Atlantic 10 Basketball: Way-too-early power rankings for 2020-21 season

Six months before the college basketball season is set to begin, here is a first attempt at projecting what Atlantic 10 Basketball will look like in the 2020-21 season.

It feels like just recently that the Atlantic 10 Basketball Tournament abruptly ended on the second day, but here we are almost a quarter of the way through the long college basketball offseason. That means, of course, that it’s time to make perhaps irrational attempts at predicting how next year’s conference standings will play out.

As far as what the general landscape of the league will look like, there likely won’t be any nationally elite teams like Dayton was this past season, but there should be an exciting amount of teams that could conceivably contend for the league trophy.

Because of how close a lot of the teams are on paper, I decided that it would behoove me to organize the teams into tiers instead of giving them numerical rankings that I would inevitably regret by the time the season is upon us. There are five tiers that I came up with, and there are two major things to note about them: 1) they’re not all the same size – some have four teams while others have 1, and 2) the order of teams within each tiers are irrelevant. If your team is the last team mentioned in a certain tier, it doesn’t mean they are worse than the teams mentioned ahead of them.

As far as what each tier means, think of this as a general guide:

Tier 1: Strong case to finish 1st in conference standings

Tier 2: Upper-middle pack, but could easily earn double-bye in Brooklyn

Tier 3: The middle of the pack

Tier 4: Will have to fight to get out of the bottom 4

Tier 5: Should be the worst team in the league