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.
Welcome in Houston, UCF, BYU & Cincy
The toughest conference in the country just got tougher with the addition of four new schools.
The Big 12 adds a historic program in Cincy, a pretty good one in recent history in BYU, one who just produced a lottery pick in UCF and one that combines all three of those in Houston.
There are so many questions for the new Big 12 members. Will UCF and BYU be more than just roadkill?How well can Wes Miller and the Bearcats adapt to the toughest conference in College Basketball? Will Kelvin Sampson and Houston still be a dominant powerhouse with the drastic increase in difficulty of conference play?
It’s going to be a story all year watching these teams sink or swim in their new conference. I believe the Cougars will be able to compete for a Big 12 title this year, but what if they don’t? Could the Cougars national profile slip if they can’t hang with Kansas, Texas and Baylor?
I like Cincinnati’s roster a lot this season. Do I think they can be a top half of the Big 12 team with zero familiarity with their new conference rivals and the travel that they will have to do for most games? Probably not.
Another wrinkle of the newcomers is the death of the round robin conference schedule. The Big 12 will no longer play everybody at home and on the road this season. Are imbalanced schedules truly unfair or is it just a tremendous excuse by coaches to deflect their team’s performance? Either way, the Big 12 will be able to blame the schedule now when they couldn’t really before.
College Basketball wasn’t going to stay the same forever. In fact, it is always changing and the trickle down effect of College Football’s realignment means that the Big 12 will have imbalance schedules, but it also means that we get to see Houston, Texas, Baylor and Texas Tech all play each other every year. Sorry Texas A&M, you are now left out of the Texas State Title belt.
Cincinnati playing West Virginia again every year is fun and good for that area. Not many regional rivalries for UCF! BYU eventually playing Colorado and Arizona all the time will be cool. But, that will be apart of next year’s biggest storylines. Good Luck to the newcomers to the proverbial Hunger Games that is Big 12 Basketball. May the odds be ever in your favor!
Hunter Dickinson and the High Profile Transfer
Two seasons ago, the public was shocked at the sticker value of Nijel Pack at Miami.
This season the public was shocked a player of the prestige as Hunter Dickinson (3x All-Big Ten, 2nd Team All-American) would transfer. We haven’t seen a player of his caliber leave his school. Of course it made perfect sense for the College Basketball pariah. Bill Self returns to run his offense through an elite big man and Dickinson gets to be hated by even more people in America. Still, it isn’t how things have always been done in College Basketball.
Dickinson will be a test case for high profile transfers.
If the experiment goes great and Dickinson is a first team All-American (he was just tabbed as a pre-season 1st teamer) and makes a Final Four or even wins a National Title, do more All-conference players at programs transfer to try and ring chase?
Does Zach Edey transfer to Kansas next season? Could Tyler Kolek finish his career as a Duke guard?
Casuals and die-hards a like should root against Hunter Dickinson and Kansas succeeding this year because of what a success story might bring.
Let’s hope the chemistry is off and that his NIL total bothers teammates. If it does go well it will just be another way that the Transfer portal and NIL has hurt the basketball traditionalist’s ideal form of College Basketball.
What the hell is happening in West Virginia?
There probably hasn’t been a program with a weirder offseason than the Mountaineers.
Hall of Famer and face of the program Bob Huggins was arrested for DUI in Pittsburgh in June. That was just after he had received a suspension for saying a homophobic slur on Cincinnati radio. Coach Huggins then resigned after how bad the DUI really was revealed to the public. Or at least he resigned until he claimed he didn’t.
Yeah, what a mess.
After all of the embarrassment Bob Huggins brought the program and to himself, assistant coach Josh Eilert was named interim head coach. Eilert has been in Morgantown since 2007 and will try to move on past the rough end to the Huggins era while auditioning for the job full time.
All things considered, Eilert did a great job of keeping players in West Virginia and out of the portal. He retained their significant portal haul of Raequan Battle, Jesse Edwards, and Kerr Kriisa. The Mountaineers lost Joe Toussaint and Tre Mitchell but it could have been much worse.
