I upset a few Saint Louis fans yesterday. In the context of a post explaining why I thought Josh Schertz should have waited for a power conference opening—specifically, the Indiana job—rather than take a more medium step upwards, from Indiana State to SLU, I wrote this of the SLU position: “It isn’t a good job.” Amazingly, that seemed to upset people less than this part: “If you compared all the ceilings of all the Atlantic 10 programs, Saint Louis’s would be in the bottom half.”
To be clear, of the few SLU fans who responded, most were fair or at least good-humored. We aren’t anti-SLU, we weren’t anti-SLU before yesterday, and our impressions have not been clouded by a good little online spat. There were some ridiculous things said, but sports fandom is a great place to be ridiculous. One Twitter account crossed some lines, but we’re always prepared for that to happen when we long on. Unfortunately, that is Twitter. We have a lot of respect towards Josh Schertz. We have mildly positive feelings towards SLU, which is our default with most college athletic programs and their fans.
Also, this was a really small thing. It was unusually big for me, because I am not exactly a prominent blogger, but it was very small. We’re writing about it today because I found the ceiling question interesting, not because it was World War III online or anything. The fact this little line provoked any reaction at all is a testament to SLU fans and A-10 fans. You guys care, and we love that. The fact that we’re spending the morning of the Final Four discussing where SLU’s ceiling stands relative to the rest of the A-10 is awesome. I hope you’re having as much fun as I am. I’m worried you’re not having as much fun as I am.
Whether SLU is a good job or not depends on where, subjectively, you draw the line. My opinion is that it’s possibly among the top 100 jobs in Division I, as I said yesterday. Upon reviewing all the things we’re about to review below, I stand by that. I still don’t know if it’s a top-100 job. I have not ranked every D-I job, and I do not presently intend to try.
Whether SLU is a good job for Josh Schertz, right now, is a different question.
My opinion remains that Schertz’s career would have been better-served by another year in Terre Haute, athletic director turnover and all, for the reasons I outlined yesterday: I think his success would have been greater next year at Indiana State than at SLU. Even though the risk was high of losing some of that starting lineup to the transfer portal, a down-year MVC offered an easy path to continued prominence throughout the season. It’s hard to win in a coach’s first year at a school, no matter what that school is. The A-10 is more competitive than the MVC. There’s none of the breathing room next year’s MVC would have provided. Next year should be a big step forward for the Billiken program, but the 2024–25 product at Indiana State would have probably been better, thanks to the advantages continuity provides.
With the Indiana job specifically looking so likely to open next year, and with so many other quality potential candidates locked up this cycle, that one additional Indiana State year felt, to me, like a good opportunity for Schertz. Succeed again, and the Indiana job will probably be yours. If it doesn’t open? There will be another open role of comparable stature to SLU. At SLU, the downside seems bigger. One mediocre year could move Schertz from being the hot rising coaching name to a hot rising coaching name. An opportunity could be missed. Get stuck in the quagmire that is the A-10—a highly competitive league within itself whose upper reaches are at a very inconvenient place when it comes to national perception—and the biggest jobs might not open up at all, or at least not without another stop after SLU.
Clearly, Schertz sees the picture differently, and I should not and do not begrudge him that. I wish the guy the best of luck. He’s a phenomenal coach, and I expect he’ll push SLU to its ceiling in his three or four or however many years he spends in the role. I have no tie to Indiana State or anyone in the MVC, nor do I have a tie to SLU or anyone in the A-10. I am but an interested blogger.
That remains the best I can offer on my opinion of whether or not SLU is a “good” job. As for where its ceiling stands relative to the rest of the Atlantic 10…
I was admittedly hasty with that sentence. I’m embarrassed I didn’t dig deeper before making that kind of claim. My first mistake was forgetting the A-10 is at 15 teams now, even though I know the 15 teams. From there, my thought process went like this:
- “Well, Dayton and Davidson and Saint Joe’s and Loyola have all had great teams in my college basketball viewing life. Legitimate no-doubt top-ten stuff. I know UMass had one right around the time I was born. Those are high ceilings.”
