“The A-10 doesn’t deserve nice things,” another fan wrote around the same time. “Ultimate sicko league.”
“Enough with this ‘A10 is a nationally relevant conference’ crap!” one fan wrote in July. “It’s a zero-bid league. End of story!”
The media took notice of the A-10′s decline, too.
“The Atlantic 10 is broken,” Sam Federman, of MidMajorMadness, wrote last season.
“A-10 basketball battling downward trend of teams in NCAA Tournament,” read a St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline in April.
The A-10 has experienced peaks and valleys throughout its existence, but it slipped into a particularly deep hole in the 2022-23 season when it received only one NCAA tournament bid — the automatic one that goes to the conference tournament champion. That hadn’t happened since 2005. The A-10 had received at least two bids and as many as six (2014) in the last 16 tournaments.
The preseason favorites, Dayton and Saint Louis, failed to live up to expectations. An infusion of veteran coaches — Archie Miller at Rhode Island, Frank Martin at Massachusetts and Fran Dunphy at La Salle — did not produce immediate positive results. The A-10 newcomer, Loyola Chicago, finished last after making the NCAA tournament the previous two seasons out of the Missouri Valley Conference.
In the Ken Pomeroy conference ratings, the A-10 ranked 13th last season. That was its lowest ranking since that same 2004-05 season. It has ranked as high as seventh (2009-10 and 2014-15) and rarely ranked lower than eighth until the last six seasons.
No A-10 team succeeded in building a NCAA tournament resume in non-conference play. Dayton, for example, finished last in the Battle 4 Atlantis with losses to Wisconsin, North Carolina State and Brigham Young. The A-10 was 1-18 in non-conference Quad 1 games.
As the start of the 2024 A-10 season looms, however, there is a more positive vibe around the league and the hope that the one-bid season was an aberration and not a trend.
“I think it was hopefully a blip in the screen,” A-10 Commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade said in October. “With anything, there are high watermarks and low watermarks. You really look at what has the historical average been. Last year, we got hit with a lot of unusual injuries in untimely fashion. But looking at the teams rolling into the start of the season right now, I think our non-conference schedules are good and coaches feel good about their rosters for the most part. They feel positive that they’ve weathered the transfer-portal chaos that you have to get through. There seems to be a general optimism, and I think when you can feel that directly from your coaches, that’s always a good sign. So I think the league is going to be strong. I think we’re going to be competitive. We need to get out there and have a good non-conference showing, and then before we know it, we’ll be in the conference play in January.”
Dayton Athletic Director Neil Sullivan also talked about the direction of the conference before the season.
“I tend to focus on our program,” Sullivan said. “I try not to tell anyone else how to do their job. But I’ll just say we collectively need to do all the things that impact winning, and that’s recruiting at a high level and being able to retain coaches. We’ve had quite a bit of turnover in coaches the last four or five years as a league. Scheduling is becoming increasingly difficult as conferences expand and move to more games. You have to fight for every square inch of space that you have, and everything matters: how your games are presented; how they’re attended; how they look on TV; how you do recruiting visits, how you compete in NIL. There’s no magic formula. I think the marketplace of college basketball is evolving at a historically rapid pace. We have extreme disruption in the system, and all of us need to adapt to that today — not tomorrow. Everyone’s got to adapt to it today with a sense of urgency and a sense of pace.”
A-10 play starts Wednesday with seven games. The Dayton Flyers, the preseason favorite for the second straight season, play at Davidson at 7 p.m. It’s the first of 18 league games for the Flyers, who seek their first regular-season championship since 2020 after tying for second place the last two seasons.
Dayton’s 10-2 performance in non-conference play helped boost the A-10′s profile in the Pomeroy ratings. The Flyers beat teams from the Southeastern Conference (LSU), Big East (Saint John’s), American Athletic Conference (Southern Methodist) and Big 12 (Cincinnati), rising to No. 25 in the NCAA Evaluation Tool as of Dec. 30.
