Men’s Hoops Picked to Finish 8th in the SEC

A rather optimistic projection considering where the program was in April

Lost in all the hoopla of football’s resurgence is that the 2022-2023 college basketball season is less than two weeks from tipping off.

The LSU men’s basketball program is going to look entirely different than when we last saw them in March. Will Wade of course is gone and at one point LSU had checks notes ah right Z E R O scholarship athletes because everyone put their name in the portal.

But now, seven months later, LSU not only has a new head coach in Matt McMahon, they’ve actually got enough bodies to field a full five and folks…they might not be half bad?

The preseason hoops polls have been coming out and LSU was picked to finish 8th in the SEC this year by the coaches. I’m not into moral victories nor do I think being projected to finish in the bottom half of the league is worth celebrating…

HOWEVER

I am absolutely stunned to see such an optimistic projection for a team that I thought was dead. Like beyond dead, I thought it’d be years before we’d see LSU field a men’s team that could contend for the NIT, let alone the NCAA.

But Matt McMahon was able to bring the nucleus from a 30-win Murray State team with him to Baton Rouge and he was able to get MWani Wilkinson, Adam Miller, and Justice Williams to take their names out of the transfer portal. The staff was also able to sign a pair of top-50 high school prospects which only fuels my newfound belief that maybe, just maybe, NCAA sanctions aren’t coming. Or at least nowhere near as severe as we thought.

Incoming Murray State transfer KJ Williams, the reigning Ohio Valley Conference player of the year, was a second-team All-SEC selection. He led the OVC in scoring with 18 points, and was second with 8 rebounds last season and has 27 double-doubles in his career.

Preseason SEC Projections:

1. Kentucky
2. Arkansas
3. Tennessee
4. Auburn
5. Alabama
6. Texas A&M
7. Florida
8. LSU
9. Ole Miss
10. Mississippi State
11. Missouri
12. Vanderbilt
13. Georgia
14. South Carolina