There once was a time, back in the day, when college basketball fans would eagerly anticipate the initial AP Poll as a harbinger of the coming season. Or maybe you were the kind of fan who took the Street & Smith’s magazine appearing at your local newsstand as the sign from the basketball gods that it was time to dig into the impending season. Nowadays, Street & Smith’s preseason magazines are long gone. The AP Poll may as well be. But with the rise of advanced metrics, college hoops junkies with a love for statistics can bask in the unveiling of Ken Pomeroy’s preseason ratings with the same joy that those old print-era milestones used to impart.

Steve Alford and UCLA check in much higher than expected. (AP)

The 2015 ratings over at KenPom.com were unveiled earlier this week, and with now only two remaining weeks before action tips off, there is plenty to dig into in Pomeroy’s Pac-12 picks. Below, key takeaways:

UCLA Gets (Too Much?) Respect – The plan all along was to start at the top and work my way down the Pac-12 rankings. But immediately, the #2 Pac-12 team in Pomeroy’s rankings jumps out, as UCLA not only shows up as the clear-cut choice to challenge Arizona for conference supremacy, but also checks in at #13 nationally. This for a team that lost five big-time contributors from last season’s team, including three of those guys to the NBA Draft’s First Round? What gives? Well, first let’s let Pomeroy explain the basis, pulling out some choice relevant quotes from his blog post unveiling his rankings.

“People always want to know why a team is ranked in an unexpected spot. Think of the ratings formula as [team baseline + personnel]. The personnel portion is looking at who is returning from last season’s roster, how much the returnees played, what kind of role each returnee had, and what class they are in.”

“The system does not give any special consideration to new players entering the program. There is some credit given for high-profile recruits, but the poor performances in 2012-13 of UCLA and Kentucky, among others, in recent years have tended to mute the impact of recruits in the model.”

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Stanford’s biggest strength may be its senior returnees from last year’s Sweet Sixteen team – Chasson Randle, Anthony Brown, and Stefan Nastic. But with guys like Dwight Powell, Josh Huestis and John Gage now departed, there are going to be plenty of opportunities for a frontcourt player to step into the mix and up his production in a big way this season. Certainly freshman power forwards Reid Travis and Michael Humphrey are going to have a say in how minutes along the front line get distributed, but there are a pair of players from Johnny Dawkins’ 2011 recruiting class who were highly regarded but have yet to make a big splash in the Pac-12: junior center Grant Verhoeven and redshirt sophomore power forward Rosco Allen.

With More Minutes Due, Grant Verhoeven (30) Should Have A Bigger Role For The Cardinal (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)

Verhoeven has played in 52 of the Cardinal’s 70 games over his first two years on campus, but he has only received double-figure minutes eight times. His career-high scoring for a game is four points. He grabbed eight boards against Northwestern early last season, but that remains the only time that he’s grabbed more than three rebounds in a game. And still, there is reason to suspect he’s in for a much bigger role this season. While Nastic is the clear starter in the middle, he’s not a guy who is going to eat up all of the minutes and Verhoeven is the player most poised to function as Nastic’s understudy in the paint. He’s a powerful force crashing the boards or setting bone-crushing picks, and although you shouldn’t expect him to turn into a reliable scorer overnight, he’s a physical presence down low who will use up his allotment of fouls (he committed 9.2 fouls per 40 minutes played last season) and getting after the glass (his 14.4 DR% and 7.4 OR% are more than respectable and should increase). He won’t be a flashy player for Dawkins, but he may be an important minutes-eater on the front line.

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The concept here is simple and completely stolen borrowed from Seth Davis of CBS Sports. We’re going to take a look at the poll of media members conducted at the Pac-12 Media Day last week and tell you whether we think each team is going to exceed, fall short of, or match the expectations expressed in that poll. And when all this is said and done roughly five months from now, we’ll look back and see how we did. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in.

Arizona: Hold. The fact is that when you’re picked first in your conference and earn 31 of the 32 possible first-place votes in the preseason poll, there is only so much higher you can go. Given that Arizona is going to be routinely chosen among the top four teams in the nation in just about every national preseason poll that appears, the stakes are pretty clear: Final Four or bust. Given the fact that Sean Miller has yet to reach such a lofty goal in his time in the desert and the fact that the Wildcats lost arguably their two most importance pieces from last season, I’m a least a little skeptical. Given such a high risk, buying this stock is out of the question. But with all the talent compiled in Tucson, we have to at least keep a little piece of the action here. When we come back to re-evaluate this, let’s consider an appearance in the Final Four the barrier, with anything less being considered a letdown and anything more a home run.

