College Hoops Open Thread

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He’s looking at you, Wolverheel.

The scheduling argument has some strengths to it, but it also has a lot of flaws:
-Wins and losses can have long-term effects. The loss to NJIT (who turned out to be a pretty good team) pretty much derailed that entire season, as we lost to EMU right after and were never the same. If we don’t lose to NJIT maybe we don’t lost to EMU and don’t lose 4 OT games and a bunch of other games and we make the tourney. The fact that NJIT happened to have a good RPI that year did diddly for us. The loss really hurt us.
-Wins by large margins allow the team to experiment with lineups, allow minutes to go to freshman, allow injured players to get rest – see Wagner, Moritz – etc…
-RPI is not the only factor in getting into the tournament or seeding
-The committee takes into account number of losses and especially bad losses
-It’s not always possible to get RPI 150 teams whenever you want them. Beilein talked specifically about the trouble of scheduling games exactly when they wanted them between 12/20 and 12/31.
-Also, that’s the way they do it! Every year! There will be a couple tomato cans! Every year! It’s so whiny and boring!!!

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Yes, I’m staying away from the “gaming the RPI” convo that happens twice a year. Bottom line for me: keep bad losses off the resume, and compete for a top 4 spot in B1G (even in down year for conference), and there are zero worries.

I don’t care if it moves us down a seed line come March, these games are fantastic opportunities for us to get better. And a huge time for Livers and Poole to cement their roles internally imo.

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Yup just a reminder that I can’t have good things in sports for longer than one year.

Sure is tough being a UNC fan.

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I think Michigan football more than makes up for it.

That is true. And a top takeaway from that topic is that, as we’ve all seen, RPI seems to be on its way out with the committee, anyway. Still, it was interesting math, as far as RPI goes.

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We can only hope… The fact that it’s still used at all shows there’s something not quite screwed in correctly in the heads of the committee.

If I had to guess, I’d say it can still help you get squarely in the field but when it comes down to last comparisons between last teams, it just isn’t as important as it used to be. That’s a stab in the dark, but I think that feels right if I’m remembering things correctly.

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Wins and losses should count for something.

Great result for us with UCLA getting by Kentucky. Alford vs. the paper bag was almost a fatal mismatch, but they got through.

Gotta hope that’s a real building block win for UCLA to believe they can have a season this year, after all, after all the chaos so far.

Some great games today. Oklahoma-Tcu was awesome. What game with trae young isn’t? But nova-butler first half was fantastic. Lavall Jordan’s Bulldogs up 8 at the half in a shootout. Would be great to see Jordan have some early success at butler after being in a tough spot with Milwaukee last year.

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Looks like Wagner is a go

Seth Towns 4-20 against Minnesota today. 0-8 from 3. He’s not shy

Shout out to LaVall Jordan and the Butler Bulldogs for taking down #1 Nova

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Yeah, what an incredible day of basketball. A ton of really close games with ranked teams.

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Underrated storyline of the year: We were deprived of that Michigan-Marquette matchup in Maui that we all deserved so that we could re-litigate the Cain/Elliott recruitments.

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