Now that conference play is about to start up, we figured that it’s time to take a step back to see how all of the teams in the conference fared so far this year and then try to figure out what we think will happen these next few months. There are no terrible teams in the conference this year, but there also aren’t any great teams either, which means that this year has the potential to be pretty wild.

Where Things Stand

Going into conference play, the Mountain West finds itself in an unfortunately familiar situation. Because of an unimpressive non-conference season, the league is most likely only going to have a single team in the NCAA Tournament once again. As far as I can tell, unless the right team happens to go undefeated in conference play (that is, either SDSU, Nevada, or maybe Boise St.), only the winner of the conference tournament will hear their name called on selection Sunday, and probably as a 13+ seed. That said, if you just happen to like college basketball, this should be a really interesting MW season. As evidenced in the plot below, which shows the KenPom adjusted efficiency margin rankings of all 351 teams in D1, while there aren’t any great teams in the league, there aren’t really any awful ones either. Gone are the days when you could basically treat playing SJSU as an extra bye; every team has a chance to win in every game.

This is further evidenced in the plot below, which shows the offensive and defensive efficiency ratings for each team in the conference. The black lines show the average D1 ratings for offense and defense, where the further down the plot you go, the better your defense is and the further to the right you go, the better your offense. The red line shows where a team would have a zero adjusted efficiency margin. If you’re below that red line, then you’d be considered an above-average D1 team. As we can see, there are only 3 teams (UNLV, Air Force, SJSU) that would then be considered below-average, and they’re not too far from the line, either. In fact, it’s notable that there are no teams in the upper-left quadrant, meaning that there are no teams that have both a below-average offense and a below-average defense. The clear favorites in the conference are the three teams in the lower-right quadrant (SDSU, Nevada, Boise St.), who all have an above-average offense and defense.

Conference Predictions

Heading into conference play, we decided to each predict the order of finish for all 11 teams. We’ve also included the KenPom projected finish, which also corresponds to the current ranking of each team.

Rank	KenPom (Rank)	Bob Bobbins	I.B. Luc
1	San Diego St. (59)	San Diego St.	Nevada
2	Nevada (76)	Nevada	San Diego St.
3	Boise St. (89)	New Mexico	Boise St.
4	New Mexico (128)	Boise St.	Wyoming
5	Wyoming (133)	Fresno St.	New Mexico
6	Fresno St. (146)	Wyoming	Fresno St.
7	Colorado St. (150)	Colorado St.	Colorado St.
8	Utah St. (155)	Utah St.	Utah St.
9	UNLV (187)	Air Force	San Jose St.
10	Air Force (190)	UNLV	UNLV
11	San Jose St. (209)	San Jose St.	Air Force

Other Predictions

Player of the Year: Marcus Marshall, Nevada (I.B. Luc), Tim Williams, UNM (Bob Bobbins)

Coach of the Year: Eric Musselman, Nevada (IBL), Allen Edwards, Wyoming (BB)

Freshman of the Year: Koby McEwen, Utah St. (IBL), Justinian Jessup, Boise St. (BB)

All-MW First Team: Cam Oliver, Nevada; Marcus Marshall, Nevada; Jeremy Hemsley, SDSU; Chandler Hutchison, Boise St.; Tim Williams, UNM (We’re actually in agreement on this!)

Scattered Thoughts

• I have no idea what to expect out of the Lobos at this point. On one hand, it still feels like they have the talent to compete with anyone in the conference and, with no really great teams this year, that could put them in position to win the regular season. On the other hand, they haven’t exactly inspired any confidence that they’re capable of doing just that. It will be good to see them play again tomorrow to see if we can get a better read on them. I feel I spent way too much time of my holiday weekend thinking about them.
• Wyoming has been the surprise of the early season, going 10-3 in non-conference play and nearly beating USC on a neutral-court game. Perhaps the most surprising thing is the pace they’ve been playing at. They have the 9^th-highest adjusted tempo this year. And no, that’s not 9^th in the conference, which would kind of make sense, 9^th in the nation! They’re going to be a lot tougher this year than most people figured they would be.
• Count me on board with those who want to get rid of the Mountain West-Missouri Valley Challenge. It doesn’t really help the reputation of either conference, forces teams to travel cross-country for uninteresting matchups, and, mostly because of the travel, could lead to years where the challenge actually hurts both I understand that the conference wants to get better games on the schedule to improve its chances of receiving multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament, but I think that they need to go back to the drawing board for this one.
• KenPom currently has the MW ranked as the 10^th-best conference overall, only a shade behind the Missouri Valley Conference. Usually, conferences with that sort of ranking would be expected to have multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament, but that’s because conferences with that sort of ranking usually have a couple of really good teams and a bunch of bad ones. Take the 11^th-ranked conference, the WCC, for example. They will get at least two teams into the tournament (Gonzaga and St. Mary’s), with the potential for a third, if someone else wins the conference tournament. The MW, on the other hand, doesn’t have any teams on track to an at-large bid, meaning that only the conference tourney winner will get a bid. On one hand, that the conference is ranked that high with no dominant teams should lead to an exciting year, because that means that there are no awful teams and that there is a lot of parity. However, given that the ultimate goal of a conference is to get as many teams to the postseason as possible, this year is going to be looked at as a failure. Given the way that money is flowing into the Power 5 (or 6, in basketball) and not to anyone else, I think the MW can either have parity or multiple bids, but not both. One would likely be better for more schools, but would limit the prestige of the conference, while the other would be good for the conference’s prestige, but would only be good for a few schools. Not an easy situation to deal with, for sure.