George Mason Men Picked Fourth in Atlantic 10 Preseason Poll With O’Connor, Okojie in the Backcourt

WASHINGTON — George Mason’s men’s basketball team was picked to finish fourth in the Atlantic 10 preseason poll released Monday at the conference’s annual media day at the Westin DC Downtown. The Patriots’ backcourt carries the projection. Graduate guard Brayden O’Connor, the point guard on Mason’s 2024-25 co-championship team, made the preseason All-Conference third team. Senior Baraka Okojie, who started his career at Mason and returns after two seasons away, made the second team.

The projection is two spots higher than a year ago. Mason was picked sixth in each of the previous two preseasons, and in 2024-25 the Patriots beat that forecast by tying a school record with 27 wins and earning a share of the program’s first A-10 regular-season title. This time, a top-four finish is the expectation rather than the surprise. Head coach Tony Skinn has two guards who have both run an offense: one who stayed when he could have left, and one who left and came back. He also has a bigger NCAA field that gives a team like his more room for error.

Where Fourth Place Fits

Mason received 240 points, finishing behind VCU (308), Saint Louis (307) and Dayton (279) and ahead of fifth-place George Washington (207). The poll shows clear tiers. VCU and Saint Louis, the league’s two NCAA Tournament teams last season, are separated by one point and split 21 of the 23 first-place votes, 11 for VCU and 10 for Saint Louis, with Dayton receiving the other two. Mason sits alone in the middle, 39 points behind Dayton and 33 ahead of George Washington.

Saint Louis placed four players on the preseason All-Conference teams, including first-teamers Trey Green and Kellen Thames. VCU’s Lazar Djokovic and Nyk Lewis also made the first team, along with Dayton’s Amaël L’Etang and Saint Joseph’s Jaiden Glover-Toscano. A top-four finish matters for seeding, since it typically comes with a double bye into the quarterfinals of the 14-team A-10 Tournament. Skinn said the league’s depth makes every night a test. “It doesn’t matter who you play,” he said. “It’s a tough league, one through 14.”

The One Who Stayed

O’Connor has been the steady piece. He started all 36 games at point guard on the 2024-25 team, led the Patriots in assists and shot 37.6% from 3-point range as Mason won a share of its first A-10 title. He went into last season as a preseason first-team pick before injuries limited him.

In an era when players with that kind of resume routinely move on, O’Connor stayed. “I led our team as a point guard to 27-9, winning a ring,” he said of the 2024-25 season, acknowledging he could have used that record to leave. He said the family atmosphere around the program and its coaching staff is what kept him at Mason.

Now the oldest player on a young roster, he described his role with a laugh: “They call me the unc. I’m the uncle on this team.” He takes the role seriously. “In all seriousness, they look to me,” O’Connor said. “They see how hard I’ve worked, how hard I work, and they want to get to where I’m at and persevere and go even more.”

He also has bigger plans. “I’m still planning on going to the NBA. That’s my goal,” O’Connor said. “I just wanna set a good example for the people that are coming after.” He’d like to play professionally for a long time. “Hopefully play till I’m 40,” he said. Coaching might come after that. “I think I’d be a good coach,” O’Connor said. “I might get too fired up sometimes, but that’s good. It’s good for the guys and the chemistry.”

The One Who Came Back

The biggest change from a year ago is Okojie. The senior guard began his career at Mason, averaging 8.1 points and making the A-10 All-Rookie team in 2023-24, then left for Memphis, where he played sparingly off the bench. His career took off last season at Mercer. He averaged 19.7 points, 5.3 assists and 3.1 rebounds, scored in double figures in all 31 games and was named to the NABC All-District second team.

Skinn said Monday that a player coming back to the program where he started is rare in today’s sport. “I think it’s a special story, to be honest with you, because you just don’t see that in this sport now,” Skinn said. “The portal, the chaos, guys constantly leaving. To be able to have a guy like Baraka Okojie, who, to be honest with you, didn’t have very many options the first time around. He comes to George Mason. He trusts us.”

