Reece Beekman is being wildly disrespected, All-American snubs, sleeper teams, Tucker DeVries, the best noncon games and more

This mailbag has it all. Possibly too much!

Photo credit: Ryan M. Kelly/Getty Images

Hello, friends. Let’s mailbag.

Oh, before we do, though, did you guys see what ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday? Get a load of this:

Asked about what the ACC basketball tournament will look like with 18 teams, Phillips said he isn’t necessarily married to the idea that all teams participate. “I don’t know that we would invite 18 teams to an ACC men’s or women’s basketball championship,” he added. “We’ll do what the membership wants. I don’t feel like that’s something that we should do. I’ve told them that. I’m not speaking out of turn.

“I think you’ve got to earn your way to play in, I think, the most prestigious postseason basketball tournaments in the country — and if you don’t get to a certain threshold, then you just don’t make it that year.”

Once more we are forced to wonder how we’ve allowed the people in charge of this sport to have so little interest in it.

Here’s how college basketball works: All year long, every team works to improve its position vis a vis the NCAA Tournament, whether that means a No. 1 seed or merely likely at-large qualification. But at the end of the season, all of the teams play in their conference tournaments. Thus, even the worst team in the ACC — the most nameless Georgia Tech no-hopers playing at noon on Tuesday in Greensboro — retains its chance to make the NCAA Tournament. All it has to do is win.

That is the redeeming promise of every college hoops postseason, no matter how poor the campaign that preceded it. That’s how college basketball works. But because Phillips recently enlarged the ACC’s pro-rata broadcast revenue share by adding Cal and Stanford and SMU, and because he doesn’t want to add a day to the ACC tourney, he’s going to restrict some players from competing in the postseason altogether? Seriously? Is this guy for real?

Hey, great question. I don’t have an answer for it. I do, however (segue!) have answers to the many questions you guys submitted in Tuesday’s thread, so many so that this mailbag doubles as another crucial entry in Buzzer’s rolling informal preseason preview. A fair number of the answers in here probably could have doubled as their own emails, full-on lists of teams and players and the like. It’s a lot!

First up: Why do people hate Reece Beekman so much?

Why do you think Reece Beekman is garnering so little respect nationally? The guy is an elite defender/DPOY and likely first-rounder and yet is being left off lists of the top 20(!) point guards in college basketball. — Grimjon

I usually take these sorts of questions in stride. Lots of fandoms are convinced people are specifically underrating their favorites for some larger systemic reason; usually, the answer is just that fans see their own guys differently. More emotionally. More generously. Not always: I’d wager Virginia fans were a bit harsher on Kihei Clark throughout his career than national media or neutrals. But usually the answer to these questions is that the player is actually getting the appropriate amount of respect.

Except here. This time, it’s true. Reece Beekman is being wildly disrespected.