Let’s take a look at the eight NCAA Basketball teams set to compete in this year’s Wooden Legacy; which team is the best out of this exclusive group?
The 12th annual Wooden Legacy will pit eight NCAA Basketball teams against each other in a bracketed event played November 28 and 29 and December 1, 2019. The tournament’s current state was formed in 2013 when the DirecTV Classic and John Wooden Classic were combined into one event. The event regularly features competitive basketball, especially from high-profile west coast programs.
In last year’s tournament, Seton Hall edged Miami FL in a competitive title game. In past years, teams like Michigan State and West Virginia have won the event, alongside a long list of Pac-12 programs including California, Washington, and UCLA. Despite their shortcomings that year, Washington State won this event back in 2017, though this year’s field should lead to a very interesting slate of games.
The Big West helps host the event and as a result will have Long Beach State in the field. Pac-12 power Arizona joins WCC stalwart Pepperdine as west coast additions to the Anaheim based tournament. The other five schools are all from the east coast. Talented schools from the Big East (Providence), American (UCF) and ACC (Wake Forest) enter the field alongside potent mid-major programs from Penn and the College of Charleston. These eight teams will meet in late November to begin the action, but only one team can win the Wooden Legacy.
We’re going to attempt to rank those eight teams as they currently stand. This article is not meant to pick the matchups or preview who would win which games, though there will be brief mentions of first round opponents in these previews. Even as the college basketball season is still nearly four months away, we can already get a sense of how these teams compare to one another.
Without further ado, let’s start running through and ranking the eight teams in the 2019 Wooden Legacy.