The Mountaineers also lost Jose Perez recently, but I’m not sure he is a real person or just an inside joke among CBB reporters to drum up offseason interest.
It has been a summer full of whispers and message boards for Mountaineer fans, but mercifully basketball is about to be played and they can start to put some of the hysteria behind them.
The roster this season is better suited to compete in the gauntlet that is the Big 12 and it will be a story all season to see them play under Eilert and no longer under Huggins.
Texas officially starts the Rodney Terry Era
Last year, Texas had high hopes that seemed to be cut short by the off the court drama of then head coach Chris Beard.
Despite Beard being dismissed, the Longhorns were able to win 29 games, finish 2nd in the Big 12 and come within a few possessions of making the Final Four. That was because everybody’s favorite spectacled coach Rodney Terry stepped in and had about as perfect of an interim run we have seen.
Rodney Terry wen 22-8 overall and ended on fire with two wins over Kansas within a week, one of those to become Big 12 Tournament Champions, and then had three victories in his first NCAA Tournament on the Longhorns run to the Elite Eight. Indeed, it seemed Coach Terry only got better and better as the season went on, however the offseason presented trouble.
Texas had two five-stars decommit in the offseason. 5-Star guard AJ Johnson decommitted to play for NBL professional league in Australia and potential no. 1 pick Ron Holland went to the G-League Ignite. Both had high praise for Rodney Terry on their way out, but still you would rather keep your best recruits than lose them.
Normally, that might be a damning offseason, but Terry and Texas pivoted and hit the portal hard. The Longhorns landed 5 guys including UCF combo guard Ithiel Horton, WAC rookie of the year Chendall Weaver, Virginia big man Kadin Shedrick, and prized portal haul and former March Madness hero Max Abmas from Oral Roberts. Abmas will step right into the Marcus Carr role and was selected as a Preseason 1st Team All-Big 12 player (1 of 4 transfers to make up the 5 selections btw).
Texas thought they had the guy to take them to the promised land after stealing Chris Beard from Texas Tech. Maybe, the real savior was the guy on the bench next to him. Eyes will be on Rodney Terry and his performance as the fully minted coach of a resurgent Texas program.
This season will also officially be the farewell tour for Texas in the Big 12. Can the Longhorns go out on top? Terry and Texas will leave the Big 12 to join the SEC and play against… Chris Beard and Ole Miss. Rodney Terry has had a weird and fruitful start in Austin, and it seems like it will continue to be strange and I can’t wait to keep up.
Can Anyone dethrone Kansas?
Is the Big 12 Championship the most interesting storyline each year or the least?
Kansas has won outright or had at least a share of the Big 12 regular season title 18 of the past 19 seasons.
Let’s say that again. Kansas for all but one season in the past two decades has won the Big 12. Add in that the Jayhawks have won 9 more Tournament titles to bring their total to 27 Big 12 trophies.
Bill Self is inevitable.
Can the preseason no. 1 team make it 19 for 20? The only team to stop them in the past 19 seasons is Baylor in 2020-21 who won the National Championship. The Bears and Scott Drew have another exciting class of players with 5-star Ja’Kobe Walter and 4-stars Miro Little and Yves Missi. Drew also brought two exciting transfers in A-10 All-Freshman Jayden Nunn and 2022-23 MAC POY Ray J Dennis. Can Coach Drew pull together a team with so many new players to win consistently enough in December and January to steal the regular season title?
Could Houston and Kelvin Sampson upset Rock Chalk in their first attempt? Will Texas be able to stick around in the Conference Title discussion this year? Are Jerome Tang and K-State going to surprise us again? Iowa State is young but really talented. Don’t count out TJ Otzelberger from making noise. Jamie Dixon and TCU are a thing!
Yet, Kansas and their seemingly predestined regular season championship are an annual tradition of the Big 12. Depending on your outlook it can be either the best or least interesting story to follow. Is a really good movie better or worse if you know how it ends heading into it?
No matter what, it will be fun to watch all of these storylines play out and soak up all the little details even if it still ends in the Jayhawks and Bill Self holding the trophy.