Skinn didn’t hold Okojie’s departure against him, and he used himself to explain why. “If Tony Skinn had an extra year after a Final Four year, Tony Skinn probably bolts, right?” he said. “But it happens. Tony Skinn also wouldn’t be the head coach at George Mason.” Now Okojie gets to finish where he started. “Now he’s gonna end his career here,” Skinn said. “It makes my job easier.”

That shot would add a new dimension to Okojie’s game. As a freshman, he attempted 136 free throws, an unusually high number for a reserve guard. If the 3-point shot Skinn describes is real, defenses can’t simply sag off him and wait for him to drive.

Sharing the Backcourt

How Okojie and O’Connor divide the ball-handling is one of the main questions facing the Patriots this season. O’Connor said it’s simpler than it looks. “It’s actually easier than you think it is,” he said. “At Mercer, he was the guy. He had to get all the buckets. He had to have the ball in his hands. Here, he can do the same thing, not as much as he had to, only because he has so many other guys that can get on the ball.” He added that Okojie is “actually a really selfless player. He actually likes to pass the ball a lot,” and that “he’s starting to get into his own.” Okojie won’t have to carry the offense alone. “There’s so many guys that can dish out,” O’Connor said, naming Oliogu-Elabor and himself.

Mason has more guards than minutes, which O’Connor said lets the Patriots play fast. Skinn wants a big man who grabs a rebound to be able to hand it to any of three or four ball handlers and go. “We have a bunch of point guards, guards, big guards that can go out there and push the tempo,” O’Connor said.

That depth also means competition. “At the end of the day, it’s a business,” O’Connor said. “You gotta perform to play.” He said the guards spent the summer pushing each other while sorting out roles. “Scoring, passing, rebounding, defending, whatever the case may be,” he said. “It just matters on fit. Whoever can fit with the most lineups probably is gonna play.” Forward Emmanuel Kanga, who appears with both guards on the cover of the program’s 2026-27 season prospectus, gives Mason a returning presence up front.

Skinn’s Program

The constant has been Skinn. He came to Mason as a 19-year-old player, was part of the 2006 Final Four team, and is 70-31 in three seasons as head coach with three straight 20-win records. He was also the 2025 A-10 Coach of the Year. “To be sitting at the helm, it’s a dream come true,” he said. “If there was a 10-point score on who the happiest coach in America is, I think I’d be top 10.”

He also knows how different his job is from the one his coach, Jim Larranaga, had. The 2006 Final Four team was built on continuity. “People forget, as good as we were in 2006, with the exception of one or two guys, we had the same team the year before, and we only won 16 games,” Skinn said. “We weren’t a very good team.” Today’s rosters turn over every spring, and Skinn compared building one through the transfer portal to “speed dating.” “You don’t know exactly what you’re getting,” he said. What he looks for is the same “togetherness” that defined his own team. “You can go recruit a lot of talented, a lot of skilled guys,” he said, “but if they can’t gel, if they can’t fit … that’s half the battle.”

Skinn also showed some of that togetherness on the Field of 68’s media day broadcast Monday, where the hosts said they had heard he was a big Alanis Morissette fan. Skinn denied it. He said he had only used her name during a staff icebreaker game, “because I just thought that would be the one thing that people wouldn’t know that I was aware of.” The hosts struck a deal anyway. If Mason wins the A-10, Skinn comes back on the show to sing Morissette karaoke while eating O’Connor’s Domino’s order. That order had come up a few minutes earlier, when O’Connor admitted he ate a Domino’s deal “probably every day for about three, four weeks” as a college freshman and sweated so much that a practice was called off because the floor was too wet. “I’ll memorize it and everything,” Skinn said of the song. As for the pizza: “I’ll eat Domino’s. It doesn’t matter.”

