LSU basketball has ambitious season ahead for 2018-19

Thanks to the Southeastern Conference placing a league-record eight teams in the NCAA tournament this season, the LSU basketball team will face an arduous conference slate for the 2018-19 campaign.
Will Wade’s team will play 12 of 18 conference games against teams that earned invites to the NCAA tournament in March, according to the schedule released by the league office Wednesday morning.
Dates and times for all conference games will be released later this summer.
LSU, which went 18-15 and 8-10 in the league, will play two games against Texas A&M, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama and one game each against Auburn, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri in Wade’s second season.
Texas A&M, Arkansas and Alabama are LSU’s permanent twice-yearly opponents, while Florida will be one of its rotating opponents for a home-and-home series this season.
LSU’s other rotating home-and-home opponent for this season is Georgia.
The Tigers, 14-4 at home last season, were 6-3 in conference play in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, winning their final six games after dropping their first three.
This year, they will play Alabama, Arkansas, Texas A&M, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt at home.
The Tigers will travel to face Alabama, Arkansas, Texas A&M, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Missouri.
Wade still needs to add one game to his nonconference schedule with 12 of 13 playing dates filled.
According to contracts obtained by The Advocate, LSU will host Southeastern Louisiana (Nov. 6), UNC Greensboro (Nov. 9), Memphis (Nov. 13), Louisiana Tech (Nov. 16), Incarnate Word (Dec. 9), Furman (Dec. 21) and UL-Monroe (Dec. 28).
The Tigers will also play in the AdvoCare Invitational in Orlando (Nov. 22-23 and 25), at Houston (Dec. 12) and vs. St. Mary’s in Las Vegas (Dec. 15).
The eight-team AdvoCare Invitational field includes NCAA champion Villanova, Florida State, Charleston, Oklahoma State, UAB, Memphis and Canisius.
Villanova, Florida State and Charleston all made the NCAA tournament field, with Villanova and Florida State reaching the Elite Eight.
Despite the tremendous schedule ahead, the basketball team is already getting a measure of respect nationally.
The Tigers have been ranked in several preseason top 25s. Now LSU finds itself with a fairly lofty projected seed in CBSSports.com analyst Jerry Palm’s NCAA tournament projection.
Palm has LSU as a No. 5 seed playing No. 12 Northeastern in Hartford, Connecticut, in the first round of the NCAA West regional.
Of course, who teams will play and in which regional is merely wild speculation at this point, more than eight months before the tournament begins. But Palm’s inclusion of LSU, on the heels of the Tigers’ No. 3-ranked recruiting class, illustrates the kind of expectations the team will face this season.