ACE

Hell yeah Jimmy Walker is high energy. DYNO-MITE!!

He looks pretty skilled, with a nice shot and good footwork. Start eating non-stop and hit the weights.

It seems his poor shooting is going to limit his opportunities.

Of course. Not blaming the kid. Just pointing out the reality of college hoops in 2024.

Tell that to St. Mary's. They lost Mahaney to UConn - even though he was playing on a good team and grew up near the St. Mary's campus.

Correct. Schertz just had a Top 30 team that had 3 transfers in the starting 5, and this year he brought in 7 transfers. Understand that this year was an unusual one-time situation to build a roster, but clearly Schertz has shown he will go after transfers and will continue to do so. You have to in this day and age. To think otherwise is just silly. I'm not sure why anyone would even try to turn this into a debate.

I am a 100% in agreement and have also mentioned this previously. I think most importantly, football conference affiliations should break away from the rest of the sports. It would solve a lot of problems.

I'm not sure I follow - UMass just left the A-10 for a much worse basketball conference because of football. New Mexico is in the MWC a league that plays football and has also been a good bball league. Every school that has a D1 football team, even if they have crappy teams, are chasing football first and everything else including basketball is secondary. As a hoops fan, I hate it, but this is the current college sports landscape unfortunately.

firetobin.com

Don't feed the troll...

Of course it would be great if the A-10 were better, but last year the highest rated non-football conference not named the Big East was none other than: https://www.warrennolan.com/basketball/2024/net-conference

Memphis, UMass and New Mexico all play football... not very good football, but they do play games.

BYU is gone, the WCC was just a temporary stop for them. San Francisco has made one NCAA Tourney appearance in the last 25 years.

Gonzaga and St. Mary's are not succeeding because of the WCC, they have managed to succeed in spite of it. The conference has not exactly elevated the likes of Pepperdine, Portland, San Diego, Loyola Marymount and Pacific. Randy Bennett has been amazing. He's unusual. Most coaches in his shoes would've jumped to another job a long time ago. After he retires, it'll be interesting to see what happens to that program.

Yep, you can count the number of programs that have been as good as Gonzaga over the past couple of decades on one hand and you can count the number of non-P6 programs that have been this good on one finger. They are an anomaly.