What the Villanova Exhibition Showed

Saturday’s exhibition opener at Villanova, an 84-67 loss at Finneran Pavilion, gave a first look at Mason without its new point guard. Okojie and Makhai Valentine did not play. “Unfortunately he missed the last game against Villanova,” O’Connor said of Okojie. “We could have used him a lot.”

The Patriots stayed within reach for most of the afternoon. They cut a nine-point deficit to 21-20 in the first half and trailed 54-48 with 10:15 remaining before Villanova went on a 9-0 run. A 14-3 finish decided it.

The numbers point to two specific problems. Mason committed 17 turnovers, which Villanova converted into a 24-9 advantage in points off turnovers, and that’s the kind of number a primary ball handler is supposed to reduce. The Wildcats also grabbed 14 offensive rebounds in the second half and took 11 more shots than Mason after halftime. The defense held up better. Villanova shot 39.4% from the field, and Mason made 8 of 18 3-pointers.

O’Connor led Mason with 14 points in 31 minutes. Sophomore Efeosa Oliogu-Elabor, who played 25 Big East games for Butler last season, had 12 points, seven rebounds and a team-high six assists, which made him the closest thing Mason had to a lead guard. Freshman Shane Pendergrass, whom the school calls the second-highest-ranked recruit in program history, scored 10 points off the bench on 4-of-6 shooting. Skinn, a D.C. native, said recruiting local high school players remains a priority, calling D.C. basketball “the best basketball in the country.” Senior forward Elijah Jones added nine points, eight rebounds and three blocks.

An exhibition on the road against a Big East opponent, without the team’s projected starting point guard, says little about Mason’s ceiling. It does identify what the Patriots need to clean up before their final exhibition against St. Mary’s College of Maryland on Sunday, Oct. 25, at 2 p.m. at EagleBank Arena.

A Larger NCAA Field

Mason will chase a bid in a bigger NCAA Tournament. In May, the NCAA approved expanding its Division I men’s and women’s championships from 68 to 76 teams beginning in 2027. The expansion adds eight at-large bids and raises the share of Division I teams that reach the tournament to 21%. A 12-game opening round will pair the 12 lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the 12 lowest-seeded at-large teams before the round of 64.

Skinn supports the change and used his own team as the example. “Because the metrics are different,” he said. “You think about our 2006 team, in this landscape, we would not make the NCAA tournament.” That Mason team got an at-large bid and reached the Final Four. “I think we deserve the opportunity,” Skinn said of the A-10, adding that he hopes the league can get “two, three, maybe even four teams” into the field.

Mason knows what it’s like to come up just short. The 2024-25 team lost the A-10 championship game in Washington by one possession and missed the field. “We’re literally one three away from the NCAA tournament,” Skinn said. “I still think about that game.” O’Connor, who ran the point on that team, still believes it belonged. “Expansion matters for us,” he said. “We were one shot away from going to March. I feel like based on our resume that year, we should’ve probably got in.” He acknowledged the Patriots hurt their own case early in the season. “We were still figuring ourselves out, so we lost a couple games we should’ve won,” he said. A bigger field, in his view, is built for teams like that one. “I feel like it just gives more of a stage to people that might have deserved it and didn’t get the chance,” he said. It hasn’t changed the target. “The goal’s still win,” O’Connor said. “There’s nothing different. The goal is March.”

A larger field still isn’t a guarantee, and at-large bids depend heavily on nonconference results. Skinn said that’s where Mason’s success has worked against it, because opponents are reluctant to schedule the Patriots. This season Mason plays at High Point, hosts South Florida and plays Bradley in Florida. “We didn’t exactly get that last year,” Skinn said of early tests. “We’ll get tested early, and I think that’s something that we need.” The school notes that Mason has finished in the top 100 of the NET in each of Skinn’s three seasons, a profile that has often fallen just short of a bid.

Turning a fourth-place projection into a bid starts with getting Okojie on the floor and cutting the turnovers and second-chance points that undid Mason at Villanova. After that, the Patriots have to win the nonconference games Skinn worked so hard to schedule, because those are the results the selection committee will weigh in March.