NCAA Basketball: Ranking the Massachusetts Teams

The NCAA basketball regular season kicked off this past weekend and everyone is looking forward to seeing how their teams will do and if they will have a good enough regular season to make it to March Madness. Here is a complete ranking of the seven Massachusetts college basketball teams, and their likelihood of making the NCAA Tournament:

1. Northeastern: The graduation of Scott Eatherton is a definitely blow for this team, however, most of their talent returns from last year. They took Notre Dame down to the wire in March Madness last year as a 14 seed, and that will undoubtedly be a confidence boost for the majority of the rotation that does return. They will look to build off last year’s success and look to jump up a couple seeds and make another shot at an upset.

2. Boston University: The Terriers will compete for the Patriot League title as they return all of their key pieces from last season. It won’t be easy with a few other teams in the league will just as much talent as them, but they will be looking to put themselves in a favorable position to win the conference championship tournament, and get a bid into the NCAA Tournament for the 1st time since 2011.

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3. Massachusetts: The graduated a couple key players from an already thin roster, so they will more than likely take a step back in the A-10. There are just too many good teams in the Atlantic 10 to give the Minutemen and realistic chance at winning the conference. The A-10 has done well in getting at-large bids from multiple teams in the past few years; however, UMass will most likely have a resume that falls short.

4. Holy Cross: The Crusaders have a favorable non-conference schedule to kick the year off which will help them stack up some wins, unfortunately, at at-large bid from the Patriot League is next to impossible.

To make the tournament, they will need to win the conference tournament, something they just don’t have enough talent to do. They will compete with some of the top teams in the conference, but putting it all together and winning it all may be a little out of their reach.

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5. Harvard: They lost too much talent to graduation. It seems unrealistic to expect this team to make the tournament again this year, which is disappointing for a team who made the tournament the past four years and provided us with some excitement with a couple upsets.

The good news is they will bring back most of their team for 2016-17, so any positives that come from this season can be used to build a new streak of March Madness appearances after a one year hiatus.

6. Boston College: They don’t have the athletes to compete with the big dogs in the ACC at this point. This season will be about developing the young players and buying into Jim Christian’s system.

They do play in the best conference in the country, so their only chance of making the tournament is to pile up some non-conference wins and sneak in a couple upsets against the ACC elite in hopes they can build a strong enough resume to impress the selection committee.

7. UMass Lowell: Still in “building” mode for a team new to D1, but they put together a few wins last year and should look to improve a little from last year. They are still at least a year or two away from competing in the America East. They have an extremely young team so they it will be interesting to see how they grow throughout the season.

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