Friar Basketball Newsletter: Diving into Every Team in the Non-conference Schedule, Ed Cooley on the 2014 Podcast Series, Previewing DePaul, and Looking Back at Wild Wins Over Marquette and St. John's

The 2022-23 season is fast-approaching. The regular season begins on Nov. 8, when Providence hosts Rider University, but there will be several chances to become familiar with the Friars prior to the season opener:

• PC will host Late Night Madness on Saturday, Oct. 1 at the Amica Mutual Pavilion (AMP). Both the Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams will be introduced, followed by a 3-point shooting contest and a performance by five-time Grammy Award-nominated multi-platinum artist Khalid.

• Two weeks later marks the return of the Mal Brown Game — an intra-squad scrimmage taking place on Saturday, Oct. 15 at 4pm. The scrimmage is returning to the AMP this year, and should be an exciting afternoon of basketball with so many new and talented members of the program, including Kentucky transfer Bryce Hopkins, South Carolina transfer Devin Carter, Louisville transfer Noah Locke, and La Salle transfer Clifton Moore. All four are expected to play critical roles this year, as Providence looks to capitalize off its 27-win campaign in 2021-22.

• The Friars will then play a pair of scrimmages — Thursday, Oct. 20 against American International College and Saturday, Oct. 29 versus Assumption University. Both of those games will also be played at the AMP.

Over the next month, we will continue to get you primed for the season with previews of every Big East team, profiles of key pieces of the Friar roster, breakdowns of the exhibition action, recruits to keep an eye on, and much more.

In this week’s newsletter, we included a snippet from our interview with Ed Cooley, which will be part of our multi-episode podcast series on the 2013-14 Friars. We are so fortunate to partner with Billy Ricci of The Friar Podcast on this project. Interviews have been completed with five members of the 2014 team so far, and we will look to publish the podcast a few weeks after we speak to others.

Nearly every Big East team has been previewed here, as our latest takes a look at DePaul in their second season under head coach Tony Stubblefield. The only schools we have yet to preview are Marquette and Creighton.

Our deeper dive piece from this week is one for subscribers. This article looks into every opponent on the non-conference schedule of the Friars, and includes players to keep an eye on, Cooley’s history against each team as PC’s head coach, and advanced numbers from Synergy Sports and Ken Pomeroy on both sides of the ball.

We continue to make our way through our “Season in Review” series. This week’s edition is an exciting one — with details and highlights from PC’s thrilling home win versus Marquette, pulling one out late against St. John’s in Queens, and Jared Bynum losing his mind in his return to DC.

Lastly, I am hoping to include a resource of websites, newspaper reporters, local sports anchors, and podcasts that cover Providence basketball. I’d love to hear from you on who you enjoy reading and listening to the most.

If you are enjoying what you see here at Friar Basketball, please spread the word to fellow Friar fans! Thanks, as always, for reading.