College Basketball Betting: America East Conference Preview

The 2021-2022 college basketball season will be eagerly anticipated in much the same way that the current college football season was anticipated. This season will feel a lot more normal than the previous one. It was hard for Americans to get interested in sports during the start of the pandemic. All the game cancellations disrupted the past college basketball season. The season was played to its completion, but it didn’t feel normal, especially with no fans in Pac-12 arenas and in the arenas of other conferences across the country. The NCAA Tournament and the conference tournaments were held before small crowds in Indianapolis and surrounding cities, not across the entire country. The Final Four was not held before a huge crowd of 70,000 people. Everything felt different. This season, however, with vaccines and more COVID-19 controls in place, college basketball will have a more normal and recognizable season. Fans will be at games in more typical numbers. The Final Four and NCAA Tournament will be held at their normal neutral sites in all regions of the country. It’s time to restart college hoops in familiar surroundings. Here we look at the America East Conference:

Team Likely To Surprise

The UMBC Retrievers attained college basketball immortality in 2018 when they became the first No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1 seed in the men’s NCAA Tournament. (Harvard had done the same in the women’s tournament 20 years earlier against Stanford, but UMBC was the first men’s team to pull off the feat.) Coach Ryan Odom led that historic win over Virginia. He made UMBC basketball into a nationally recognized name. Now he is off to Utah State to replace Craig Smith as the coach of the Aggies in the Mountain West Conference. Many people will think that UMBC will fall off a cliff as a result of losing Odom, but new coach Jim Ferry should not be underestimated. This is a program, not just a one-man show. The continuity Odom developed will be sustained by Ferry, and the Retrievers will remain in the hunt for the America East title, likely finishing in the top three and very possibly reaching the conference tournament championship game.

Team Likely To Disappoint

The Hartford Hawks aren’t feeling like a disappointment, and to be clear, they shouldn’t. Hartford made its first ever NCAA Tournament appearance last season, winning the America East Tournament in an upset. To be honest, if this year’s team doesn’t make the Big Dance, it won’t feel like a crushing setback for the program. Nevertheless, there is a sense around the league that Hartford won’t be able to live up to last season’s expectations. There are so many other contenders for the league title, the Hawks will get crowded out of the picture.

Conference Champion

The Vermont Catamounts have regularly been the standard-bearer in the America East, and this season figures to be no exception. The big and obvious key for Vermont is that the 2021 America East Player of the Year, Ryan Davis, is back for another season. That fact alone gives the Catamounts the elite performer who will make them very tough to beat as the season goes along. The supporting cast should develop around Davis, giving VU a complete team which will be tough and tested and ready to handle the challenges of the conference season.