Saint Joseph’s (10-3) has also done its part. Victories against Villanova, Temple and Princeton put the Hawks on track to record their first winning season since 2016.
Defending champion Virginia Commonwealth got off to a disappointing start but is now 8-5. It got a boost by the NCAA’s decision to allowing players who have transferred more than once to play the rest of the season. That was good news for guard Joe Bamisile, who averaged 16.5 points in his only season in the A-10 with George Washington two years ago. He would have had to sit out the season but now can play.
Dayton and Saint Joseph’s have the best chances to earn at-large berths into the NCAA tournamen. They were the only A-10 teams to rank in the top 60 of the NET and the only teams with Quad 1 victories.
The A-10′s ability to return to its status as a multiple-bid league was one of the subjects visited at A-10 Media Day in October.
Here’s what several A-10 coaches had to say when they were asked if they were optimistic about the direction of the conference:
Anthony Grant, Dayton: “When you look at the history of the A-10 and the quality of the basketball that’s played in the A-10, I’m very optimistic. I think obviously a lot of what happens in the A-10 is decided early in November and December when people form opinions. We’ve got to do a great job ourselves No. 1 at Dayton of making sure we do our job in non-conference. I think every other team understands that. But I think once we get into conference play, I’d put our league up against anybody. I think you’ve got great coaches and a lot of great players in this league.”
Mark Schmidt, St. Bonaventure: “We have the one of the best conferences in the country. Last year was last year. I’ve been in the league when we’ve had five teams (in the NCAA tournament). We have a great league from top to bottom. Dayton is a top-25 team. They’ve got one of the best players in the country (DaRon Holmes II). We have a lot of depth. So we’re really looking forward to getting two, three or four teams (into the tournament). Last year, we didn’t do a good job in the non-conference from top to bottom. We don’t have a lot of opportunities just because of how all this has played out now with the power fives playing 20 games. But when we get our chances, we’ve got to cash in. Last year, we didn’t. I think we have the talent in this league to be able to do that. That’s our job. I think we can do it.”
Chris Caputo, George Washington: “I’ve coached a long time. The A-10 has unbelievable coaches. They have unbelievable programs. They put a lot of money into the into their programs. We have a national coach of the year in Anthony Grant. Frank Martin’s gone to the Final Four. Archie Miller. I’m not even talking about some of the younger coaches. They’re smarter than all of us. They are unbelievable. That being said, the deck is stacked. There’s about four to six at-large bids for mid-major teams like us. So the key to it is, from the bottom to the top, we all have to win in November and December. If we could get a lot of top-75 type teams throughout our league, now we have more Quad 1 and Quad 2 opportunities. But it certainly doesn’t appear like we’ll ever be getting six or seven teams out of the league, which in some ways is unfair because a road win in the Atlantic 10 is just as hard as a road win in the Big Ten. And 7-10 and and 10-8 in the Big Ten is getting you into the NCAA Tournament, and 13-5 is not getting you into the NCAA Tournament in our league. I don’t think a lot of those high-major teams want to play A-10 teams in the NCAA Tournament. Unfortunately, last year’s VCU and Saint Mary’s (two mid-majors) played (in the first round), which to me — I don’t want to be critical — but really that’s a cardinal sin.”
Chris Mooney, Richmond: “I’m optimistic because I know the depth of the talent of coaching in this conference and commitment of each of the school in this conference. The part that concerns me a little bit is the scheduling piece. As I look around, it just doesn’t seem that we’re getting quite as many cracks (at the top teams) in our non-conference schedule as maybe we used to. At the end of the year, a lot of it’s based on who you’ve been able to play and beat, and if you hadn’t had those opportunities, it’s hard to build a resume that resonates like some of the previous year’s resumes. I know the talent, I know the ability and the commitment of the programs is a at really high level, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we have four or five bids as we have in the past.”
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