Maryland basketball comes in at No. 42 in Matt Norlander’s massive CBS Sports 2016-17 college basketball ranking, in which he ranked all 351 teams. Not everyone is as high on this year’s squad as ESPN, who ranked Maryland No. 22 in its latest preseason poll and has ranked them as high as No. 14.
Here’s the short blurb Norlander wrote on the Terps:
“It’s all on Melo Trimble now, isn’t it? The frontline from last season is basically gone, and Trimble’s going to need all the help he can get from Jared Nickens. Let’s see what freshman Kevin Huerter can do, too. Terps are a toss-up team right now.”
Take this assessment with a grain of salt; it’s hard for national college basketball writers to know a ton about every major conference team in the country.
One guy Norlander probably should have mentioned is Dion Wiley. He’s who this team needs to step up and produce. Jared Nickens plays an important role as a sharpshooter, but he doesn’t do much else on either end of the floor, and he’s not the ideal player to rely on in the tier below Trimble.
But Norlander is right in saying Maryland is a toss-up team, and at the moment, everything kind of is on Melo.
With new faces making up a large chunk of the expected rotation, and Wiley coming off a knee injury, we really don’t know who will be a difference-maker. Will LG Gill be as effective as Robert Carter Jr. was? How much will freshmen Anthony Cowan, Kevin Huerter and Justin Jackson actually be able to contribute?
We’ll start to get some answers in a few weeks.
