The problem to me is, Duke, Iowa State and Houston, all built their net rankings playing in bad conferences. Houston lost to Auburn. We beat Auburn on their floor. Houston has 2 wins vs the Net top 10. Florida has 5. Yet the metrics reward Auburn for beating Houston and the metrics put houston over us in the seeding? It's all a mess.
I think it’s tough to know. Our data is always incomplete, and experts continually disagree. It might be that Duke is getting to much credit, but making this claim suggests that we have a way to accurately determine how much credit each team deserves. And the NCAA tournament itself isn’t that much help, as we could run it 1,000 times and never get the same result. Maybe Duke loses in the first weekend, but as our loss to Georgia shows, that alone doesn’t say much. I think the best you do is appear good enough to win six games. Each of the top 4 seeds have that look to most observers, including me.
Admittedly, the SEC was much tougher than all the other conferences this year. Still, it must be possible for worthy teams to exist outside of the SEC. In 2007, only two SEC teams finished in the top 25 of KenPom, and yet the overall #1 seed was an SEC team who indeed won it all. No teams play the exact same schedule, so comparisons among teams will always require some level of art.
Could be an SEC team or 2 gets beat just because their opponent is sick of hearing how great the SEC is.
Two different metrics: one set that rewards you for how you played relative to your level of competition, another set for what the quality of your wins tells us about how would compete with others. On the first, a close loss to a great team is much better than a big win against a bad team. They may quantitatively correlate to the same predictive metric, but the results metric will always be better. The problem once you get into conference play is that the ceiling on your results metric is kind of set. Every game that Auburn wins will make them a better opponent, but their opponent a worse one. If you beat everyone, it’s fine. But no one does that. The only thing you can really do is curb stomp people, which will increase your predictive metrics (hello, Duke). The other option you have is to play an elite non-conference and roll the dice. Auburn, Houston, Bama, and Duke did. Florida and Tennessee didn’t. What you can’t do is pretend that non-conference didn’t happen. And just remember: before this, all we had was the NET, and before that RPI. Those were exclusively results based, so you couldn’t make up much ground at all. Now, at least there is something else. It didn’t move us up to a higher 1-seed, but we already had a 1-seed locked because our predictive metrics were better than both Bama and Tennessee.
Sorry just saw this. Yeah but peeps like Isaiah Thomas, Alan Iverson were shooting guards at I think a few inches shorter than Walt. He’s 6’3 as I just checked. That’s a good several inches than some of those small shooting guards and he’s so talented. Biased but I would pick him up. But hey I dunno shiz about B-ball. Maybe he should be a little smaller so he can be one of those little guys so he can sneak under. I hope to see him play. Maybe to tall to be small and too small to be big.
What I’ve been saying, even if they are talented as us, they haven’t been battle worn. When we hit them with that speed and up on the O-Boards. They not like us.
I don’t really watch any talking head shows, but the ones on our broadcasts sure seem fine with saying the sec was head and shoulders above the other conferences this year. I don’t know if you were saying they’d be more excited or less though. I think they’d embrace an an sec final four. Would that be a first? Single conference final four?
I beleive it would be a first. I just mean, nationally, it would be pretty cool to see all of the talk about SEC being an all final four group...
The big east got three of the final four in the year that Villanova upset Georgetown. Four would be pretty cool. Although a little bit boring for me, since we’ve played all those guys already. I’d like to see us against Duke.
Not to mention depth. I don’t care if people say other teams have depth too. They don’t have our depth. I don’t remember what game it was in the tournament but we went on a 10-0 run……and then 4 of our starters checked back into the game…that’s gotta be demoralizing.
All facts. It’s at the end especially when that matters and the “2nds” are starters at most schools and fast and big yeah it’s just “give up”. It’s almost unfair.
