College Basketball Betting: Atlantic Sun Conference Preview

The 2021-2022 college basketball season will be a fascinating one. In the Atlantic Sun, one of the big stories is that there are new members of the conference this season. One of them has a legitimate chance to contend for the league championship. How will all of this work out? It will be highly interesting to see how this particular conference shakes out over the next several months.

Team Likely To Surprise

The Eastern Kentucky Colonels are in their first year as an Atlantic Sun Conference member in men’s basketball. This is a step up for the program, which was previously in the Ohio Valley Conference. The transfer portal is changing college sports (basketball even more than football, one could argue, given that over 1,200 athletes were in the transfer portal at one point this past offseason, and that’s a conservative estimate), and Eastern Kentucky has lost multiple high scorers from last season’s team. One might think the Colonels are toast, but they compensated for those losses with some of their transfer portal acquisitions, and they already had quality depth on their roster to begin with. Many will anticipate a tough season for EKU, but the Colonels could actually move right into their new conference and contend for the championship.

Team Likely To Disappoint

The Lipscomb Bisons had some excellent teams a few years ago, establishing the program as one of the best in the Atlantic Sun. However, those successes didn’t always translate into NCAA Tournament berths. The Bisons are hungry to get back to March Madness and capitalize on the positive publicity they gained in 2018 and 2019. However, it doesn’t seem likely to happen. Ahsan Asadullah is a high-quality center and one of the five best players in the Atlantic Sun Conference this season, but the early read on the Lipscomb roster is that there isn’t much depth around him. Lipscomb needs to prove that its backcourt is capable of developing over the course of the season, to the extent that it can win games in many ways and not be limited by its imbalance. Lipscomb will have a very hard time competing for the Atlantic Sun championship, not just because Eastern Kentucky and Liberty figure to be the class of the conference, but also because Stetson and Florida Gulf Coast figure to be contenders in the league. Lipscomb doesn’t begin the season as a top-tier team in the conference. It will have to earn its way to that tier and then fend off its foremost competitors.

Conference Champion

The Liberty Flames took over the mantle of the best team in the Atlantic Sun from Lipscomb. They remain the team to beat. Ritchie McKay is generally regarded as the best coach in the conference. He has done an outstanding job at this program. He gets 2021 A-Sun Player of the Year Darius McGhee back for another season, creating the kind of dynamic combination which will be hard for the rest of the conference to figure out. This is Liberty’s conference to lose, and few would argue with that line of analysis heading into the start of the season.