- “VCU made that Final Four run and continues to always seem to occupy the upper end of the A-10, even as it churns through coaches. That’s a high ceiling.”
- “That’s already six. George Mason hasn’t been as good as VCU since the Final Four run, but they’re a big school right next to D.C., and the run did happen, and they were good for a little while after it. Plus, St. Bonaventure and George Washington and Rhode Island have all had good teams in the recent past. Teams comparable to SLU’s good teams. I don’t know that SLU’s far enough ahead of that pack for who this seventh team is to matter.”
Then, I checked SLU’s NCAA Tournament history to make sure I wasn’t missing any especially high seed or deep run from the 80’s or 90’s, and after recoiling in shock at just how little NCAA Tournament history SLU has, I moved on with my proofread/edit.
This was, again, hasty. What I wish I’d double-checked was the kenpom history. I looked at it a few days ago, but the wrong end-of-season peak—that 2013 team, which finished 19th-best in the country—was what stuck in my mind. I assigned that number, in my head, to 2012’s even better SLU team. Was 2012’s as good as the best offered by Dayton, Davidson, Saint Joe’s, Loyola, or UMass since the tournament’s expansion in the 80’s marked the beginning of modern college basketball? No. But that performance probably signifies a top-half ceiling.
So, an apology. If I’d done a reasonable level of due diligence, I would have changed the sentence. I would have said, “If you compared all the ceilings of all the Atlantic 10 programs, Saint Louis’s wouldn’t be in the top five.” Would that have gone over better? I don’t know. Was it correct? We’re about to look into that. Either way, we’re in this now. It’s you and me, buddy. Let’s look at where SLU’s ceiling lies.
The arguments in favor of SLU’s ceiling seem to go as follows:
- But we were ranked in the top ten that one time!
- But we finished in the top four in the A-10 four years in a row!
- But reporters said SLU is a top mid-major job!
- You don’t know the A-10!
- Indiana State is a bad job!
- Actually, SLU has a really big budget for men’s basketball.
- Fuck you, man!
The first two of those belong on banners. Congratulations to all involved. I’m sorry I missed the ceremony. The third one is silly. Reporters in college sports say a lot of vague, positive things. They think this helps get them access. They might be right. If I had a dollar for every job a lot of reporters would call a top mid-major job, I might have fifty bucks.
The fourth one is intriguing, but I’d counter that not knowing the A-10 might be to my advantage when it comes to evaluating it. For example: Not being part of a whole lot of A-10 discussions (thank goodness for that, if this is how they go), I haven’t been subject to hearing SLU fans bellow, “BUT IT’S A GOOD JOB,” every time anybody else takes a breath. I lack some contextual knowledge, but I’m capable of more objectivity than those battered over the head with conventional wisdom.
The fifth one is a deflection, but hell, you’ve made it this far, so I’m going to say that Indiana State’s ceiling (*giggles*) is lower than SLU’s. I’m also, however, going to say that Indiana State has the capacity to rise quickly. Is it a good job? No! Top 150, maybe. But you could do worse than being the fifth wheel in the state that loves basketball more than any other.
The sixth one is great. It’s a valuable contribution to this conversation. I appreciate the Twitter account West Pine Bills for bringing it up, as I hopefully made clear at the time they confronted me with it. I did go fact-checking, and per the work of Jim Root in 2022, SLU’s basketball budget was roughly equivalent to those of both Dayton and VCU, ahead of the rest of the A-10. It was even bigger than those of two Big East schools, Butler and DePaul. SLU’s budget was, at that time, around the 75th-largest in Division I. That is a data point which points to both SLU being a top-100 job and SLU having one of the highest ceilings in the A-10. It is not the only data point, but it is a favorable data point for SLU. We’ll talk more about it below.
The seventh one is also great. I am spending my Friday night preparing a detailed blogpost comparing the ceilings of college basketball programs within the nation’s eighth-best conference, one that is only eighth because we exterminated the Pac-12. Fuck me, man.
