Conference strength is cyclical.
Take the SEC for instance. The league hasn’t had fewer than six of its 14 members reach the NCAA Tournament since 2018. The SEC has averaged seven bids the last five tournaments, sending eight teams dancing in 2018 and in 2023.
From 2009-2017, the SEC never had more than five teams earn a bid. In four of those nine seasons, just three SEC teams went dancing.
To put that into context, 35 SEC teams earned a bid in the nine tournaments from 2009-2017. The same number of teams reached the dance in the five tournaments from 2018-2023.
The Atlantic 10 has been on the opposite side of that cycle. From 2012-2018, the conference averaged four bids to the NCAA Tournament, with the peak coming in 2014, when six teams heard their name called on Selection Sunday. That’s to say nothing of the six top-two seeds the league received in the NIT during that same stretch.
That was not the case the last five years. The situation reached a low point last season when just one bid went to the Atlantic 10: VCU’s automatic bid for winning the league tournament.
And I’m here to argue that the conference is getting ready to come out on the other side.
It’s inarguable that the Atlantic 10 is vastly improved over what it was a season ago. Look no further than the simple fact that Dayton and St. Joe’s are on every bracketology projection as of today. The Flyers are in the field. The Hawks are one of the first four or next four out. There is a real chance that this is a three-bid league once again in 2024.
But the growth isn’t just those two programs.
Overall, the Atlantic 10 has seen a significant jump in the performance of the league as a whole in nonconference play. Their winning percentage in all Division I games is up from 59 percent to 67 percent. There are eight teams in the top 100 of the NET, as opposed to just two at this time last season. The league is eighth in KenPom’s conference rankings after finishing 13th last season. Every team in the league is at .500 or better overall — the first time that’s happened after nonconference play ended since 2014, the year six teams made it.
Perhaps most importantly, the league has five Quad 1 wins as of today. This time last year, it had precisely zero.
Part of that is the result of smart scheduling. Part of that is the result of older teams returning key pieces. But there’s more to it than that.
The conference has invested in the coaching ranks. Frank Martin, Archie Miller and Fran Dunphy are proven veterans in their second season in the league. Chris Caputo and Tony Skinn are young coaches who understand the league and have both had success in the DC area — Caputo as a coach and Skinn as a player. Anthony Grant and Mark Schmidt are stalwarts who will be impactful at their institutions until the day they decide they’re ready to live out their days on a beach somewhere.
Maybe the best sign of where the league stands is that this growth has happened while two of the best programs in the conference (VCU and Saint Louis) work through some early-season issues, and while one of the preseason favorites (Fordham) struggles to replace its lost talent.
The arrow is pointing up on the A-10 as a whole, and that is a good thing for college basketball.