Big West Basketball: Ranking of 25 best players from last decade (2013-23)
By Joey Loose
The sport of college basketball is a mystery that we unfold each and every season. There are plenty of exciting characters and plenty of unknowns that all play out as five months of basketball occupy our attention. It’s more than just those five months though; these coaches and players work hard for the full twelve months to achieve their dreams. Not all dreams come true, of course, but there are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with this sport all shooting for that same goal.
In this project, we’ve been telling some of the stories of those players, sometimes spilling the beans on some lesser-known players. This specific project has looked at the best players from each conference across the last ten years, which in itself is quite the heavy quest. Leagues like the ACC and Big Ten were full of household names that made major contributions in the postseason, but today is not a day for the power conferences.
Today is all about the Big West, a mid-major league containing mostly schools from California. It’s a league that has some recently successful teams like UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara, a recent addition in UC San Diego, and of course Hawaii. You’re not going to find these conference matchups on ESPN and the players on these teams aren’t going to be known by the average fan. Still, there are some impressive names to run through today.
Before we get into the rankings, it’s important to remember exactly how this series works. We’re only focusing on Big West Basketball players from the last ten seasons, which means that action outside the league or prior to 2013 won’t matter in the rankings. Anyone who played in the Big West in the last ten seasons is eligible, we just won’t consider those other seasons in the rankings. These schools from California and Hawaii have produced some intriguing names in recent years, let’s start highlighting just what they’ve done in the Big West.