There are, I offer, two general ways to evaluate a college basketball program’s ceiling. The first is to look for their proven ceiling: What they’ve shown. The second is to speculate on their hypothetical ceiling: What they can do.
The nice thing about proven ceiling is that it’s measurable, especially within the kenpom era. How good was a team? What did they accomplish? These are things to which we have good answers. We can and will quarrel about what metrics to measure, but we’re at least dealing with things that have happened.
The bad thing about proven ceiling is that time moves on. Success in 1992 doesn’t mean as much regarding current ceiling as success in 2018. The world is always changing, and the twin dawn of NIL and unlimited transferring has changed this world very quickly. For the sake of setting a boundary on what matters and what doesn’t, I’m only considering results from the 1989–90 season onwards. That’s somewhat arbitrary, but the tournament had been at 64 teams for a few years, the three-point line had been around a similar amount of time, and Rick Pitino had just taken the Kentucky job, something I’d argue is a nice milestone when referencing the careers of college basketball’s current elder statesmen. There’s some cohesion within college basketball from 1990 through today.
With the imperfection of this exercise established, let’s look at five different proxies for proven ceiling. We will not be considering AP Poll ranking. This is a dumb blogpost, but consulting AP Poll peaks is a dumb too dumb. AP voters aren’t ranking how good teams are. They aren’t even ranking how good they think teams are. The AP Poll is some inconsistent combination of how good teams are, how accomplished teams are, and how long it’s been since teams have lost. It is not a measurement. It is a good idea that has been executed in nauseatingly stupid fashion.
First, how good the current A-10 programs’ best-ranked teams have finished in the kenpom era. This might sometimes differ from each A-10 program’s best-rated team, but that exercise was too similar to justify the added work, so if you need that, my apologies, but you will have to do it yourself.
| Team | Year | Rank | Rating |
| Saint Joseph’s | 2004 | 3 | 27.66 |
| Dayton | 2020 | 4 | 24.93 |
| Loyola Chicago | 2021 | 10 | 24.32 |
| Davidson | 2008 | 11 | 23.61 |
| Saint Louis | 2012 | 14 | 21.2 |
| VCU | 2013 | 18 | 20.28 |
| Rhode Island | 1997 | 20 | 19.36 |
| George Mason | 2006 | 22 | 18.16 |
| UMass | 1998 | 28 | 16.32 |
| St. Bonaventure | 2021 | 32 | 19.04 |
| Richmond | 2004 | 38 | 15.07 |
| George Washington | 2005 | 38 | 14.41 |
| La Salle | 2013 | 50 | 13.89 |
| Duquesne | 2011 | 55 | 13.36 |
| Fordham | 2006 | 127 | 4.12 |
This one’s pretty good for SLU! Top half. Because of when the kenpom era starts (1996–97), it cuts out the early and mid-90’s, helpfully eliminating those five good UMass teams, but not bad, Billikens. Not bad. I would argue that this is the best measurement of proven ceiling if you’re going to rely on only one. It is incomplete, but it’s a pretty literal measurement of ceiling. The fact it has SLU fifth or sixth in A-10 ceiling is good for the argument that SLU is a top-half A-10 ceiling.
Second, how good each A-10 program’s best NCAA Tournament seed has been since our semi-arbitrary cutline of 1990:
| Team | Year | Seed |
| Saint Joseph’s | 2004 | 1 |
| UMass | 1996 | 1 |
| Dayton | 2020 | 1* |
| Saint Louis | 2013 | 4 |
| La Salle | 1990 | 4 |
| VCU | 2014 | 5 |
| Rhode Island | 2018 | 7 |
| Richmond | 2010 | 7 |
| Loyola Chicago | 2021 | 8 |
| George Mason | 2011 | 8 |
| George Washington | 2006 | 8 |
| St. Bonaventure | 2021 | 9 |
| Davidson | 2015** | 10 |
| Duquesne | 2024 | 11 |
| Fordham | 1992 | 14 |
*We’re going with the customary practice of using the final Bracket Matrix for 2020.
