Iāve been wondering about that. I saw some people espousing some teamās really hard schedule (donāt remember who at this point) then I looked at KenPomās numbers and their schedule was nothing to write home about and I started to wonder where they get their SOS numbers. Thatās really frustrating that they āgot rid of the RPIā but still use it as their SOS indicator. Makes absolutely no sense.
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Iām confused how Michigan can have a SoS of 52 given the number of Quad 1 games theyāve played and how good the Big Ten is this year. IIRC Kenpom has Michiganās SoS in the top 10.
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This is excellent, thank you. A 6 seed for Michigan would be greatā¦Iāve always preferred the 6 seed to the 4 or 5 seeds, just to avoid playing 1 seeds for as long as possible. The gaps between teams get pretty small once you get past the 1 seeds.
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Part of that too, I would argue, is avoiding the elite mid-major teams in favor of a middling bubble P5 11-seed as well. Plus, like you said, a three-seed is much better second round competition than a one-seed.
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Ace Anbender at Mgoblog got Bart Torvik to look at Michiganās splits with and without Livers, and weāre #11 in the country when Livers plays. Regardless of where we get seeded (presuming itās in that 6-10 range as this article predicts), people are going to hate seeing us in their part of the bracket.
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Yeah, I think that is really going to depend on the next month (hopefully) with a healthy Livers.
Going back and grabbing the Bahamas games will make any splits look good though 
Baseline for Michigan is to defend home court down the stretch. If it can win a couple road games then I think it is fair to start raising expectations.
Was thinking, the one upside to not being a protected seed this year: Pretty unlikely that weāll have to watch them play Montana again.
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Iāve seen some brackets where we are still in their Pod, which would be very funny. If we get a 7 seed and they win their conference tourney again there could be a theoretical 7-15 2nd round matchup
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Iāll consent to this, so long as the 2 seed they beat is either Duke or Kentucky.
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Iām all in for round 3 of Sayeed Pridgett and Timmy Falls
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Whatās the deal with the gap between the Kenpom rankings and the NET? And why is MSU so far ahead of Michigan in the NET? MSU is 15 and Michigan is 25 when IMO, the resume is better for Michigan.
NET resumes:
Michigan
Q1: 6-8
Q1A: 4-4 (wins over #3, 11, 15 and 33)
Q2: 4-1
Michigan State
Q1: 5-8
Q1A: 2-6 (wins over #16 and #34)
Q2: 5-1
So what gives? Why is there a 10 spot gap between them?
Here are the team sheets:
My guess is that the gap comes down to some of the efficiency margin stats at play. MSU is ranked 9th in Torvik (filtered by one day to avoid preseason priors) and Michigan is 14th. A few more blowout wins by MSU overall.
Whereās Purdue at in the NET? Is Saturday another opportunity for a Quad 1 win?
Yes, the upcoming games are on the bottom of the team sheet. Four of Michiganās final five game are Q1 ā¦ although Wisconsin probably wonāt stay in the top 30.
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You can never really get a great answer to this because NET is a blackbox. As Dylan said, itās probably just something to do with the idiosyncrasies of how NET handles effeciency (which is in some proportion to use MOV up to 10 points and also raw effeciency margin)
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Hard to fathom that a home game against a Big Ten opponent is a Q4 affair but here we are with Nebraska languishing at 175 in the NET.
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How is the SOS calculated on these? On the advanced metric sites, Michigan is 1st (Torvik) and 3rd (KenPom) in SOS. 57th here.
Same for MSU ā much higher on the two sites above than the 46th listed (I get that the rankings for each set are different, which leads to small changes, but this gap seems really wide).
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It is basically the RPI SOS component which is absolutely insane, but ā¦ oh well.
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Thought I read somewhere that SOS is still calculated using RPI, which if true is simply beyond stupid. NCAA decided that RPI was too easy to game and too old so they make their own metric but then still use said outmoded RPI for strength of schedule for their hollowed team sheets that the committee uses to seed. Just baffling.
EDIT: So the reason Michigan is worse than MSU in SOS is largely because their RPI [link] is 48 while MSUās is 41.
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āJust bafflingāis the NCAAās management philosophy.
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