Is This The Year Sean Miller and The Wildcats Cut Down The Nets? (AP Photo)

Utah: Sell. Sell, sell, sell. And I like Utah. But let’s remember that this is a squad that went 9-9 in conference play last season. And while they’ve got some fun new pieces (Brekkot Chapman, Chris Reyes, Isaiah Wright, Jakob Poeltl and Kyle Kuzma all have the opportunity to earn playing time), second place in this league is some heady stuff. The Utes will have to prove that they can win games when they’ve got a target on their chest, that they can win close games (they were 3-8 in games decided by two possessions or fewer), and that they can win away from the Huntsman Center (they were 2-9 in true road games) before they’re worthy of blue-chip status.

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Adam Butler (@pachoopsab) of Pachoops.com is back for another go-round on his March to Vegas. He covered the Pac-12 Media Day on Thursday. Part I of this two-part series, which covered USC, Washington State, Oregon State, California, Washington and Utah, is located here.

Arizona State

Senior Jonathan Gilling Had Head Coach Herb Sendek Speaking In Glowing Terms (Pac-12 Conference)

If nothing else, you have to love Herb Sendek’s enthusiasm. He’s a very positive dude and, at Media Day, has so many great things to say about everything. This year in particular he came out, positivity guns-a-blazing, about his senior wing, Jonathan Gilling. “He basically has been a four-year starter except for the fact last year he discovered he loves to come off the bench. He’s our best sixth man… I think he’s had the best offseason and preseason since he’s been at Arizona State.” Jon Gilling, as it were, seems to be killing it, perhaps even Gilling it, if you’ll allow me. But with the level of turnover and the new faces in Tempe, it’s going to take a lot more than a sixth man’s effort for the Devils to be successful. Fear not, positive Herb would have you know! Newcomers like Willie Atwood, Gerry Blakes, and Roosevelt Scott will be providing wing skills and combo-guard talents that will greatly help Arizona State. Tra Holder, their freshman point guard, will be distributing to these wings and the three-raining Gilling. The Devils can maintain their year-over-year emphasis on tempo with this personnel. This isn’t your Jahii Carson or James Harden Sun Devils, but it just might be a collective effort that leads this group beyond expectations. Particularly considering Sendek’s thoughts on how the conference’s final standings could – literally – shake out: “You could probably put everybody in a hat, shake it up, have just as good a chance at predicting the order of finish as we are able to do sitting here today… So how anybody short of Nostradamus could sit here today and predict like there really is a difference between ninth and tenth or eighth and ninth just is unreasonable.” Here’s a hat, Herb, shake it up.

Stanford

For the first time in his six seasons at Stanford, Johnny Dawkins took the podium as an NCAA Tournament coach. That’s huge. Had that not been the case it’s very likely that he wouldn’t have been joining us at Media Day. Nevertheless, that wasn’t the case and he wasn’t going to miss his opportunity. JD gave the longest and most insightful opening remarks of any of the coaches. He touched on last season and the experience they had as well as whom they lost. Dawkins transitioned into his excitement for this season and the schedule they’ve pieced together, its challenges. He praised his stage-mate, Chasson Randle, and noted that the Cardinal’s game in Chicago is an opportunity for Chasson to return home. Johnny Dawkins was excited to be here just as I imagine he was excited to have made last year’s Sweet Sixteen. I asked him about it and loved what he had to say: “It’s about standards, you know. Last year we were able to set the bar… You have to have standards to meet or exceed what you’ve accomplished.” These were some of my favorite quotes of the day and certainly the most encouraging I’ve heard from Dawkins before. Last year he told me his 9-9 conference team, returning almost completely intact, was going to “Think about things differently.” I wasn’t sold and they managed 10-8. But now that bar has been set. The hurdle has been jumped and the program knows that it can make the Tournament. And be loud there. The experience of Randle, Anthony Brown and Stefan Nastic is not just games played but actual NCAA Tournament wins. That speaks volumes to the newcomers filling the gaps left by Josh Huestis, Dwight Powell, and John Gage. Collectively, this group doesn’t just believe, they don’t think about doing it anymore. They now know.

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The Pac-12 microsite will preview each of its league teams over the next few weeks, continuing today with Stanford.

Stanford Cardinal

Strengths: Losing an all-league player (Dwight Powell) and one of its premier defenders (Josh Huestis) will be an adjustment, but there is still enough of the group remaining from Johnny Dawkins’ first NCAA Tournament qualifier to make some noise. Look no further than senior Chasson Randle, the team’s top scorer from a season ago and one-half of a seasoned backcourt to go with the Pac-12’s reigning most improved player in Anthony Brown. The duo started all but one of the Cardinal’s 36 games last season. Center Stefan Nastic, a fifth-year senior like Brown, also logged significant minutes as a starter in the run to the Sweet Sixteen.