**We’re only listing one year when a program received the same best seed multiple times.
The idea here is that the job of a college basketball team in the regular season and conference tournament is to convince the committee of its worth. Being good is good, but it can sometimes be advantageous to do well at things the committee values, even at the expense of actually being good. Dumb, I know. But I’m not here to defend college basketball’s chosen postseason format. Just measurin’ ceilings, folks.
This one’s also pretty good for SLU. Drawing the line where we draw it includes La Salle’s 1990 season but cuts out VCU’s 1985 season, for those wondering, but the bottom line is that SLU is in the top half.
Third, how many NCAA Tournament bids each A-10 team has received since 1990:
| Team | Bids |
| VCU | 14 |
| Dayton | 10 |
| Davidson | 10 |
| George Washington | 9 |
| Saint Louis | 8 |
| UMass | 8 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 7 |
| Richmond | 7 |
| Rhode Island | 6 |
| George Mason | 5 |
| St. Bonaventure | 4 |
| La Salle | 3 |
| Loyola Chicago | 3 |
| Duquesne | 1 |
| Fordham | 1 |
I don’t like this one. This is more about consistency than ceiling, and it introduces a lot of automatic bid noise. But, being able to consistently perform at a high level proves some capability. With regard to SLU, it doesn’t change a lot. They’re in the top half again, but they’re again outside the upper echelon.
Fourth, how many NCAA Tournament bids and NIT bids each A-10 team has received since 1990, with NIT bids counted as half in the combined column:
| Team | NCAAT Bids | NIT Bids | Combined (NIT = 0.5) |
| VCU | 14 | 4 | 16.0 |
| Dayton | 10 | 10 | 15.0 |
| Davidson | 10 | 8 | 14.0 |
| George Washington | 9 | 6 | 12.0 |
| UMass | 8 | 7 | 11.5 |
| Saint Louis | 8 | 6 | 11.0 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 7 | 8 | 11.0 |
| Richmond | 7 | 8 | 11.0 |
| Rhode Island | 6 | 8 | 10.0 |
| St. Bonaventure | 4 | 6 | 7.0 |
| George Mason | 5 | 3 | 6.5 |
| La Salle | 3 | 2 | 4.0 |
| Loyola Chicago | 3 | 1 | 3.5 |
| Duquesne | 1 | 2 | 2.0 |
| Fordham | 1 | 2 | 2.0 |
This is maybe a better way to get at what the third was trying to evaluate, but it’s still more about consistency than the best a program is capable of producing. Regardless, for SLU, we continue to see a similar result.
Fifth, how many Sweet Sixteens and Final Fours each program has made since 1990:
| Team | Sweet 16’s | Final Fours |
| UMass | 3 | 1 |
| Loyola Chicago | 2 | 1 |
| VCU | 1 | 1 |
| George Mason | 1 | 1 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 2 | 0 |
| Dayton | 1 | 0 |
| Davidson | 1 | 0 |
| George Washington | 1 | 0 |
| Richmond | 1 | 0 |
| Rhode Island | 1 | 0 |
| La Salle | 1 | 0 |
| Saint Louis | 0 | 0 |
| St. Bonaventure | 0 | 0 |
| Duquesne | 0 | 0 |
| Fordham | 0 | 0 |
In small samples, I loathe using the NCAA Tournament as a referendum on coaches and programs, as regular readers know well. It’s too random to tell you much. At the same time, though, championships are the point of the sport, and getting close to championships is a good thing. Over time, this is what counts. It’s not perfectly controllable, but it’s what ultimately matters to the largest share of fans.
Obviously, this reflects very poorly on SLU’s ceiling, for whatever that reflection is worth. And for those wondering about the cutoff: Two current A-10 teams made the Sweet 16 in 1988.
Turning to hypothetical ceiling:
The nice thing about hypothetical ceiling is that it’s what we really want to know. It’s the thing we’re trying to get an answer about. How high’s the ceiling? That’s a hypothetical question.
