Wisconsin probably punched its ticket to the dance tonight at Iowa… which is completely unraveling as we expect from a Fran McCaffery coached team.
The Big Ten title race is basically up for grabs and Indiana has the inside path despite the fact that everyone wanted Tom Crean fired in December.
Wisconsin’s turnaround has been incredible… Huge wins at Iowa and at Maryland down the stretch. Have won 10 of 11 after starting the season 9-9 with a bunch of bad Ls.
Side note for NCAA tournament purposes…
Three teams to watch: NCST, PSU, Northwestern. All are just outside the top-100 and a couple of wins could boost Michigan’s resume IMO.
PSU: NEB, @MSU, NW, ILL
NW: RUT, @PSU, NEB
NCST: @SYR, BC, @ND
Annoying how Wisconsin can lose a POY, another first-round pick, a few other vets, and their coach (I initially misspelled this “roach”, which is fitting) and still continue their hateful ways after a few minor bumps in the road. I haven’t followed them too much this year but I gather Hayes is finally becoming the player they had hoped for and other guys like Happ are stepping up. Still think that Koenig is the most overrated player in the conference – he’s good but I’d take Walton any day of the week.
A win vs either one of those would be major! We need these games!!!
Zak Showalter is also an extremely proficient defender and capable of hitting clutch threes. He is almost lock-down at this point and is a total pest.
Thanks for the breakdown umhoops!
It would probably solidify our spot in the tournament with a win in either of the next 2 games, but equally as big is getting more “top-100” wins in the eyes of the committee. I’m a PSU/NCST fan these next 2 weeks.
Is this based on Kenpom? If it is, then isn’t @Nebraska a top 100 win? With PSU, NW, and Nebraska all playing each other, seems hard to read how the rankings could shake out. Seems like, unless PSU beats MSU, there is really only room for 1 of the 3 schools in the top 100; because they all need to beat each other to improve their ranking, and their other games are against teams that wont provide much of a resume boost (ILL, Rutgers).
Selection committee uses RPI
I believe that is why UM fans need to root for PSU… we beat them twice and that would give us 2 more top-100 wins. (someone correct me if I’m wrong.) Last I think I checked PSU was RPI 101 or 102.
Stupid arbitrary cutoff at 100. Can’t tell me that PSU and NC St. Are significantly worse than Albany, LOng Beach St and UC Santa Barbara. But our resume would “look” much better if we replaced our three wins with the former with three against the latter. Silly. Hope the committee doesn’t take hard line approaches when looking at records against top X in the RPI
Question: I see different RPI’s all over, even though there is apparently one formula, why is this? On liveRPI, we are #49, #50 on ESPN, and 52 above…
Probably just data consistency issues I’m guessing. Based on when sites updates, a couple mistakes here and there could compound into a couple of places difference.
The actual calculation is fairly straightforward
The RPI is calculated by adding three parts. Part I (25% of the formula): Team winning percentage. For the 2005 season, the NCAA added a bonus/penalty system, where each home win or road loss get multiplied by 0.6 in the winning percentage calculation. A home loss or road win is multiplied by 1.4
I would think that the committee wouldn’t be so shallow as to only look at Top 100 RPI wins.
If we’re on the bubble, wouldn’t they closely examine all of your wins/losses compared to the other teams on the bubble?
This is true, but it’s a stronger starting point for UM if it has the top 100 wins. If you can boast the top 100 wins and no bad losses it’s pretty hard to keep them out. Otherwise you leave more up to the whims of the committee. With PSU’s schedule and their recent success, I think they have a good shot to improve a couple spots and add two more top-100 wins for us. NC State could do it too, especially if they could upset a somewhat struggling 'Cuse team on the road, and that would be a top-100 road victory for us.
I believe ESPN and Crashing the Dance’s RPI updates daily and liveRPI’s is up-to-the-minute. I guess data consistency is the only possibility, although as you said, the formula is unambiguous.
Yes, and sometimes when it comes down to very similar records then you DO impose some relatively arbitrary standard to help make your decisions. Rules often carry some arbitrary germ.
PSU holds on to beat Nebraska and jumps up to 92 in the RPI. That 5-9 vs top-100 looks a lot better than 3-9. I could easily see PSU beating NW and Illinois at home to close out the season as well.
I know on other topics some people think the “top-100” wins thing is ridiculous since “we don’t have any bad losses”. But you can not look at past history and decisions by the committee and not think going from 3 top-100 wins to 5 top-100 wins isn’t HUGE when comparing resume (especially if we don’t win one of our last 2 games.)
Thanks for the update umhoops!
Yes.
RPI is not the only thing the committee considers.
