In the month of October, The Floor Slap will be launching our College Basketball Preview. We will be previewing all 14 Big Ten Teams, making predictions, covering the biggest storylines across the country and more! Follow @thefloorslap to stay up to date on all our Basketball coverage before the season tips off on November 5th.
by Jordan Beckley
So, The Floor Slap is supposed to be a Big Ten blog, but part of covering College Basketball and Football demands attention to the National perspective.
So to get ready for the new College Basketball season I am going to write a little piece about the biggest stories to track from each power 5 conference.
To kick it off, I’m going to talk about the ACC. After a disappointing season that mostly saw the conference ignored when talking about the best basketball in the country last year, Miami made a somewhat surprising run to the Final Four.
There’s plenty to talk about as we have two coaches with decades long tenures being replaced, another loaded Duke team, some revamped rosters from the portal and oh yeah a Miami team who is going to still be pretty good.
Duke is … running it back?
Duke Basketball has become synonymous with One-and-Done’s. So it is a little weird when not one, not two, but three big time freshmen came back this offseason.
Mark Mitchell returning was a bit of a surprise but he was a 50/50 stay or go guy. Tyrese Proctor returning made sense considering he reclassified to play last season and the upcoming season really should be his freshman year. But the real surprise came from leading scorer and a likely Top-20 pick Kyle Filipowski deciding tor return to Durham.
With Jeremy Roach returning too, Duke will bring back four returning starters for the first time since their Head Coach Jon Scheyer was a player for Duke.
The Blue Devils still are Duke though and are bringing in a new batch of top recruits. Jared McCain is a 5-Star guard who will have to compete with Roach and Proctor for minutes. Unusual for the top rated player at Duke to potentially come off the bench. TJ Power is a 5-Star forward, who with Filipowski and Mitchell back, doesn’t have a clear path to starting either. 4-Stars Caleb Foster and Sean Stewart will also likely come off the bench along with Jaylen Blakes, Jaden Schutt, Christian Reeves, Neal Begovich and more.
With Dereck Lively gone there are questions at Center and whether or not Filipowski can be the anchor defensively, but Duke has big guys for days to figure out what combination works defensively.
All that firepower has Duke once again as many people’s preseason number 1 ranked team. Just know that this version is a little different than the normal one. Come tournament time, Coach Scheyer will have players that have been through it before and won’t get as rattled.
Top End Talent + Experience isn’t a formula that Duke has had in a long time. That used to be their championship formula back when Scheyer joined the brotherhood.
Could that version of Duke be returning under him?
New Eras in South Bend & Syracuse
For the first time in 36 years Syracuse will have a new Head Coach.
For the first time in 24 years Notre Dame will have a new Head Coach.
With Mike Brey and Jim Boeheim leaving their posts, Leonard Hamilton, Jim Larranaga, Tony Bennett and Brad Brownell are the senior members of the ACC.
There are so many different aspects to both Adrian Autry at Syracuse and Micah Shrewsberry at Notre Dame to be excited to see this season.
Will Syracuse still play zone 100% of the time? Adrian Autry says no. What will a Syracuse team look like without zone? Judah Mintz and JJ Starling are sneakily one of the best backcourts in the ACC. The Orange figure to be a tournament caliber team and it will be really weird watching a different coach stroll the sideline in the Carrier Dome.
Notre Dame won’t be nearly as good. This year’s Fighting Irish team will likely be near the bottom of the conference, but it still will be fascinating see Coach Shrews compete in the ACC for the first time.
His 5-out three happy offense shifted his disadvantages against the bigger Big Ten teams. Will he keep his philosophies or will he change his strategy to make up for the shortcomings of this roster?
Coach Autry and Coach Shrews aren’t the only new blood with Damon Stoudamire landing the Georgia Tech job, but these two are replacing all time leaders of programs. No offense to Josh Pastner, but its just going to be more interesting to see the Syracuse Orange and the Notre Dame Navy being lead by someone new.
How will UNC and Hubert Davis rebound?
In his first season, Hubert Davis went to the National Championship.
In his second season, the Tar Heels missed the tournament and were the most disappointing team in 2022-23.
How will season 3 go?
The Hubert Davis era has certainly been a seesaw of results. The positive end had him winning 26 ACC games in his first two seasons, beating Duke in Coach K’s last home game and last Final Four game, and again making the National Championship. The negative side was that same National runner up roster, a preseason number 1 team, missed the tournament.
Last season, Carolina struggled with the departure of just Brady Manek. This year Davis will have 5 of his top 7 rotation guys gone only keeping RJ Davis and Armando Bacot. Yet, that roster turnover might not be all that bad.
UNC loses Final Four hero Caleb Love, but his absence leaves a spot for 5-star freshman Elliot Cadeau. There has been a lot of hype coming from camp about Cadeau’s vision. The Tarheels might benefit more from a more traditional get-everybody-else-going type of guard instead of a shoot-first guy like Love.
Losing a glue guy like Leaky Black hurts, but maybe Stanford transfer Harrison Ingram can connect the dots better offensively for Hubert Davis. Ingram might not have the defense of Black but his secondary playmaking and swiss army knife offensive skill set could compliment Davis and Cadeau perfectly.
