- May 30th, 2018, 11:07 am
#551844
There's a lot of talk about how bad Upstate is in basketball in this thread..and last year was awful. It was also a season that saw their long time head coach retire 5 weeks before the season started and with other turmoil going on in the athletic department (which led to their AD getting fired less than a year after he got the job). Not saying they are a long term great program (their facility will limit them in that respect), but I think judging them on this latest season is possibly a mistake. They had a four year stretch not that long ago (2012-15) where they finished in the Top 200 in KenPom...that may not sound like much, but the only Big South team to accomplish four straight years of Top 200 KenPom finishes in the last 15 years has been Winthrop (they are on a current four year run...and also did it 2005-08). Asheville has never done it (they are on a 3 year stretch now), Coastal never did it...most Big South teams have never even strung together two such seasons like that over the last 15 years (Liberty, Radford, Campbell, Gardner-Webb, Longwood, PC, and you can even throw VMI in there as well). Of the current ASUN teams, FGCU is on a 6 year run of top 200 finishes and Lipscomb also did 6 straight years in the past (2006-11)...
Will Upstate return to that level? Who knows..they have a new coach (and a new AD), and they are coming off a historically bad season, but their program isn't that far removed from a pretty solid run of decent basketball, so they are probably a safer bet to be at least decent than some other schools in the Big South and ASUN (including a transitional D2 school like North Alabama).