I don't care where Eamonn Brennan thinks. Actually, scratch that. I do care what he thinks. I hope that he is as pessimistic as possible in assessing UConn's prospects for the 2015-16 season. That is why college basketball is the easiest sport to profit off of from a gambling standpoint - you can unveil flagrant market inefficiencies by deploying nothing other than common sense.
Honestly, I get it. Common sense dictates that these Huskies' - following an NIT berth and the loss of their best player - have a lot to prove. And that's true. There are a lot of college basketball teams with a lot to prove, though, and attempting to handicap their odds purely by virtue of that subjective qualification is probably not the best way to go about it.
If I were a college basketball blogger examining the cursory components of every team in the country, I truthfully may not rank this UConn team in the top 50. That's as much a function of how preposterously middle-heavy college basketball is going to be this year (get ready for me to make this point hundreds of times before and during the season) as it is UConn's roster deficiencies, but nonetheless, the optics paint a picture that veers in the direction of modesty, and frankly, that is probably the approach you should take.
I hope that you will choose me to view me as mentally unstable rather than conceited when I say this, but I feel I have a better grasp on the sport than most anybody that is paid to discuss it (and the same could be said of some posters here). Simply put, I feel that way because of the inexhaustible research I have devoted to the subject. I have an excel document that contains the records of virtually every principal statistic you can imagine. Where were they ranked in KenPom to finish last season? What percentage of their scoring returns? How many five star sophomores does the roster possess? Four star seniors?
From there, I broke things down into even more fragmented pieces. What is the average PER of a five star sophomore? What is the average PER of a four star freshman? This way, I'm familiar with the specific composition of roster that tends to forecast success in addition to the less covert indicators - who their coach is, what they were the year prior, etc.
In totality, I've spent ten or more hours studying tape on last years UConn team, twenty or more attempting to articulate my observations - and, more importantly, my projections - in a manner that would read as transparently as possible. I adhered to the same process last year, and the year before that. How accurate was I? Semi-accurate, I guess. I anticipated that they would struggle last season more than many - including the national media - let on. To the extent of those struggles, I was purposely unclear on, because I had no earthly idea. But the season did not surprise me. The year before? I had us billed as a top ten team (I think I ranked them seventh preseason), but also put my foot in my mouth by claiming there was no way they could win a national championship.
"All this time and work for something the casual fan may have been able to predict," some might think. Yeah, you're not wrong. I regurgitate my past not to boast my qualifications but to assure you that I try really, really hard not to be a homer.
This year, I have UConn #2 in my preseason poll. In the coming weeks, I will share in excruciating detail the basis for this ranking, and maybe of the three people who read my work, one of them will be one over. For now, though, any poll that renders us outside the top 25 is music to my ears.
