The beauty of college basketball is the unpredictability of it all but you can count on these 19 predictions for the 2019-20 season to prove true at season’s end.
College basketball, if nothing else, is bathed in unpredictability. Two years ago as the Virginia Cavaliers entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 1 seed, no one thought that Tony Bennett’s team would wind up being the first top seed to lose to a No. 16 but UMBC made it so. In that same vein, it felt almost too much like a fairy tale that the Wahoos would go on to win the program’s first National Championship one year later, cutting down the nets this past March.
That’s the beauty of it, though. As much as we can evaluate and prognosticate about a college basketball season, the simple fact remains that these are 18-to-22-year old kids playing in a spotlight that many of them have never experienced before and against competition that’s at a much higher level than they’ve ever faced. That leads to immense variance from year to year and within a single season as well.
In that regard, the 2019-20 college basketball season is fascinating to try and project. Perhaps even more so than usual, there are wild cards all around the country. Will the much-hyped Memphis Tigers live up to expectations under Penny Hardaway? Can Virginia defend their title despite losing their three most important pieces? Are the Michigan State Spartans, the preseason No. 1, truly a cut above the rest?
We can try our best to answer these questions before the first tip-off of the 2019-20 season but the truth is that it’s all educated guesses. We’re looking at what we know and projecting what we possibly can and doing our best to go from there. It’s the best we can do when trying to predict what is, by nature, unpredictable.
As that’s the case, let’s have a little fun and get bold with how we predict the 2019-20 college basketball season will play out. These are 19 predictions ranging throughout the country that are as sure to come true as any prediction you’ll find out there.