Atlantic 10 Basketball: Biggest cases to make for 2022-23 season

The Case For …The Best Season In Years

The narrative around the favorites in the Atlantic 10 is that they always underperform, which is certainly true over the past four years, but it can be easily explained.  The preseason #1 in 2019 (Saint Louis) and 2021 (Richmond) were shaky choices and weren’t on the national radar, the result of overall down years in the conference.  In between, 2020 VCU started 16-5, beat LSU, and was in the Top 25 in December, only to spend February going through an epic collapse that was exacerbated by injury.

This season feels much closer to 2017 (particularly strong preseason Top 3 of Dayton, Rhode Island, and VCU all made NCAA Tournament) or 2018, where a pair of veterans teams made the Tournament (Rhode Island came in as favorites and won the league, while St Bonaventure was projected to jump from 5th to 2nd and did exactly that).

Both Dayton and Saint Louis would have been runaway favorites in 2019 or 2021 and Dayton likely would have been favored in all of the last five years.  The A-10 hasn’t seen a pair of veteran rosters this deep since 2017 and at least one of them will come through as a Top 25 team at the end of the season, pulling up the A-10 even if the other flops.

Meanwhile, over this same five-year period, a team outside of the preseason Top 5 has made the NCAA Tournament every year and the teams ranked between #4-#8 all have the ceiling to continue that streak.  George Mason, Davidson, and Richmond are all built around a star, who can take a solid core into contention, while the others are built around a senior backcourt, a deep group of newcomers at the other spots, and a fantastic defense reputation from their school (Loyola) and coach (UMass).

Even the bottom of the league looks a bit stronger than normal thanks to a deep class of coaches. If you think it’s crazy that Frank Martin (UMass) and Archie Miller (Rhode Island) are ranked 8th and 9th respectively, then you’ll be stunned to know that the two have similar combined wins (494) then the coaches of the two teams ranked dead last, Fran Dunphy (580, La Salle) and Keith Dambrot (484, Duquesne), do individually. Oh, and Mark Schmidt (St Bonaventure, 384 wins) is ranked in the bottom half as well.

The ultimate wild card is VCU, who is far too good to be a sleeper but hasn’t generated enough hype to join the national discussion at the top.  But the Rams bring back the best two-way guard in the A-10 in Ace Baldwin, plus two other end-of-season starters, and add a group of newcomers with multiple Big Ten transfers and four-star recruits now getting to work with player development extraordinaire Mike Rhoades.  VCU will once again have one of the best defenses in the country and if they can develop a Top 5 A-10 offense then they will be just as good as the two favorites.

Last year, the Mountain West got four bids and reminded everyone the Selection Committee still respects mid-major leagues in their best years.  Four is an ambitious number given the A-10’s relative down years in the last half-decade, but it’s only been ten years since the conference’s six-bid aberration and this year has the top-end player talent, once-in-generation rosters at the top, and great coaching throughout that’s needed for a great season and this one will join 2016 and 2017 as the best overall seasons of the last ten years.