I thought Patton was coming along nicely towards the end of last year
Can’t hurt to not give him like 8-12 MPG
I will be curious to see how they do against Arizona State.
Mahaney going to UCONN, to me, was a BAD IDEA. He is not a UCONN type of player.
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Agree 'femme. Mahaney to UConn never made sense to me. UConn is defensive minded, maybe Hurley expected Mahaney to be a good defensive player because SMC defends so well as a team??? Problem is Mahaney was the worst defender in their rotation. Hurley did find success with USD transfer Joey Calcaterra season before last and he contributed as 3pt specialist off the bench; but Mahaney hasn’t even done that. He was in the starting linuep for the first several games but was dropped from the starting lineup recently and minutes dropped.
Another one is LMU transfer Dom Harris, had a good season last year, transferred to UCLA, but is only playing a handful of minutes a game and barely scoring.
Flip side is there are several WCC transfers who are doing fine…we’ll see one today in Portland transfer Tyler Harris who is leading UW. USD transfer Wayne McKinney is starting for San Diego St. And SMC transfer Joshua Jefferson is doing well for Iowa St., starting and is their leading rebounder while scoring just under 10/game.
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Yesterday, Arizona State defeated St. Mary’s 68-64.
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Hard to argue we should be any higher, if anything it’s inflated considering we’re 3-5 with Quad III and IV losses.
Based on actual performance (not talent/ability/potential), we’re playing more like a 175-200ish squad.
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Harris is chasing something. Didn’t he also leave Gonzaga?
That’s Dom Harris who bounced from Gonzaga to LMU and now somewhere else. Tyler Harris is only in his second season after being a solid frosh at Portland.
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no Cedric Coward, down to as many as 7 players at one point and thoroughly pasted Nevada, super impressive from David Riley’s squad. He’s good
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USF boatraced St Louis in the city by 17. SLU only had 7 healthy players but a 26-4 run out of the break will always do it
Broncos up to 87 in NET. Aided by the TCU win over #22 Xaiver. Oh what might have been without the second half slip ups against Stanford and North Dakota State. Bradley is #57 and will provide the last opportunity for a boost before Conference Play. Too bad the bottom of the conference is so awful this year because Gonzaga, Oregon State, Washington State, St. Mary’s, USF, and Santa Clara all being inside the Top 90 in NET make for an otherwise very strong league.
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Even NDSU is doing fairly well which may turn them into a Q3 loss rather than the death knell Q4. For whatever that’s worth at this point.
But yeah, if you just get back NDSU and Stanford, Santa Clara is probably in the top 60 or so and sees the path. Now they just need to rattle off about 10 straight wins to even sniff where they were supposed to be.
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That’s nice and all but does anyone believe we’ve actually performed up to a Top 90 level team and deserve that ranking? I don’t.
I’m not talking about potential, talent and where we should be…I mean actual performance to date.
There are 364 D1, 87th puts us in the top quartile. If that’s accurate then there must be some really ugly and horrible basketball being played elsewhere.
Just my opinion.
The analytical models are far from perfect.
Let’s compare Washington St. (#69) vs. Santa Clara (#87) resumes for instance. They are separated by just 18 spots which isn’t much. However, looking at their resumes and performance to date you’d think there’d be a much greater separation.
Washington St. is 7-2 vs. the Broncos 4-5. WSU is undefeated vs. Quad III and IV teams whereas the Broncos have 2 Quad III/IV losses. WSU has a Quad II win over the same Bradley team we play next week and Quad 1 win over Nevada in Reno; the same Nevada team that shellacked us. WSU’s two losses are to solid power conference teams #45 SMU and #58 Iowa at neutral sites. Those two resumes should produce a ranking delta of greater than 18 spots.
The above are two WCC teams, there are only a handful of non-con games left to change the Strength of Schedule comparison. Once league play starts any ‘Strength of Schedule’ comparison between WCC teams is more or less static.
IMO, the Broncos still have a long, long way to go to realize their potential. It’s nice they logged decent wins vs. TCU and McNeese but we looked just so-so in those games and we still have yet to win back to back games. If we don’t clean things up, get more efficient on offense and D up and rebound more consistently then we’ll likely continue to see the roller coaster ride and win roughly 2 out of 3 in conference with a head scratching loss or two and/or several uninspiring wins.