The bad thing about hypothetical ceiling is that it’s really, really subjective.
With the imperfection of this exercise established, let’s look at five different proxies for hypothetical ceiling.
First, those budget numbers Jim Root shared in 2022. In this table, I’ve normalized them to Fordham. Each unit is one Fordham men’s basketball budget. This feels useful and also a little silly. Dayton basketball costs 1.7 Fordhams. See? Useful! And also a little silly. (For reference, Fordham’s budget was $3.57M in 2021).
| School | Budget (Fordhams) |
| Dayton | 1.7 |
| VCU | 1.6 |
| Saint Louis | 1.6 |
| Richmond | 1.2 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 1.2 |
| Duquesne | 1.1 |
| Loyola Chicago | 1.1 |
| George Mason | 1.0 |
| Rhode Island | 1.0 |
| Fordham | 1.0 |
| George Washington | 0.9 |
| Davidson | 0.9 |
| St. Bonaventure | 0.8 |
| UMass | 0.8 |
| La Salle | 0.7 |
I understand the allure of budget as a proxy for ceiling. I think it’s good. I think it’s imperfect, but I think it’s good.
A very basic economic production function is Y = AK, in which Y is output, A is productivity, and K is capital. It’s not out of line to think about college basketball through this lens. The budget is the capital. Productivity is mostly the ability of the coach to turn resources into success. The output is the success of a program.
Problems with this:
- These budgets don’t account for NIL spending.
- These budgets are only for one moment in time. Texas’s was effectively tied for the biggest in the country, something I believe was tied to the construction of the Moody Center. Loyola wasn’t yet receiving A-10 revenue at the time of this budget being set.
- Going off that last point, these budgets are subject to change. In fact, part of “productivity” in college basketball is the coach, athletic director, development office, and booster organizers successfully soliciting bigger donations from more boosters. Productivity and capital aren’t perfectly separate in college hoops. Y = AK is not perfect here.
- Going off that last point, other parts of productivity are separated from the coach. Some of them are embedded in the school. How easy does the SID make the coach’s life? What amount of travel does the team have to undergo? How’s the athletic director’s management style? How easy is it to get the admissions office to accept transfers from North Carolina? How easy is it to get the admissions office to accept transfers from a junior college? How big is the program’s home court advantage, accounting for altitude, crowd size, student proclivity to imbibe alcohol, conference schedule as it pertains to tip times, conference schedule as it pertains to days of the week involving games of different magnitudes, and referee priority within whichever consortium to which said conference belongs? Some of these can be changed with some ease. Others are limited. The limited ones affect a program’s ceiling.
Budget, then, tells a good story when it comes to hypothetical ceiling, but it doesn’t tell a complete story.
Still, it’s a great indicator for SLU, and it’s a testament to the school’s commitment to men’s basketball. We know the salary numbers for both Travis Ford (upwards of $2M/year) and now Josh Schertz (reportedly $2M/year) are around the top of the A-10 if not atop the A-10 outright. Those also get close to low-end Big East salaries (I’m struggling to find a reported number for Thad Matta, but it appears the other ten are all past $2M/year).
Second, undergraduate enrollment. How many people are walking around with a sentimental attachment to this school, diplomas in their closets, and dollars in their pockets? I’m sourcing from Wikipedia on this, so some numbers may be a few years old.
| School | Undergraduate Enrollment (Thousands) |
| George Mason | 27.2 |
| UMass | 22.9 |
| VCU | 21.7 |
| Rhode Island | 14.7 |
| Loyola Chicago | 12.2 |
| George Washington | 11.5 |
| Fordham | 9.9 |
| Saint Louis | 8.5 |
| Dayton | 8.3 |
| Duquesne | 6.1 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 5.1 |
| La Salle | 3.9 |
| Richmond | 3.2 |
| Davidson | 2.0 |
| St. Bonaventure | 1.9 |
This isn’t as good as budget for our purposes, but it gets at the malleability of budget. Bigger schools have an advantage when it comes to soliciting both NIL contributions and formal donations. The money that’s out there differs on a per-alum basis, and a lot of it might be untapped, but enrollment points in the direction of how much is there. Think of this like oil reserves. Sometimes they’re easy to access, sometimes they’re hard, but it helps output if you’ve got a lot.
