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Candid Coaches: Who will be the best college basketball team this season? – CBS Sports
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CBS Sports college basketball insiders Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander spent a month surveying 100-plus Division I men’s basketball coaches for our annual Candid Coaches series. They polled across the sport’s landscape: some of the biggest names in college basketball, but also small-school assistants in low-major leagues. Coaches agreed to share unfiltered opinions in exchange for anonymity. We asked them 10 questions, and will post the results over a three-week span.
I posted Version 1.0 of the CBS Sports preseason Top 25 And 1 college basketball rankings immediately after the title game of the 2023 NCAA Tournament and have updated it a total of 19 times over the past five months. In my head, it’s now clear that Kansas should be No. 1 thanks to the presence of Hall of Fame coach Bill Self and the addition of former All-American Hunter Dickinson via the transfer portal.
KU is loaded.
For what it’s worth, the Jayhawks (+350) are the favorites in the betting markets to win the 2024 NCAA Tournament — but what do college coaches think? With this in mind, we decided to wrap our annual Candid Coaches series by asking roughly 100 college basketball coaches the following question:
As you can see from the breakdown of votes, the coaches we polled largely agree with the betting markets and the Top 25 And 1. The coaches also made Kansas their de facto favorite to win the 2024 NCAA Tournament — although more than half who answered picked somebody other than the Jayhawks.
Purdue got votes.
Duke got votes.
In all, 10 different schools got votes — but 45.4% of the vote did go to Kansas with nobody else getting more than 17.9%. In other words, the Jayhawks got more than twice as many votes as anybody else, presumably because they really do check every box you need to check to have a reasonable chance to win a national championship.
Here’s KU’s probable starting lineup:
As I’ve explained before, that’s a lineup with size, shooting and experience — one so strong that five-star high school prospects Elmarko Jackson and Arterio Morris will likely begin games on the bench. Harris is arguably the country’s best run-the-team point guard. Timberlake shot above 41% from 3-point range on 6.7 attempts per game last season. McCullar is a double-digit scorer and two-time Naismith Memorial Defensive Player of the Year semifinalist. Adams started 36 times for the reigning Big 12 champions last season. And Dickinson is maybe the best center in college basketball not named Zach Edey.
Those five players have already combined to play parts of 17 seasons of college basketball, which means Kansas’ starting lineup should be one of the oldest in the sport. That’s an advantage in this era, where teams too heavily reliant on freshmen tend to struggle more than flourish.
Nothing is guaranteed, of course.
Any single-elimination tournament that requires six straight victories to hold a trophy lends itself to upsets, which is why even the favorite in any given season is an underdog to the field. Kansas is an underdog to the field. But, on paper, the Jayhawks have long projected as the team most likely to win the 2024 NCAA Tournament, and 45.4% of the coaches we polled told us that they agree with that sentiment.
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