NEW YORK — The Atlantic 10 placed two teams in the NCAA Tournament last season, a major disappointment for one of the premier mid-major conferences in the country.
Up until VCU lost in last year’s Atlantic 10 Tournament, it was likely the Rams would have been the only team set to qualify for the tournament. The league received three bids in both 2017 and 2018, so the slow start to last season set off the panic meters across the national landscape.
“The national media jumped on us a little bit last year for having an off season,” St. Bonaventure coach Mark Schmidt said Thursday at the annual Atlantic 10 media day at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. “We lost some games early, but this year it’s going to be better. The good guys last year are back, so consequently, the league is going to be that much more difficult.”
One year has done a lot to change the national perception of the league with two teams hovering in and around the top 25 in several preseason polls from national publications. The league returns 11 players from its 2018-19 all-conference teams, including four of the five members of the first team. That list doesn’t include the countless veterans who return across the conference.
“Our conference is in a position now where we’ve got a lot of veteran players,” Dayton coach Anthony Grant said. “My first two years, the league was somewhat young, but now you look at every program, VCU returns a majority of their team that won the league last year, so does Davidson, we return a good portion of our guys, Richmond returns a lot, St. Bonaventure returns a lot, Rhode Island returns a lot and then there’s pieces that have been added to other teams that will make for a very challenging conference slate.”
Three teams received votes to win the league in the preseason poll of coaches and media members. VCU received 19 first-place votes and was the preseason favorite to repeat as conference champion. Davidson received eight first-place votes with Dayton getting the nod from Fordham coach Jeff Neubauer. Rhode Island, St. Bonaventure, Richmond and Saint Louis rounded out the top half of the league, and all received mentions from coaches as potential sleeper teams.
Duquesne was picked eighth followed by George Mason, La Salle, UMass, George Washington, Saint Joseph’s and Fordham.
The number of teams returning a majority of their roster from last season gave a lot of coaches optimism that the league could return to putting four or five teams in the NCAA Tournament.
“I’ve been a part of this league for a long time going back to my UMass days,” said Saint Louis coach Travis Ford, who coached the Minutemen from 2005-08. “This is as good as I’ve been a part of it as far as the really great talent returning and so many teams returning pretty much their whole team. It’s almost unheard of nowadays. We will get four or five teams in the NCAA Tournament.”
WHAT SECRET — In the age of social media, there are few things coaches can keep secret from their fans.
That includes the supposedly secret scrimmages that teams hold during the preseason, the dates and opponents of which are now widely reported by various outlets. Still, coaches are not allowed to speak much publicly about the events in those scrimmages per NCAA rule, even though scores – and in some cases highlights – are published for fans to devour.
Some Atlantic 10 coaches said they wouldn’t mind having more information available from those scrimmages, provided they remain in a closed environment away from the eyes of the public and media.
“Because they’re at the beginning of the season and everybody is excited to get going, there’s all this interest in them,” Richmond coach Chris Mooney said. “The idea was that they’re just these irrelevant scrimmage games, but there’s just so much hype and excitement, especially for some programs, so it’s fine to not have any fans or anybody at the game but not make it secret.”
However, there is an argument to be made that the scrimmages don’t hold any value and as such making information about them publicly wouldn’t do much good. UMass coach Matt McCall pointed out after practice Tuesday that the results of a scrimmage are not indicative about how the season will play out and that many championship teams play poorly or even lose those scrimmages.
As McCall and several other coaches noted, the scrimmages are just glorified practices with another school, so the stats might not be as useful as fans would think.
“To say there’s a need to publicize the results of a practice is a bit much, but I understand also there’s an appetite out there for as much information as you can possibly get,” Grant said. “For me, it’s nothing more than a practice, I don’t know any coach who will tell you that it’s important to go out and win a scrimmage in October. It’s more about looking at different lineups, looking at different matchups, trying some different things and experimenting more than it is about who wins and loses.”
NEW FACES — There are two new coaches in the league – Jamion Christian at George Washington and Billy Lange at Saint Joseph’s – and the pair had very different paths to their current positions.
Christian, 37, is a young coach who has been around the college game his entire career and is now on his third school in the past three seasons. He led Mount St. Mary’s, his alma mater, to two NCAA Tournaments and three winning records in six seasons before orchestrating a nine-win turnaround in his only year at Siena last season.
Lange last coached at the collegiate level in 2013 when he finished a two-year stint as an assistant coach at Villanova under Jay Wright. He spent seven seasons as Navy’s coach before that, but he left Villanova for a shot as an assistant coach with the Philadelphia 76ers before being hired by Saint Joseph’s.
PRESEASON ALL-CONFERENCE FIRST TEAM — Kellan Grady (Davidson), Jon Axel Gudmundsson (Davidson), Obi Toppin (Dayton), Cyril Langevine (Rhode Island), Jacob Gilyard (Richmond) and Marcus Evans (VCU) made the first team.
Josh Walfish can be reached at jwalfish@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshWalfishDHG. Get UMass coverage delivered in your Facebook news feed at www.facebook.com/GazetteUMassCoverage.