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Torvik has the Broncos having played the 7th toughest Schedule in the country so far. 2025 Strength of Schedule - Customizable College Basketball Tempo Free Stats - T-Rank
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Yep, well aware of Torvik stats, I spend a lot of time there. But that’s my point, some of the analytics don’t make sense.
And for the record, Torvik projects our strength of schedule to drop to #27 by league play as are upcoming opponents are all 200-300 ranked teams aside from Fresno St.
Nevada is the best team on our schedule to date, ranked #44. There are 32 to 34 at large berths to the NCAA’s. I know tourney selection doesn’t work this way but theoretically if you’d base tourney selection today based solely on Torvik rankings and assuming Nevada doesn’t land their league tourney auto birth then Nevada wouldn’t even be in the NCAA tourney. So we’ve possibly played zero NCAA tourney teams to date yet that translates to the 7th best schedule??? Doesn’t add up.
We’re being rewarded by having a bunch of supposedly decent (not great) teams on the schedule (in the Top 100) and no really bad teams as the supposedly worse teams to date are #194 UC Riverside and #178 N Dakota St. That makes Riverside and NDSU more or less average teams. Are half the teams in D1 truly worse than NDSU??? They looked like garbage to me so that doesn’t say much about the rest of D1 hoops.
And amongst the decent teams we played they mostly seem like they are over ranked. Power conf teams who are given a high ranking to begin the season for no other reason than they are Power Conf schools. Torvik rankings for those recent decent teams: TCU - #67, McNeese - #75, Washington - #86, Stanford #91. I wasn’t overly impressed with any of those teams. I don’t think those rankings are grossly out of whack but they all seem inflated by 25 - 50 spots. McNeese #67??? No way, or again the quality of D1 hoops has eroded significantly. If most of these rankings are inflated then it’s junk in, junk out.
Let’s dissect another resume, this time Stanford: They are 7-2…sounds good right? But take a closer look. We are their best win and only Quad II win, they have one Quad III win and their remaining 5 wins are all Quad IV including vs. illustrious programs like Denver, Northern Arizona and UC Davis. Their two losses are both Quad III losses including to # 232 Cal Poly at home.
That doesn’t strike me as a Top 90 team.
Stanford’s schedule reminds me of our schedule back in 2019/20 full of SWAC teams and empty wins…but hey, the record looked fantastic…then of course we got exposed in WCC play.
And since we’re referencing Torvik…Torvik currently has us as 0.8% probability of an at-large berth. That kind of sums things up to date.
And USF has a 26% chance of an at-large…probably inflated but they at least have some hope.
We’d have to go on a monumental run to get an at-large including winning out the rest of non-con and either winning the WCC regular season outright or at worst finish something like 15-3 and 2nd place. Pipe dream territory.
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Hey now, I like my pipe dreams!
I can’t argue with any of the analysis. I don’t think we will have a good litmus test for whether this team is capable of stabilizing until they play USF. And if they lose any game between now and then, the AD should have some soul searching.
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I’m going to say this, and then I promise I won’t bring it up again, cuz we have what we have:
Herb Sendek is certainly a knowledgeable coach. Unfortunately, he is not an inspirational coach. When I think of an inspirational coach, I think of someone like Dan Campbell (head coach of the Detroit Lions) or Mark Madsen (head coach of Cal). How about Kenny Dillingham? The guy is 34 years old and is leading his ASU football squad (picked to finish last in the Big 12) to a Championship game matchup tomorrow against Iowa State. THIRTY-FOUR!!! BORN IN 1990!!! His players absolutely LOVE playing for him. He is passionate, he is emotional, and he coaches with joy and exuberance.
Our Broncos seem rudderless. We don’t have a true floor/field general and our joint chiefs commander (HS) doesn’t inspire. It will be hard to put up a long string of W’s without leadership, either on the floor or on the bench.
Again, just my two cents. I’ll shut up about this topic going forward, because there is nothing I can do to change the situation.
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