No surprises here for SLU. They’re in the middle of the pack in terms of enrollment.
Third, endowment. These again come from Wikipedia, so again they may be slightly out of date, and I again did not double check the source. They should get us in the ballpark, though. I’ve normalized them to units of La Salles.
| School | Endowment (La Salles) |
| Richmond | 38.8 |
| VCU | 34.0 |
| George Washington | 32.5 |
| Saint Louis | 17.5 |
| Davidson | 16.3 |
| Loyola Chicago | 13.4 |
| Fordham | 12.2 |
| Dayton | 9.6 |
| UMass | 6.3 |
| Duquesne | 5.9 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 5.8 |
| Rhode Island | 2.5 |
| George Mason | 2.4 |
| St. Bonaventure | 1.2 |
| La Salle | 1.0 |
Total endowment isn’t perfectly proportional to athletic department bankroll, but the correlation exists, and it’s another one of these measures of how much resource is out there, tapped or untapped. Are GW’s donors less inclined to NIL activity than Dayton’s? I would imagine that answer is yes. Still, the resources are there for a school like GW, or for the Ivies, up the road. If Harvard ever made a good enough sales pitch, their field hockey team could have so many sleep deprivation chambers. I am only half-joking.
SLU is in the second tier of the A-10 in endowment, right there with Davidson.
Fourth, recruiting territory. A sampling, ordered very subjectively:
| Team | Primary Recruiting Metro | Metro Population (Millions) | Proximity |
| Loyola Chicago | Chicago | 9.3 | There |
| George Washington | Washington | 6.3 | There |
| George Mason | Washington | 6.3 | 25 minutes |
| Saint Joseph’s | Philadelphia | 6.2 | There |
| La Salle | Philadelphia | 6.2 | 5 minutes |
| Saint Louis | St. Louis | 2.8 | There |
| UMass | Boston | 4.9 | 1.25 hours? |
| Fordham | New York | 19.5 | There |
| Davidson | Charlotte | 2.8 | 30 minutes |
| Duquesne | Pittsburgh | 2.4 | There |
| Dayton | Cincinnati? | 2.3 | 45 minutes |
| Richmond | Richmond | 1.3 | There |
| VCU | Richmond | 1.3 | There |
| Rhode Island | Providence | 1.7 | 30 minutes |
| St. Bonaventure | Buffalo | 1.2 | One hour? |
This is the most subjective thing in this blog post, but allow me to explain:
To begin, I think this is worthwhile, even though yes I know recruits from Georgia can go play at Rutgers. We were very tuned into the NIT Championship, of course—a level of basketball not far off that of the two best A-10 teams in a given year—and Seton Hall had three starters from the New York City metro while Indiana State had two from Indiana and two more from Chicago. Location does matter. How much it matters is up for debate, but it matters to some degree.
To continue, I tried to order these based on the sheer population in the relevant metropolitan area, with a few exceptions. I did this because while the average recruit is better or worse depending on the area, the size gaps are mostly so big here that the numbers game aspect of producing good basketball players favors bigger cities.
Those exceptions? The biggest exception is New York, for Fordham. New York is too full of college basketball programs of similar stature to Fordham for Fordham to be reasonably expected to have a recruiting advantage in its own city. Loyola’s competition in Chicago—Northwestern, DePaul, UIC, Chicago State—is nowhere near that which Fordham faces from Seton Hall, St. John’s, and other local schools. I put SLU ahead of UMass, because I can see an argument for it and wanted to err on the side of being too kind to SLU with this one. I also tried to be fair in evaluating the impact of distance, but again: This is really subjective.
