Atlantic 10 Basketball: Preseason power rankings for 2022-23 season

There are a couple of important things that I’d like to note about this piece before commencing with the list beginning on the next slide. First off, I decided to put the Atlantic 10 Basketball teams into numerical order as opposed to tiers for the sake of entertainment and discussion, but that does not mean that the tiers do not exist in my mind.

As usual in the A10, there are a couple of “automatic contenders” (barring anything unforeseen), a sizable group that could end up finishing anywhere from 4th to around 9th, and a handful of teams that are “Wednesday night pillow fight” (of course referring to the play-in games at the A10 Tournament, though that might have to change to “Tuesday night” with an added team and new format) type of teams.

That all being said, a team that I have listed in the 7-10 range might be one that I like only slightly less than a team I have in the 4-6 range. Especially in a league with so many new head coaches — six to be exact; more than I’ve seen at any point in my A10 fanhood — and even an entirely new team in Loyola, tiers would probably be the smart way to go. But, as mentioned earlier, it’s more fun to have some hot takes and generate discussion.

The other thing worth mentioning is that I was pondering formulating these rankings with conference schedules and projected standings in mind. In the end, I did not. If a team is listed as fourth, for example, that indicates that I believe they are the fourth best team purely in and of themselves. It doesn’t matter if they have a difficult schedule that will result in them dropping to seventh in the conference standings. I simply wanted to establish what I view as the pecking order on any given night.

Thank you for bearing with that introduction. Now, without further ado, let’s get into the very worst team in the league…