Welcome Back!

Hi everybody, I'm back and ready to go for another season of college basketball. It might feel like college basketball is far away, but we're really just about to get started. It's less than three weeks until Midnight Madness (Friday, October 17th); Division III schools will be lined up to get slaughtered in exhibitions by the end of October; and early season Tournaments like Coaches vs Cancer will tip off on November 10th. The NCAA has set the "official" start of the season to be November 14th (the big early season Tournaments were exempted from this rule), but the first slate of big match-ups will be on November 18th. And what a day that will be: ESPN and their family of networks will be broadcasting fourteen games in one day. The full schedule is here.

Now, some of those games will get larger audiences than others. Idaho State at Hawaii at 4am? I don't even know if the parents of the players are going to watch that one. But Kentucky/UNC at 9pm? That's awesome. Kentucky has relatively high expectations for the coming season, but those expectations will go through the roof if they can beat the team that will probably be the unanimous pre-season #1. There are a slew of other good match-ups, including Richmond-Syracuse and Drexel-UPenn. Another game that interests me is UMass-Memphis, since it will give us a good early season sense of where Memphis is after losing so many players to the draft. Plus, there will be four NIT games, and you have to expect that some of them will be pretty good.


So what can you expect from BasketballPredictions between now and the start of the season? Well as usual there will be a new BP65 within a week of Midnight Madness. So, a little more than three weeks from now. There will also be semi-regular updates with pieces of news as well as some little bits of opinion here and there.

I look forward to spending another year with all of you. See you soon!