Still, for SLU, the recruiting territory is merely fine. It’s not the advantage it is for Loyola, Saint Joe’s, or even George Mason, since we’re in the realm of hypothetical ceiling.
Fifth, attendance. We’re looking at attendance per game, we’re using NCAA data, and we’re looking through the lens of the current arena’s capacity (capacity is sourced from Wikipedia, with the exception of George Mason—thanks to the fan who pointed us towards the GMU website for that one). There are a number of issues with this approach: Arena expansions aren’t considered, these are just two data points, etc. In the interests of time, though, this is what we did, and with SLU in particular, overall attendance has held roughly steady over the last decade up until this season’s dropoff.
| Team | 2013 Average | 2023 Average | % Full, Average | Current Arena Capacity |
| Dayton | 12,438 | 13,407 | 96.4% | 13,409 |
| VCU | 7,693 | 7,303 | 98.2% | 7,637 |
| Saint Louis | 7,673 | 7,056 | 69.5% | 10,600 |
| Richmond | 5,960 | 6,285 | 85.0% | 7,201 |
| Rhode Island | 4,291 | 5,158 | 61.7% | 7,657 |
| UMass | 5,255 | 3,580 | 46.5% | 9,493 |
| George Mason | 4,562 | 3,584 | 51.8% | 7,860 |
| St. Bonaventure | 3,987 | 3,764 | 70.7% | 5,480 |
| Davidson | 3,941 | 3,356 | 69.9% | 5,223 |
| Saint Joseph’s | 4,292 | 1,504 | 69.0% | 4,200 |
| Loyola Chicago | 2,278 | 3,373 | 63.0% | 4,486 |
| Duquesne | 3,400 | 2,178 | 79.7% | 3,500 |
| La Salle | 2,910 | 1,481 | 64.6% | 3,400 |
| George Washington | 2,554 | 1,608 | 41.6% | 5,000 |
| Fordham | 2,225 | 1,135 | 52.5% | 3,200 |
This is somewhat circular with performance, but it’s also a gauge of fan engagement, and that’s a valuable thing. It’s a resource in its own right (home-court advantage, general culture), but it’s also a means to acquiring more of the financial resource we all agree is valuable in college hoops.
SLU does well in the raw attendance numbers here, but they aren’t filling up Chaifetz Arena.
We wanted to look at how these schools are growing, as well, but we didn’t have the time for what would have been a pretty manual dive into old enrollment numbers. It doesn’t seem SLU is a big outlier on that front. SLU is doing well. Some A-10 schools are doing a little better. Some are doing a bit worse.
**
What did we learn? Again, I think the biggest takeaway here is that A-10 fans love the A-10. You’re still reading. I’m still writing. Holy shit. But if I were to rank ceilings, having looked at all this, I’d categorize them in this way, which I’m sure will upset absolutely no one, especially with the Loyola piece:
- High proven ceiling, no red flags: Dayton, VCU
- High proven ceiling, bullish indicators: Loyola Chicago
- The resources are there, the school seems committed: Richmond, Saint Louis, Davidson
- The resources are questionable, but there’s definitely power and some commitment: UMass, Saint Joe’s, George Mason
- The resources exist but aren’t currently being mined: George Washington, Fordham
- LeBron James is showing an interest: Duquesne
- The size is working for it, and there’s a basketball culture in the area: Rhode Island
- There is commitment, but all success is somewhat astonishing: St. Bonaventure
- I’m so sorry, La Salle: La Salle
You win, SLU. You have a top-half A-10 ceiling. I’d say that means you’re a top-half A-10 job. I was wrong. My haste was indeed misleading. I am sorry. Some of your fans have a funny combination of 1) a wildly inflated view of SLU’s potential and 2) a very low bar for success, and it’s very hard to see how you’d be a top-three A-10 job, but you’re somewhere in the vicinity of top-five. Hang the banner.
I still don’t know if you’re top-100 nationally, though. The budget only gets you so far. (*scurries away and deletes Twitter app from phone*)
