Sunday, September 24, 2017

Conference USA: UAB Returns to Football Field While Future NBA Star Leads Middle Tennessee

UAB returned to the football field after the Board of the University of Alabama disbanded them, perhaps realizing Coach Nick Saban would not be there forever and UAB was posed about where TCU was relative to Texas at one point. The resultant 14-team Conference USA includes five solid football programs and four very good basketball programs led by Western Kentucky.

Value Add projects Middle Tennessee's Giddy Potts as a top 50 player in the country and the preseason Player of the Year, and Louisiana Tech's Jacobi Boykins and Western Kentucky's Mitchell Robinson, a potential early NBA pick, in the top three percent of all players in the country.

Here is where Value Add ranks each Conference USA team for the season, and the Massey Rankings rank the football teams against all other schools. Updates will be provided here.

CUSA / 2017 SeedHoops 2017-18Football
Western Kentucky5978
Old Dominion8984
Middle Tennessee 1294104
Louisiana Tech10572
Marshall176115
UAB221138
Southern Miss22895
UTSA23880
North Texas251146
Florida Atlantic259136
Charlotte267169
FIU275157
Rice313144

Here are the top 15 projected players in the conference in order.

Top 15 CUSA PlayersValue AddSchoolHt
Giddy Potts 207.90Middle Tennessee`6-02
Jacobi Boykins7.19Louisiana Tech`6-06
Mitchell Robinson6.71Western Kentucky`6-11
William Lee 346.20UAB`6-09
Justin Johnson 236.07Western Kentucky`6-07
Jon Elmore 335.70Marshall`6-03
Darius Thompson 515.49Western Kentucky`6-04
Jon Davis 35.30Charlotte`6-03
Brandan Stith 255.15Old Dominion`6-07
Chris Cokley 34.92UAB`6-08
DaQuan Bracey 44.90Louisiana Tech`5-11
Ahmad Caver 44.80Old Dominion`6-02
Payton Hulsey 34.54Florida International`6-05
Tyrik Dixon 04.50Middle Tennessee`6-01
Omega Harris 24.20Texas El Paso`6-03

Ken Pomeroy ranked the Sun Belt 15th of 32 Division 1 basketball conferences, which will all be previewed here with notes on which schools are now "basketball" or "football" schools based on which program is stronger this season. Football revenue is much higher, but programs are much more expensive between equipment and the requirement of matching enough women's scholarships in other sports. Therefore some programs forgo FBS football programs to focus on low cost basketball programs as their biggest revenue sport.

Sports IllustratedFox Sports and ESPN have lauded Value Add Basketball for estimating the number of points each college basketball players is worth to his team above a replacement player - similar to baseball WAR (Wins Above Replacement). Massey Ratings is used for the football rankings above.

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