It’s November, which means it’s that time of the year again. The time when John Calipari deploys another of his loaded lineups that looks like world-beaters. The time when the Duke Blue Devils and the North Carolina Tar Heels try their mighty best to beat the hell out of each other. The time when fans plan what crazy stuff they’ll do in the bleachers to distract the visiting team.
Lastly, this is also the time to see which teams some of the college hoops savants are predicting to succeed in the coming season. Read on to learn their picks to win the power conferences, as well as the biggest prize of them all.
[sc:MultiSportArticles ]Experts’ Picks for 2014-2015 College Basketball Season
CBS Sports
[sc:NCAAB240banner ]These CBS Sports writers sure are excited for the upcoming college basketball season. But before they banged away on their keyboards to write a deluge of articles about college hoops, the seven CBS panelists first laid out their predictions on which teams are going to win each conference.
It’s a pretty long list, but for your convenience we whittled their list down to just the seven power conferences, from which the eventual national champion will most likely come.
Last season, these guys were unanimous in predicting that the Louisville Cardinals would win the American Athletic Conference. However, Shabazz Napier happened. Napier led the Connecticut Huskies all the way to the conference championship game, where they handily beat Louisville. With Louisville defecting to the ACC, the road to the top just got a lot easier for the Huskies and the SMU Mustangs, who each have three votes from the CBS experts.
This season, the Huskies will have to contend without major contributors in Napier and DeAndre Daniels, but will still have considerable talent left led by senior Ryan Boatright. The Mustangs, meanwhile, have a near-intact lineup from last season and should continue to flourish under Larry Brown.
The addition of Louisville to the ACC clearly had little effect on the CBS experts’ predictions for the conference. Like last season, the group fancies the Duke Blue Devils to win the ACC despite Jabari Parker and Rodney Hood’s decisions to leave for the NBA.
It’s easy for Mike Krzyzewski and his team to move on from those key personnel losses, not to mention from their first round exit against the Mercer Bears, largely because they’ve done a great job of recruiting new top tier talents. Duke will begin the season with a pair of highly touted freshmen in Tyus Jones and Jahlil Okafor, the latter projected to be the next No. 1 draft overall in the NBA.
| Conference | Gary Parrish | JMat Norlander | Chip Patterson | Jerry Palm | Jon Rothstein |
Doug Gottlieb |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAC | SMU | UConn | UConn | SMU | SMU | UConn |
| ACC | Duke | Duke | Duke | Duke | Louisville | North Carolina |
| Big East | Villanova | Villanova | Villanova | Villanova | Villanova | Villanova |
| Big Ten | Wisconsin | Wisconsin | Wisconsin | Wisconsin | Wisconsin | Wisconsin |
| Big 12 | Kansas | Kansas | Kansas | Kansas | Kansas | Kansas |
| Pac-12 | Arizona | Arizona | Arizona | Arizona | Arizona | Arizona |
| SEC | Kentucky | Kentucky | Kentucky | Kentucky | Kentucky | Kentucky |
| National Champion | Kentucky | Duke | Kentucky | Kentucky | Arizona | Wisconsin |
Aside from the ACC, the CBS crew also had unanimous picks in the Big East (Villanova), Big Ten (Wisconsin), Big 12 (Kansas), Pac-12 (Arizona), and in the SEC (Kentucky).
Frank Kaminsky can be a one-man wrecking crew on any given night, but there’s more to the Badgers than just Frank the Tank. Sam Dekker, Josh Gasser and Traevon Jackson will be flanking the big man in this new season and they’ll build on their momentum from last March’s unexpected Final Four run.
But let’s not forget about the Kentucky Wildcats. John Calipari may have lost a slew of his prized recruits from last season but not his ability to replace them with another horde of top 100 recruits. The current edition of the Wildcats is stacked to the gills with incoming freshmen Karl Towns Jr., Trey Lyles, Devin Booker, and Tyler Ulis.
Waiting for them at Lexington are the Harrison twins, Aaron and Andrew, Marcus Lee, Willie Cauley-Stein, and Alex Poythress, all of whom were part of last season’s bunch that made it all the way to the National Championship Game. Kentucky is the favorite to win the next NCAA Tournament with a price of +175.
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Bleacher Report
| Conference | Kerry Miller |
|---|---|
| AAC | UConn |
| ACC | North Carolina |
| Big Ten | Wisconsin |
| Big 12 | Kansas |
| Big East | Villanova |
| Pac-12 | Arizona |
| SEC | Kentucky |
Kerry Miller of Bleacher Report, meanwhile, tried to project the teams that will have the best records in their respective conferences at the end of the regular season. Perhaps his most intriguing selections are the North Carolina Tar Heels, whom he believes will finish with a 24-10 record overall and a 13-5 conference slate.
They had a significant loss in talent with James Michael McAdoo electing to pursue his NBA dreams than extend his stay at Chapel Hill and Leslie McDonald finally graduating, but a third-ranked recruitment class (Justin Jackson, Theo Pinson and Joel Berry) is ready to take the floor with Marcus Paige and give the Tar Heels a big lift.
Rant Sports
| Conference | Trevor Lowry |
|---|---|
| AAC | SMU |
| ACC | Duke |
| Big Ten | Wisconsin |
| Big 12 | Texas |
| Big East | Villanova |
| Pac-12 | Arizona |
| SEC | Kentucky |
Rant Sports’ Trevor Lowry isn’t one to shy away from having a bold prediction. Lowry went against the flow and predicted that the Texas Longhorns will win the Big 12. That means Rick Barnes will have to steer Texas past teams like the Iowa State Cyclones and the Kansas Jayhawks, two teams that went to the NCAA Tournament with them last March.
What makes the Longhorns a team to reckon with in the Big 12 is their successful recruitment of Myles Turner, a seven-foot center with a range that stretches up to the three-point area. Turner is ranked No.2 in the ESPN 100. He will be an immediate starter in a Longhorns squad that kept its entire lineup from last season.
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