Atlantic 10 Basketball: 5 takeaways from start of 2022-23 conference play

Loyola is Dead in the Water

It took me a long time to give up on the Ramblers. I so badly wanted to like them. I even picked them 5th in my preseason power rankings because I thought they might be one of the teams in the mix for an at-large bid (oh, how long ago it was when the discourse was centered around there being two or three of those…). By this point, though, it’s safe to say this team just doesn’t have any type of juice and likely won’t find any down the stretch.

It’s not that they don’t have talent – Braden Norris, Ben Schweiger, Phil Alston… all quality A10 players -– they just can’t find a way to play cohesively and put it all together on any given night. It also doesn’t help that a team whose identity has been centered around tough, collective defense ranks 241st nationally in that regard on KenPom. To speak of the turnover problems on the other end of the floor would be to beat a dead horse at this point, so I will leave that one alone for now.

All that matters, in the end, is that the Ramblers have lost 8 of their last 9 and have a ridiculously tough stretch coming up. They can essentially be locked in as one of the bottom two seeds in Brooklyn at this point.