Give credit to UCLA for their game last night. Maybe they had an off night too against us? Still can’t help feeling like we take them 4-1 or 4-2 in a series.
It gives me hope if we didn’t throw up a goose egg again that the boys had a real chance at pulling that off versus Zaga…
Tough pill to swallow.
Yep, I hate that we’ll never know how we’d have stacked up against Gonzaga. Looking at the way UCLA was scoring (a lot of iso ball), I don’t know that we’d have been able to keep up. I mean, we just couldn’t do that. OTOH, Gonzaga’s defence definitely isn’t as connected as many teams, so our stuff may have yielded plenty of open looks in its own way. It probably would have played out similarly to last night’s game in terms of being pretty close all the way, just maybe a little lower scoring.
Accurate
I LOVE this! I don’t love that some games play out like this (ours vs. UCLA!) but this is pretty darn funny!
Just needs some unnecessarily long video reviews
Apparently our pain was the third worst in the country, per ESPN. I don’t like that UCLA is one spot ahead, though I agree with VCU at #1.
Sorry, should have added the link…
We had an 88.8% win probability with a seven-point lead in the middle of the first half? I think they might want to recalibrate that measurement a bit. That’s way too high for an Elite Eight game. Anyone you face this late in the tournament is legit.
Then to say “Michigan fans are not going to remember this tournament fondly” . . . don’t know about that. After Livers went down, my expectation became simply making the second weekend. The LSU and FSU games were fun.
Michigan started the game with around a 78% win probability. It doesn’t start at 50/50.
They have win probability posted throughout games as they are played live, but yes, it’s rather ridiculous to even attempt to calculate it that early.
I was expecting the second weekend after Livers was lost also.
However, the UCLA game should have been won.
I understand that, but 78% was much too high. We should have only been a slight favorite, not overwhelming.
That’s revisionist thinking. Nobody had that game as being anything close to a toss-up – not KenPom, not ESPN, not Vegas. The game was about a 6-point spread at tip, IIRC, and that equates to about a 71% win probability. KenPom had 75%. 78% isn’t really much of an outlier.
UCLA had a string of lucky games in the tournament. Are they better than the 45th team in the country, which is what they were in KenPom at the start of the tournament? Yes. Was Michigan still substantially better than them? Yes.
I disagree. All our season rankings were based on us having Livers for 90% of the season. Taking him out (from a team that already had limited depth) made our margin for error much reduced, which was why I didn’t expect to make the Final Four after that. I was happy that UCLA beat Bama but still, thought that game was very loseable.
The Vegas line reflected that it was a 1 seed vs. an 11 seed, but again, without Livers playing 90% of the season we wouldn’t have been a 1 seed and it was clear by that point that UCLA had been underseeded.
Regardless, I’m not sure how ESPN can say we should feel worse than say, Illinois or OSU fans. We had a good run that came up just short of the Final Four. They just plain laid an egg. If you’re Illinois, this tournament was everything you were shooting for and you didn’t make it past the first weekend. That’s brutal.
The Vegas line represented the fact that Michigan, without Livers, was still a substantial favorite. If the teams were as close as you’re suggesting, the line would have been smaller. The books couldn’t have risked that kind of exposure to the sharps. UCLA was lucky, not good.
I think there’s some recency bias in that article, but there’s also something to the argument that Michigan had the best chance to go to the Final Four of any of the teams that didn’t make it.
Does a 6 point spread really mean we were substantially better? The only things you have to go by to say that UCLA was purely lucky and not a good team was that they lost some more games in the regular season, by some very fine margins at that, and the number next to their name.
UCLA was a good team with talented players. You’re not going to convince we were head and shoulders better than they were. We were a very well drilled, well coached squad that played way beyond expectations. Not only that, once we got into the tournament we lost our best player. A team doesn’t get by these Alabama, Michigan, and almost Gonzaga by sheer luck alone. To say it’s some cosmic tragedy that we lost to this UCLA is just doing a disservice to what an excellent job we did to even get there and have such high expectations.
They can be both good and lucky.
Pretty clear watching all three games that Bama, Michigan, and Gonzaga were the better team.
Those win probability charts are based on reams of historical data. And I think they reflected the mind set of this board in the first half, that at some point Michigan would shake out of their funk. And that early in the second half, it started to look bleak. But if you want the chart that starts at 50-50 you can see the line here:
I mean, the intention of betting lines is not to be predictive.
Yes.
I mean, those things are relevant. Even after they played Gonzaga to the wire, they’re still only 13th on KenPom, and if they were to play another 60-possession slugfest, Michigan would be favored on a neutral court by 4 points. (In a more typical 70-possession game, Michigan would be favored by 5).
Have you watched UCLA play? They take a bunch of low-percentage shots.
They did.
Forget three-pointers, because I’d prefer not to hear about UCLA’s allegedly superior three-point defense. If Alabama had hit their season average free-throw percentage, they’d have won in regulation. If Michigan had hit their season average free-throw percentage, they’d either have taken the game to overtime or won in regulation, depending upon how you want to round and how you want to treat a missed front end. If Gonzaga had this their season average free-throw percentage, they’d have won in regulation.
Michigan was a much better team than UCLA, and they generated much better shots. They didn’t go in – it happens. But that had little to do with UCLA’s skill and a lot to do with luck.
Actually, the final Vegas line is statistically the best predictor of the final margin. Yes, they’re not intended to be predictive, but they can’t afford to be very far off or they’re going to be vulnerable to sharps with better predictive models.
While the books certainly attempt to balance their liability and make money on the vig, their best chance of being able to do that is to have the line be as predictive as possible. You can have your liability all perfectly balanced when somebody walks up and places a $50,000 bet and now you’re unbalanced again.
