If it’s not clear I’m arguing about effect sizes and that scouting is vastly more important.
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TJD back. Indiana probably the favorites now which feels really gross
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This conference is going to be so bad next year lol
Still, I don’t like how Illinois is flying under the radar and having any high expectations placed on them. They have Shannon and a Five star coming, as well as the entire transfer portal. They should be the favorites right now
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From our perspective, it was really nice to say Hunter is the best returning piece in the league and if we surround him with some shooters, we will be in the mix.
With TJD back and Indiana having a better supporting cast (as of now) it certainly seems reasonable to knock us down a peg in the pecking order.
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I actually think Underwood is a good coach, but with all the talent they have had the past few years, what have they really accomplished? And sure maybe a post-Kofi Illinois is better but that is a LOT of talent that has walked out that door.
Can only assume the choice of Weezy’s “A Milli” is a reference to his new NIL deal to seal this.
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- Indiana
- Illinois
- Michigan State
- Ohio State
- Wisconsin
- Maryland
- Purdue
- Minnesota
- Iowa
- Penn State
- Rutgers
- Northwestern
- Nebraska
- Michigan
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31-9 in the conference with a conference tourney title and a regular season title is nothing to scoff at. Didn’t do well in the tournament, but I think tourney performance is an overrated metric, albeit it hilarious for us to watch.
I don’t think they’re going to have nearly as good of a team next year, but the rest of the conference is down as well.
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- Indiana
- Illinois
- Michigan
- Purdue
- ???
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It’s not an overrated metric at all and I really don’t like this idea that you can just discount tournament performance because it’s a single elimination format. Kids, coaches, fans dream of this event their entire lives, it’s not just a regular season game against an opponent you’ve scouted 3000x before.
Fact of the matter is, the World Cup and March madness are won, consistently, by the best teams in the field, almost without exception. Shows you the merit of succeeding in the tournament.
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i agree with this. until michigan starts losing in the tournament, which will mean that it’s all random and we should move to soccer-style points-based championships
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Are there too many players to actually get through a board-sourced player ranking? Been thinking of doing kind of a Likert scale with, I dk:
1 - Bad backup
2 - Backup
3 - Meh starter
4 - Average starter
5 - Good starter
6 - Star
7 - Top 5 in the league
We’d prob want at least 7-8 guys ranked per school so we’d either have to go by position or by school? Seems like a really heavy lift to actually get enough responses?
But if we had that plus a minutes projection, I thiiiiink we could end up w an in-conference power rank w expected win % and neutral court spreads. Could be cool.
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My hunch is that in a vacuum we’d rank far too many players as good or bad and virtually none as average……
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I mean I’m pretty mediocre data person but even some crazy bimodal distribution strikes me as tractable. But yeah I think how you ask people to rate 100+ players will impact the outcome. 1 team per day seems obvious but means you can’t really see what you’re doing as you go along. By position is annoying/arbitrary (“this guy is definitely a 4!”) and might not cut the problem down enough to get good answers. Etc. etc.
This is how I think about it. Michigan went to two championship games under Beilein. In one we were down like 5 points with 15 seconds left and tied it due to missed KU FTs and a Hail Mary 3 that goes in like 25% of the time? That’s probably generous, it was an off the dribble bomb.
Then in the second round of the other championship appearance we were about to lose in the second round until an equally miraculous shot pushed us through and then we did have very favorable matchups after that.
So if a coach or program or whatever is consistently over/underperforming for like a decade in the tournament it’s worth thinking about. Like Beilein did. But on a year to year basis it is pretty random in many ways.
Does that mean it’s not an accomplishment? No. But the best way to expect the best tourney success is to keep having the best teams possible.
As for whether that makes it an underrated or overrated metric 
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Bill Self is schroedinger’s cat here.
He was a first weekend exit last with the same roster minus Marcus Garrett, plus Remy Martin.
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You had people constantly criticizing Self for underperforming in the tournament, but it took one tournament run and now he’s got 4 final fours and two championships in the last 14 years, and he had to miss out on a tournament when he had the best team in the country.
Same thing with Toney Bennett, it took all of one tournament run the flip the narrative. He went from a choker and a style of play that can’t win in March to winning it all.
It’s just silly to say that just because something hasn’t or didn’t happen means that it won’t or was never going to. You just want to have a consistently strong program that regularly has teams that are talented enough and capable enough to make a run without just getting lucky, i.e. just regularly have top 10 teams.
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I hate Tony Bennett. I hate that the Demolition Man rescued his legacy. Purdue should have won that game
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It’s annoying too because he was a huge tournament choker that was flat out losing all those games in past years not by bad luck, but by being just bad.
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