s tough to envision them being anything less than extremely competitive night in, night out at worst.

Richmond Spiders

Perhaps because of the Spiders’ recent struggles under Chris Mooney, people have been skeptical about their ability to be competitive or even to crack the top half of the A10 standings. That type of dismissal is a mistake, and calling it that is no defense Chris Mooney as a tactician, but rather an acknowledgement of just how talented this roster is shaping up to be.

Unless the injury bug strikes, which, unfortunately, it almost always does for the Spiders, there are only a handful of teams in the league that will be as intimidating as they are on paper. The rising Junior tandem of Grant Golden and Jacob Gilyard is perhaps the second best one-two punch in the conference (after Davidson’s Jon Axel Gudmundsson and Kellan Grady), and, unlike last season, they should have plenty of talent and depth around them to keep smothering double-teams at bay.

The two most noticeable additions to this year’s roster will be a recovered (hopefully) Nick Sherod, who averaged 12.1 points per game before being sidelined with a knee injury just six games into last season, and transfer Blake Francis from Wagner. In his most recent season with the Seahawks, Francis averaged 17.3 points per game on 40.7% three-point shooting. Of course, the numbers he put up in the NEC will likely take a hit in a much more competitive conference, but he should be more than ready to perform the duties of the team’s fourth option. As far as the rest of the rotation after that talented core goes, high-upside underclassmen like Nathan Cayo, Jake Wojcik, and Andre Gustavson will all be breakout candidates in their Sophomore campaigns.

The bottom line is that the Spiders are almost certainly not going to dominate A10 play, but they should still be very competitive and could easily steal a few games from the consensus top dogs. If you aren’t ready to project them finishing in the top five of the standings, that’s perfectly acceptable (I’m not quite ready for that either), but conversely, they don’t belong in the bottom five either. A finish somewhere in the 6-9 range, with a slightly higher ceiling, is likely imminent.