Other transfers like Cormac Ryan from Notre Dame, Paxson Wojcik from Brown, and Jae’lyn Withers from Louisville all could lead to a more balanced UNC offense.
Could UNC be an addition by subtraction success this season? Or will another disappointing regular season have people asking question about Coach Davis?
How sad will Louisville’s season be?
Nobody had a worse season than Louisville last year.
Not only was it a bad season, it was historically bad. The Cardinals lost a program record 28 games last season. Now, that is partially due to there being more games nowadays. A 20 game conference schedule did not help Kenny Payne out.
But more than just the sheer number of losses was how dreadful the winning % was. Louisville won just 12.5% of games last season. That was their worst winning % since before the US entered World War II.
Louisville is a program used to excellence not inferiority. A program with 10 Final Fours and over 1700 wins all time got passed by 4 schools on the All-time win list because they only could win 4 games last year.
After easily the worst season in Louisville history, how sad will this season be?
The Cardinals lost eight players to the portal including last year’s standouts (can you call them standouts?) El Ellis, Jae’Lyn Withers and Kamari Lands. They bring in three guys from the portal in Illinois flush-out Skyy Clark, USC wing Tre White and redshirt freshman Danilo Jovanovich from Miami.
Kenny Payne did his recruiting thing pretty well landing an almost top 5 class (even without DJ Wagner). Payne flipped 4-star Dennis Evans from Minnesota to Louisville, secured Kaleb Glenn from La Lumiere, and grabbed Bronx PG Ty-Laur Johnson as 3 of the 5 orginial 4-star recruits he landed.
That number is down to 4 after Trentyn Flowers bizarrely left the program and decided to play in Australia’s NBL in August.
Is Flowers decision based at all on what he saw from summer practice?
Fans were fed up with Kenny Payne almost instantly last season. His buyout is down to $8 million now. If things go sour again, will they be patient enough to wait til March when the buyout goes down more?
The Cardinals have “recruiting talent” but they did last year too. With Ellis, Lands and Withers gone Louisville has even fewer proven College players. Is there any hope for Payne to figure out a half-decent offense?
Louisville won’t be in the dumpster forever. If you’re a hater, you gotta enjoy the Cardinal tears while you can.
What does Tony Bennett do now?
Last season ended in a gut punch for Tony Bennett and Virginia.
After tying with Miami for the ACC title in the regular season. Virginia lost to Duke in the ACC tournament and then was upset by no. 13 seed Furman in March Madness after Kihei Clark’s career ended on this pass.
Side note: now when you google ‘Kihei Clark pass’ this play pops up first instead of the pass against Purdue.
The punches didn’t stop there either. The Cavs lost senior players like Clark, Ben Vander Plas, Jayden Garnder and Armaan Franklin, but Coach Bennett also lost players to the portal in pivotal big Kadin Shedrick and redshirted Isaac Traudt before he ever played a game for the Wahoos.
Virginia has long been a program that prides itself on development and sitting players until they are ready.
One impact of the transfer portal has been drastically reducing a coach’s ability to redshirt players. Why redshirt and not play when you can go somewhere else play and transfer to a bigger school later?
Leon Bond III redshirted to and is staying at UVA and should have a big role this season, but can Tony Bennett keep doing this?
After losing six major rotation pieces, Coach Bennett is brining in eight new scholarship players. Four Freshmen and four transfers. Bennett has been more selective in the past usually only taking one or two transfers. This time he didn’t have much of a choice.
Some old school coaches who share similar team building mentalities as Bennett in Roy Williams and Jay Wright have left the sport with the introduction of NIL and the Transfer Portal. This season will be a fascinating one to watch as Bennett adapts to the new age of College Basketball.
How will this unusual UVA team perform? How good will the defense be with the players not having years of playing the pack line defense? Will Tony Bennett show any displeasure on the sidelines?
Just keep an eye on Charlottesville.
Will Miami repeat?
I think the layman probably thinks that every team that made the Final Four besides UConn was a fluke. I imagine most casuals might even think of Florida Atlantic as better than Miami this season.
No hate towards the Owls, but Miami was ACC regular season champions and beat Indiana, Houston and Texas on their way to the Final Four. The Canes are not a Final Four fluke.
Jim Larranaga is bringing back almost everyone except for Isaiah Wong and Jordan Miller. Norchad Omier, Nijel Pack, and Wooga Poplar are ready to run it back and contend for the ACC title again. In come Florida State transfer Matthew Cleveland and 4-star big man Michael Nwoko as reinforcements.
Miami are +400 odds to win the Atlantic Coast Conference behind only Duke at +140 according to our friends at DraftKings. UNC at +450 seems like a reach and dark horses in Clemson (+1200) and Virginia Tech (+2500) are lingering.
For all the experience people are raving about for Duke, Miami has more of it and was better last year. The odds make it seem like it is just a one-horse race, but I’m confident Miami and probably another team will be fighting with the Blue Devils for the Title.