Chasson Randle (5) and Anthony Brown (21) give Stanford a formidable backcourt high on experience. (Ben Margot/AP Photo)

Weaknesses: Brown just happens to be Stanford’s top returning rebounder at a mere five boards per contest. Those two aforementioned departures, Powell and Huestis, combined to pull down 15 rebounds per game, accounting for 43 percent of the team’s production. Coming into the program will be a pair of top-50 frontcourt recruits, Reid Travis and Michael Humphrey, but the boards and their development will be worth watching early. Point guard play is also a concern, despite the abilities of Randle and Brown. Powell led the team in assists last season as a stretch-four, and freshman Robert Cartwright is the only true floor general expected to play a role. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Let the dissection of the Pac-12 media poll begin. The league will have its media day from the San Francisco headquarters today, and the schools will be represented by each head coach and a few select players. The Pac-12 Networks and website will have live coverage, and here’s a schedule of when to expect each coach to take the stage and address the media in attendance. Who’s ready for commissioner Larry Scott’s rose-colored declaration about how the league is stronger than it’s ever been and another non-story update on the failed DirecTV negotiations? If there is such thing as suspense on this day, it will come from the predicted order of finish behind the likely favorite, second-ranked Arizona. In fact, the folks in Tucson are already wondering whether the Wildcats can run the table in conference play.
2. Speaking of Wildcats and running the table, USA Today’s Scott Gleeson highlighted the group from Kentucky and skimmed through its schedule to pinpoint the toughest tests that stand in the way of a perfect season for the preseason No. 1. Among the contests circled was the December 20 matchup with UCLA in the CBS Sports Classic. Quality opponent and neutral court – the game will be played in Chicago – is a good start to the makings for an upset. And, as Gleeson pointed out, the timing of the game should give both programs a fair barometer and good sample size to mesh. That will be particularly important for the Bruins, who add Isaac Hamilton and Kevon Looney to the mix but are short on experience and in search of a defensive identity.
3. The intrasquad showcases continued Wednesday as Stanford put on a Cardinal and White scrimmage. Head coach Johnny Dawkins has work to do in reloading the program’s first NCAA Tournament qualifier of his six-year tenure. It appears he has already found the breakout star of Year 7, as Rosco Allen turned heads with a winning performance in the dunk contest and 11 points and six rebounds in the 20-minute scrimmage. A team that finished in the top five in the Pac-12 in three-point shooting, the Cardinal have another dead-eye shooter to watch as Dorian Pickens edged out Chasson Randle in the contest. Randle, a first-team all-conference pick last season, led all scorers with 18 points on 5-of-9 shooting.
4. In Salt Lake City, Utah hosted its “Night With the Runnin’ Utes.” After a lackluster intrasquad scrimmage last Friday, head coach Larry Krystkowiak said his team is “making progress” and has the ability to go two-deep at each position. Utah played 16-minute halves that include a halftime shakeup in the rosters. It was a good night to be on Jordan Loveridge’s team as the junior scored a combined 27 points in split duty for each squad. The forward finished 8-of-11 from the field, including 4-of-5 from beyond the arc, and converted all seven of his free throws. The sidebar of the night belonged to 7-foot freshman Jakob Poetl, who returned after missing a week of practice because of a concussion suffered while playing dodgeball during a team dinner at Krystkowiak’s house. The Austrian collected 12 points, five rebounds and two blocks.
5. At Colorado, sophomore guard Jaron Hopkins is making it a point to be more aggressive. Head coach Tad Boyle, who is looking to fill the void left behind by standout Spencer Dinwiddie, said the notable difference is in Hopkins’ decision-making. Hopkins received a crash course in his first year as the Buffaloes adjusted after Dinwiddie’s season-ending injury, so the transition should be more accelerated and less foreign this time around.

With basketball season now officially a speck on the horizon, it is time to dig back in and begin the trek that will eventually drop us off at the Final Four in Indianapolis on the first weekend of April. If you, like us, have been away enjoying your summer and you need a refresher on what’s going on in the world of Pac-12 basketball, we’ll get you jump started by trying to sum up every Pac-12 team’s offseason and their big questions for this season in a short paragraph.

Washington State – The Cougars’ big offseason story was etched in stone way back on March 18 when they fired head coach Ken Bone after five increasingly less successful seasons in Pullman. After a tidy two-week search, former Oregon head coach Ernie Kent was named as Bone’s successor. Kent’s got his work cut out for him at the toughest job in the conference, but he’s shown an ability to recruit on the fly, putting together a tidy four-man 2014 class that will at least give the Cougs a chance to surround star senior guard DaVonte Lacy with some decent parts.

