This is the first in a series of posts leading up to the 2015-’16 college basketball season, wherein I preview each of the 33 conferences (well, 32 + 1 independent) that offer Division 1 basketball. There will be no set format, so some will be a bit of an overview, some will talk about sleepers, some will profile one team or one coach, etc.
By the time November rolls around we will have them all previewed. The posting schedule will be regular in terms of offering something roughly every week. The days of the week will vary.
We get started with the lowest ranked conference, the SWAC. The SWAC hasn’t been above last place since 2010, but interestingly enough the league not only escaped the play-in games in March but conference champ Texas Southern avoided the 1 seeds altogether, grabbing a surprising 15 seed. The 202nd ranked team in KenPom lost to Arizona by 19, but it’s noteworthy that the Bobcats, who led the league in scoring by a wide margin, scored well over a point per trip against Arizona.
Next year Texas Southern should be the favorites to make the tournament yet again, and might be able to snag another 15 seed or at least escape the play-in game by virtue of making the tournament in each of the last two years. The Bobcats lose Madarious Gibbs, at worst their second best player, and Deverell Biggs, who shot 39 percent from three.
Texas Southern will still get to trot out three senior starters, however, a big advantage for a team that finished 2015 with a 60 place advantage in KenPom over its next closes competition.
Alabama State returns the best player in the conference in Jamel Waters. Waters averaged 14 points per game for the Hornets with a 52.5 percent true shooting percentage. He also was second in the conference in assist rate at 34.5 percent, making him one of the best all around players in all of the low major conferences. He will not be able to win the regular season league title by himself, but with a great conference tournament he can perhaps will the Hornets to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2011.
That is, if they are eligible. In each of the last two years the SWAC has courted a PR disaster with multiple teams being ineligible for the NCAA tournament due to low APR scores (Alabama State was one of them last year), yet being allowed to compete in the conference tournament anyway. This year’s title game was a bit of a farce considering Southern, one of those ineligible teams, made the league title game against Texas Southern, making the Bobcats the league’s NCAA representative no matter what happened, before losing by four.
Arkansas Pine-Bluff, one of just two teams to beat Texas Southern in conference play last year, will start three seniors and a junior, and ranked third in the entire country last season at forcing turnovers, so they’ll no doubt be a threat, but the Golden Lions did not even participate in the conference tournament due to a postseason ban imposed by the NCAA.
About the only certainty in the SWAC is that Grambling will be bad. The Tigers went 0-18 in league play last season and are just two seasons removed from not winning a single game all year. They’ll get to start a senior and three juniors next year, so they might get a couple conference wins, but they are probably the worst job in the country at the moment.
The SWAC has been plagued by problems, some of which are its own doing and some of which are the result of decades of both NCAA and national policies which have been designed to address people and places that never even think about the SWAC, and as a result the league often gets the short end of the stick when it comes to recruiting and NCAA tournament seeding. Hopefully Texas Southern’s 15 seed signaled a bit of a shift towards thinking of the league champ based on what the team did that year and not what conference it came from, but don’t expect the SWAC as a whole to rank too high any time soon.
