Digging into the situation, it’s apparent why BPI is so fond of Gregg Marshall’s squad. Wichita State, despite being a 10-seed in the NCAA tournament in 2017, actually finished the season – by BPI’s measure – as the 15th-best team in the country. And it did so as a team that hardly played its seniors at all, so the Shockers are bringing almost everyone relevant back. In BPI’s mind, that’s huge. Returning so many minutes after a strong season is a big reason why BPI considers the Shockers to own the fourth-strongest offense and defense in the country, which helped them edge out the likes of Louisville and Villanova in overall BPI.
Hopefully, it won’t keep him out too long. Looks like he’ll be back the first week of November so he may not be ready for their first couple of easy wins. They do have the Maui Invitational over Thanksgiving Break which is where they’ll need him.
We need him to be there as we need a strong Shockers program to lift everyone else up. UCONN’s injuries last year and subsequent bad play out of conference probably kept us from having a serious chance of making it last year after the season we had.
Being nomads this year has almost nothing to do with our BPI rating. If anything, taking the nomadic nature of our schedule into account would help – counting games away from campus as neutral site games would raise our SOS and therefore our ranking. But they’re probably not doing that.