Ernie Kent, Now At Washington State, Is One Of Three New Pac-12 Head Coaches (Geoff Crimmins, AP Photo)

California – Likewise, the Golden Bears’ offseason story revolves around a coaching change, what with Mike Montgomery putting an end to his Hall of Fame career following last year’s disappointing season. Athletic director Sandy Barbour wound up with an intriguing hire when he pulled Cuonzo Martin away from Tennessee following his March run from the First Four to the Sweet Sixteen. Martin’s first year in Berkeley will be marked by a short bench, and he’s yet to have any success on the recruiting trail. Furthermore, replacing a fixture like Montgomery is never going to be easy. But Martin immediately gives Cal a completely different feel on the sidelines. Stay tuned.

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1. Emmanuel Mudiay‘s decision to head to overseas–maybe partially influenced by questions regarding his eligibility–has sparked some discussion about the possibility of more players spending a year overseas–and be paid–rather than going to college. This is hardly a new phenomenon with Brandon Jennings being the most prominent player to follow this path, but it appears that several players in the class of 2015 are contemplating it. According to Mudiay, three highly rated players in the class of 2015 have contacted him about following in his footsteps. Mudiay didn’t offer any names, but based on the comments in the column by Evan Daniels it would seem like  Jaylen Brown is the most likely candidate in the class. Obviously there is a long time to go until the class of 2015 matriculates and we doubt that this will become a trend, but it is something worth keeping an eye on.
2. Dunk City might not be getting back to the Sweet Sixteen any time soon, but Florida Gulf Coast picked up a significant addition when Rayjon Tucker committed there yesterday. With Brett Comer, Bernard Thompson and Jamail Jones all entering their senior years this season, the Eagles will need a lot of help starting in the  2015-2016 season, which means that Tucker, a three-star small forward out of North Carolina, could play a big role. It is also a big addition for second-year head coach Joe Dooley as it shows that he can still capitalize on the team’s NCAA Tournament run from two seasons ago despite Andy Enfield leaving for USC soon after the season ended. The school–or at least the location–could sell itself, but there are plenty of schools you could say that about that cannot be consistently competitive. Tucker is not the first significant pick-up for the school after Enfield’s departure, but could help provide the program with momentum going forward.
3. Lost in all of the Mike Krzyzewski-Team USA debate over the past week is the question as to how much longer Krzyzewski will even be at Duke to “exploit” any recruiting advantage he may have. As we have pointed out many times the Krzyzewski coaching tree is not particularly noteworthy in terms of potential successors. One name that has been mentioned at times is Johnny Dawkins. With his experience as a star player at Duke, working under Krzyzewski as an assistant, and coaching at a big-time program he would appear to be an ideal fit. Unfortunately, his job security at Stanford has been questionable at times, which makes the extension that was announced yesterday notable. The timing of the announcement–details on years and money were not made public–is strange since it would seem that Dawkins does not have anything to bargain with like open jobs. Dawkins, who has a 117-87 career record with four postseason appearances, was on the proverbial hot seat early last year before turning it around finishing with a Sweet Sixteen appearance that included a win over Kansas. We are not sure that Dawkins is the right fit for the Duke job when it opens up eventually, but as long as he has a job at a major program he should be viewed as a top-tier candidate.
4. Schools cannot financially incentivize student-athletes to come play for them outside of scholarships, which have been discussed here and on other sites ad nauseum, but they can improve their surroudings. The most well-known example of this is Kentucky’s Wildcat Coal Lodge, but even smaller programs need to try to keep up. One example of this is at Houston where they announced their planned “Basketball Development Facility” (basically practice facility) with a reported $25 million price tag. The construction is expected to start this week and finish by August 2015. With what has essentially become an arms race in this area we wondering how much of this is to try to get ahead the competition as opposed to merely trying to keep up with it.
5. Ivan Cruz Uceda will half to sit out the first half of the season for Miami due to a NCAA rule requiring a student-athlete to enroll in college one year after graduating high school. Cruz Uceda, a native of Spain who turns 23 on October 24, played at Harcum College where he averaged 14.6 points, 9.6 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.1 blocks per game as a sophomore before committing to play at Miami. We don’t claim to be experts on NCAA bylaws, but you would assume that someone in the Miami athletic department would have seen this coming months ago. In any event, it put the Hurricanes in the difficult position of having only nine scholarship players to start the season with seven of them being newcomers. Cruz Uceda will not be eligible to play until January 13 in what should be an extremely difficult environment for this first game–a trip to Duke.

