Kevin Doyle is an RTC contributor and the Patriot League correspondent. You can find him on twitter @KLDoyle11
Today is one of five days throughout the year when I roll out of bed in the morning and I can’t help but look into the mirror with a devilish looking grin. Today, of course, marks the beginning of the college basketball season. It is hard to believe that it has been seven months since that defensive slugfest between Connecticut and Butler in the National Championship game, but we can now return home from school/work and flip on the tube to have some college hoops brighten our evening. As for the other four days you may be wondering about. Well, they seem trivial right now, but here they are anyways: 1) BCS Title Game, 2) Super Bowl Sunday, 3) That Thursday in mid-March that commences the NCAA Basketball Tournament, 4) Sunday at the Masters.
One caveat to my favorite sports days of the year that I must include: Any day when David overtakes Goliath in the NCAA Tournament is a favorite day of mine, and I am sure it is of others as well. America’s love of the “little guy” come March leads me into the focal point of this preview: an Introduction— or a refresher for others — to The Other 26 article that details life outside of the six BCS/power conferences. For those who are already familiar with the weekly article, please bear with me.
When brainstorming the best and most efficient way to construct these articles, I found myself hitting a predictable roadblock every time—how do I, personally, define what a mid-major is for the purposes of this article? Ultimately, I came to the realization that it is not necessarily vital to have a concrete definition. While my weekly article will certainly be built around the traditional mid-major teams, it will absolutely not be exclusive to them. Even though there are arguments for and against the inclusion of leagues such as the Atlantic 10, Mountain West, and others, there are more reasons to include them than not, so I finally came to this conclusion: Every team that does not play in one of the six major conferences will be a part of the discussion.
In discussing the teams that are not part of a BCS conference, it would be foolish of me to refer to some of these schools as mid-majors. Surely, no one believes that big-money programs such as Memphis, Xavier, BYU, Gonzaga and so on truly belong to the mid-major class. These schools, along with several others, operate under fairly large basketball budgets, recruit the same caliber of player as many BCS schools, and are at the same competitive level as the elite—simply put, they are not mid-majors. Another term was needed when referring to and identifying this collective group of non-BCS schools. Thus, I arrived at the name of the column: The Other 26.
The focus of this column each Friday will be to review highlights from the 26 non-BCS conferences. Here are several aspects of the article you can come to expect every week:
- Top Ten teams with a brief commentary on each.
- Team who had the best week.
- Best individual performances of the week.
- Looking ahead to March: whose stock is rising/falling.
- Notable teams defeating BCS teams.
- Tracking the conferences. What conferences have been doing well as a whole, and which have been disappointing. Furthermore, comparing conferences of similar stature and/or geographic footprint and how they have been performing against one another. For instance: Atlantic 10 vs. Conference USA, Mountain West vs. WAC, Horizon League vs. Colonial Athletic, Ivy League vs. Patriot League, etc.
- Most important games of the upcoming week.
I envision these articles to have the preceding seven points as a mere base for how the article will be constructed. I fully expect, however, that there will be a continual flux in terms of how the article is shaped as we move through the season. Each week brings a new story and theme. Because this is merely an introduction to the series and games have not yet begun, I’ll leave you with the preseason Other 26 Top Ten:
Hopefully this Top 10 gives you something to chew on as the games get underway tonight. The first regular season O26 will post at the end of next week so that we’ll have some actual games to discuss, on November 18. See you on those upcoming Fridays, folks!