Friday, April 05, 2013

2013-14 Conference Previews

I know, I know, the 2012-13 season hasn't even ended yet. Final Four games tip-off tomorrow. But it's never too early to start looking at next season. And this page will be the way to look for all of my 2013-14 previews.

When this page goes live, my previews will not all be completed, so not all of the links below will be live. They will all be posted within a week of the National Title game, though. So if you come back on the night of April 8th, this page should be all filled with active links and my preseason BP68 should also be posted.

There are several things to know about these previews. First, I break up the conferences. The seven major conferences get their own post (I'm including the AAC/"Ye Olde Big East" as a major conference for now... that might change in a year or two). I then arbitrarily decide on "mid-major" conferences, and "small" conferences. The difference is that the mid-majors are three conferences per page, and I will project the top 4 or 5 spots in the standings. The "small" conference previews are four per page, and I only project the winner.

In the past, fans of certain conferences have gotten mad at how I organized these conferences, so let me just say two things. First of all, I do change things over time as conferences get stronger or weaker. I'm already thinking that next year I might drop the WAC to a "small" conference, to be replaced by the Summit League. The Summit League certainly is better placed to have an at-large bid next season. Second of all, the way I orient these leagues in no way impacts my projections. Despite the Summit League being a "small" conference, I will include a pair of Summit League teams in my bracket projection next week.

The second thing to know about these previews is that at the top of each conference preview I give an Excel table with several stats from the past season. The stats should be self explanatory, though note that all of these stats were taken between Selection Sunday and the tip-off of the first postseason tournament. So many of those numbers will change by the end of the NCAA Tournament. I just need a consistent point in time to measure everything.

The third thing to know is that I'm going to likely make some mistakes. I'm trying to keep track of all of the teams switching conferences, of all of the transfers, all of the recruits, all of the redshirts... and also trying to project who will be going to pro and who will not. If I don't mention some low-rated recruit, that was probably on purpose, but if I miss something major then please let me know. Constructive criticism is always appreciated (emphasis on constructive, folks... I'm breaking down like 200 teams, so if I make a minor error on your favorite team it doesn't mean that I hate your team or know nothing about your team).

For the smaller conferences I will include a lot of stats for each player. I figure a lot of my readers won't know who some of these guys are, so I'll give you a bunch of stats like points per game ("ppg"), effective field goal percentage ("eFG%"), etc. For the bigger conferences I will leave that out. I figure you don't need me to tell you how many points Trey Burke scored per game for you to know how good he was this past season. For all of the conferences I will include recruiting data from Scout.com and Rivals.com. So "John Doe (Scout: 10 PF, Rivals: 87)" was ranked the 10th best power forward by Scout.com and the 87th best overall player by Rivals.com.

So I think that wraps things up. If you have any questions, you can e-mail me, tweet me or leave comments here. Without further ado, here are my complete 2013-14 conference previews:

American Athletic
America East
ACC
Atlantic Sun
Atlantic Ten
Big East
Big Sky
Big South
Big Ten
Big 12
Big West
Colonial
Conference USA
Horizon
Ivy League
MAAC
MAC
MEAC
Missouri Valley
Mountain West
Northeast
Ohio Valley
Pac-12
Patriot League
SEC
Southern
Southland
SWAC
Summit
Sun Belt
WCC
WAC

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