1. With the NBA Draft in the books we can officially put last season in the rear-view mirror. The top of the Draft was no surprise as Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, and Joel Embiid went 1-2-3. Actually, most of the Draft was not particularly surprising, but there are a few things that caught our eye. Outside of Toronto drafting a player who is “two years away from being two years away”, we we surprised to see Gary Harris and Shabazz Napier slip so far. I don’t think either were guaranteed top-10 picks and Napier was probably a borderline lottery pick at best, but both probably went at least six spots lower than what we would have expected and teams in higher spots made moves to acquire players at similar positions who simply are not as good as these two.
2. The annual Coaches vs Cancer event announced their semifinal match-ups on Wednesday with Stanford playing UNLV and Duke playing Temple with the winners playing the following night. We would expect Stanford and Duke to meet although UNLV with all of its freshmen could surprise Stanford. If Stanford does advance (we are going to assume Duke will beat what should be a fairly mediocre Temple team) it would produce an interesting match-up between Mike Krzyzewski and Johnny Dawkins. We would not expect the Cardinal to be competitive with the Blue Devils based on talent alone although the Blue Devils may struggle integrating all of their new pieces early in the season. What would be interesting is seeing Krzyzewski face off against his former player, protege, and potential candidate to replace him if and when he does retire.
3. So maybe that soccer thing didn’t work out exactly how we wanted, but basketball is still a sport that we do not need to rely on other countries to advance. The US demonstrated its dominance with a 113-79 victory over Canada to win the gold medal at the FIBA Americas Under-18 Championships. The victory was one of the closer games for the Americans as they won their five games by an average of almost 57 points per game including this 34-point win that made their average margin of victory plummet. As expected the Americans had a well-rounded attack. Despite what you might read about these wins and how certain players (not student-athletes until they are in college) played we would not read too much into it as they were playing against vastly inferior competition.
4. A significant college prospect was taken off the recruiting board on Wednesday when Georgios Papagiannis announced that he was signing with a Greek club rather than going to college. Papagiannis, a 7’1″ center was a consensus top-50 player in the class of 2015 and had already taken unofficial visits to Maryland and Penn State. His decision should not come as a shock to observers because foreign recruits provide another potential source of talent they also have a much higher likelihood of opting to play overseas rather than coming to college in the first place.
5. With the NBA Draft on everybody’s mind this week, CBS had its own draft, but did it for college coaches. As Gary Parrish, who wrote the accompanying article, notes there are many ways to define the best coach. For the purposes of this exercise they defined it as the best coach for the next five years. Most of the selections seem pretty reasonable, but we would question both Mike Krzyzewski (5th) and Kevin Ollie (22nd) slipping so far. Obviously Krzyzewski’s resume is better than his next five-year prospects, but he would have been in the top two in our draft if we had done one. As for Ollie, you can certainly point out that he was very close to getting eliminated early from this year’s NCAA Tournament, but the fact is that he wasn’t and he might be the most coveted NBA coaching prospect in the college ranks, which ought to count for something with recruiting in the future.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go through each Pac-12 team one by one and recount the season that has just completed and begin to turn the page to what we might see next season. Today, Stanford.

What Went Right

It wasn’t always pretty, and you probably still can’t say that this Stanford team ever consistently played up to its potential, but Johnny Dawkins and his senior class finally got to the NCAA Tournament. And they didn’t stop there, beating two solid teams – New Mexico and Kansas – in the Big Dance in order to earn an unlikely Sweet Sixteen appearance. The team was well-balanced on both ends of the court; Chasson Randle took that long-awaited next step in his personal development; and Dwight Powell eventually slid into a new role in order to begin potentially a new era for Stanford basketball.

Chasson Randle Had A Breakout Season In Leading The Cardinal To The Sweet Sixteen (Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP Photo)

What Went Wrong

One major problem plagued the Cardinal all year: team-wide inconsistency. We saw it early in the season when the team decided to forgo any inkling of defense in a loss to BYU while giving up 112 points; or a couple weeks later when they were unable to come up with any more than a half worth of good basketball in Brooklyn in the Legends Classic; or in conference play where they backed up their non-conference accomplishments with an 0-2 start in the Pac-12. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Sweet Sixteen where, coming off of a win over Kansas, the Cardinal had a beatable Dayton team between them and a date with the Elite Eight. What happened? The Flyers scored at will against the Cardinal; Randle was at his brick-tastic worst; and Dawkins and company let a big opportunity slip away without much of a fight.

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