Where the NMSU Aggies are picked in preseason CUSA men's and women's hoops

The Las Cruces rebuild continues.

Jason Hooten, like most coaches, will tell you what little regard they have for preseason polls. But they can also tell you when they’ve out-performed those preseason polls.

Thursday, Hooten’s New Mexico State Aggies were predicted to finish seventh this season in the Conference USA preseason men’s basketball poll, conducted by the league’s 10 coaches. Aggies senior guard Christian Cook was voted to the 10-player All-Conference team.

Louisiana Tech was picked to win the league in a razor-thin race among three teams at the top. The Bulldogs, with preseason Player of the Year Daniel Batcho, received three of the 10 first place votes and 87 total points. Second place Western Kentucky had two first place votes and 85 points followed by third place Sam Houston, Hooten’s previous school, which received three first-place votes and 83 points.

Middle Tennessee (fourth place) and Liberty (tied for fifth) received the other two first-place votes. UTEP, which plays the UNM Lobos in the Pit in a charity exhibition game on Oct. 28, was tied with Liberty for fifth. The rest of the poll included NMSU, Jacksonville State and FIU and Kenessaw State tied for ninth.

One year ago, the Aggies — in a total rebuild in Hooten’s first year — were picked eighth in the C-USA preseason poll and finished in a four-way tie for fourth place. Around mid-October, Hooten made two points about preseason polls. One, he said, is that the polls are largely a guessing game in the modern college game with the transfer portal leading to such high roster turnover each season.

“I think if it was five or six years ago, you could probably get P-O’d a little bit about it because there wasn’t a (transfer) portal,” Hooten said in a conversation on the Talking Grammer podcast. “And there wasn’t a bunch of sitting out guys. But nowadays, you know, when you got a portal, you have no idea what people got on their roster. Even when you’re getting ready to scout people like the first couple of games of the year, you don’t know what those guys are.”

But his second point was also telling. He knew exactly how his teams fared versus those polls. In his final two seasons at Sam Houston State, Hooten’s squads were picked seventh in 2021-22 and finished fourth and sixth in 2022-23 and finished second.

Hooten’s squads have now outperformed predictions three consecutive years.

Cook, a 6-2 senior from Oklahoma City who transferred to NMSU a year ago from Northwestern State, started 26 games for the Aggies last season, averaging a team-best 11.3 points per game and making a team-high 59 3-pointers.

Aggie women predicted to finish sixth

Middle Tennessee is the favorite to win the 2024-25 Conference USA women’s basketball regular season championship, as voted on by the league’s 10 head coaches. New Mexico State is predicted to finish sixth in the preseason poll announced Thursday.

Middle Tennessee finished last season 30-5 (16-0 C-USA), winning its second consecutive C-USA regular season and tournament title.

The Aggies, 13-18 overall, finished in a three-way tie for sixth place at 6-10, which was the second worst record in the league.

Florida International’s Mya Kone was named the preseason Player of the Year. NMSU’s Molly Kaiser, a graduate student, was among the conference’s 10 preseason all-conference honorees.