NCAA Basketball: Flopping, mid-majors, and Houston among key topics
By Bryan Mauro
2. Has the gap between low and mid-majors and power conference schools really shrunk that much?
Two weeks into the season and there have already been some crazy upsets. There are going to be more as the year goes on. This season there does not appear to be too many walkover games on any schedule. The teams that we all expected to be bad are all putting up a fight and are showing that this year they are no pushover. The gap is shrinking and has shrunk at least over the first two weeks of the season. If you have not been paying attention, let’s just recap.
The Pac 12 was swept by the SWAC in all three road games in the Pac 12 SWAC challenge. That means Grambling, Texas Southern and Prairie View A&M beat Colorado, Arizona State, and Washington State. Those are huge eye-opening wins for the SWAC and really for college basketball as a whole. The sport is so much better when there is parity like this.
The MEAC and Southland conferences have been two of the worst conferences in the country for a long time and those conferences have also had huge wins so far this season and some of them have been on the road. Delaware State, which is one of the worst programs in the country, played with Villanova for 35 minutes and held a lead for most of the game in Philadelphia. Those are things that didn’t usually happen.
Why are they happening now? Why is the gap shrinking? I am going to get more in-depth on this later this weekend but NIL deals and the extra Covid year have made teams older and kept good players on campus at low and mid-major schools. The other thing is that these schools winning the games against the power schools have no fear, there are zero expectations for them to win the games they are playing so they have nothing to lose. Teams are older and the volume of transfers that last few seasons has done wonders for low-major schools.
It will be interesting to see how the rest of the year plays out but there are some low majors and mid-majors who have wins on the resume already that they never dreamed of having. That could play big come March and it is also going to keep the power schools on watch. If they are not on their game they are going to get beat. The gap has shrunk considerably and will continue to shrink as the year goes on.