My sampling size is small but Zona looked very very overrated when I saw them and truthfully when I watched Louisville a few times I was very impressed…
We’re -1 in Kenpom and -1.5 in Vegas. I think Vegas get up to -2 or 3 by tip
When our record on neutral courts gets inevitably played up, I bet we’re favored by close to 4 come tip.
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That’s fair enough. My sample size for Louisville is also fairly small, so I might have caught them on off nights. Their half-court offense looked pretty rough–if they weren’t scoring in transition, they were having a tough time scoring at all. In the games I saw, they shot very poorly and their bigs weren’t a threat to do much on the offensive end other than rebound. I’m not sure if the stats bear that out over the whole season.
If we can limit our turnovers and if the refs call a fair game (they mug people on defense), then I like our chances. This, of course, assumes that we beat OK State, which is not a given.
Great to hear! When I saw the possible matchup with Louisville it had me freaked out. But I am reading through a lot of comments and some people think the matchup is not so bad, so that is encouraging!
I guess anyway we slice it it is going to be difficult…
You look through Louisville’s scores and it’s not really overly great. Blow out a few bad teams, some terrible games against good teams and everything else close. Not really playing that well right now either. Just meh coming in as far as a 2 seed would be.
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“Hollis on conference call said committee switched Michigan and Wiscy after Wolverines won. So UM got 7 and avoided being 8 seed in East.”
This pisses me off like no other. It’s sickening, pure sickening how political Hollis was and how he had it out for certain teams. You cannot convince me otherwise. You never want to root for bad things to happen, but I will applaud when he gets canned at MSU for his failure of running their AD.
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Come on, there’s no big Mark Hollis conspiracy here. MSU’s seed was a little eye opening, but otherwise we knew the B1G as a conference was going to be seeded around the middle of the bracket.
But keep in mind Hollis is just 1 of 10 votes on the committee and he had to leave the room when MSU was discussed/voted on, so he/HOLLIS is not the one to complain about for MSU’s slight bump up.
Also keep in mind the rules involved for Conference discussion…
“An athletic director may be present when other schools from his or her conference are discussed, but he or she may only speak if asked.”
…so highly unlikely that Hollis submarined fellow B1G schools in the limited opportunities he was ASKED to talk about them.
Do you truly believe we should be a 7 right now? Do you truly believe we should’ve been an 8 playing on Thursday if we lost? Do you truly believe Wisconsin should be an 8? Do you truly believe MSU should be a 9?
There’s legitimately no reason ANY of those should have happened. None.
Whether he’s in the room or not, there’s PLENTY he can do to direct those type of decisions. We’re only talking about a small group of people making these decisions. Like in everything in life, politics will always occur with people in positions in power.
EDIT: It legitimately brings up the question, would we have been in after the Nebraska win? They mightve had us in the play in game had we lost to Illinois.
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^^^Yupp
And I think, even with it being blatantly wrong, Michigan being a 7 instead of a 6 is the least awful seeding mistake you listed. MSU is OBVIOUSLY not worthy of a 9 seed, Izzo got that one by name alone (and the track record behind it, but still not a good reason). Wisconsin should not only be more than 6 spots ahead of MSU, as a direct comparison, but it deserved a 7 seed.
Aside: Minnesota as a 5???
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Just saw brackets. What a joke, actually besides us getting screwed these brackets aren’t as bad as usual. Smu as a 6 an absolute joke too. So is msu as a 9. Minny a 5? That should be us or we should be where creighton is.
Bottom line the committee is a joke every year. What bliss said earlier is true. Screw this pod crap, rules against playing conference too early and just rank the teams 1-68 and pair them. Who cares if your across country. You want the fairest and therefore best draws for your roster.
They need to back to valuing late year games more. It’s about who you are now, not November .
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Listening to the Tournament Selection Show, Hollis said how difficult it was for teams to move up seed lines the past few days. So it seems likely that Michigan entered the B1G Tournament as a 9 seed — safely in the bracket — and slid up 2 seed lines over the course of the weekend.
I’m not trying to defend MSU’s seed, but the Sparties lost to a bunch of top-seeded teams early in the season while injuries played a major impact on its roster. MSU went on to post a better in-conference showing than we did.
So fair to assume both entered play on Thursday seeded on the 9-line. Michigan won and was able to move up; Michigan State split its games and stayed put? Logical responses from the committee when looked at that way.
As for Minnesota, another team seeded a line or 2 higher than I thought, but clearly the committee has a lot of respect for Vanderbilt — Minny’s early season win over Vandy probably looked better to the committee than it did to you or me, plus its B1G regular season mark and you can see the logic for that seeding.
Did they though ? We just won the conference. Add are 4 wins and their one and done and it’s clear we had the better big ten year overall. i value the conference regular season champ more then the tourney champ but we are now 14-8 in conference. Comparatively I’ll take out big ten performance versus theirs. The tourney counts as games played and we have the higher win percentage now.
I’ll also add to @slyboogie2 by saying you can’t take conference record into play all that much. With 14 teams there’s too much unbalanced schedules that alter conference records.
4 Ws on on a HOME court against two top 25s, a top 50 and top 75 RPI teams are the backbone of most bubble teams resumes. We did that ON TOP of our resume and on a neutral court. We should’ve been bumped to a 6 or stayed at a 7 if we had lost.
It’s a broken system with dumb people in charge that are lazy as hell, crooked and just use RPI for all their decisions, with a nod toward locations aiding that.
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Honestly I started to wonder if we were a 5. I thought 6 was a lock. Add in all those close road losses to good teams and it’s clear were at least a 6. Jesus we weren’t even the top 7! St Mary’s was. Look at their resume then ours. We had more good wins this week then they did all year.
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Also as far as the matchups I don’t like it. I think Louisville is underrated and is one of the few teams that has the bigs to guard ours on the outside AND those bigs could pound us on the class. Very lengthy and athletic.
I actually think we match up better with duke and Kentucky. I think duke is overrated still. I don’t care that they got hot. I’ve seen them play suspect to often. Louisville was a team I thought I might take to get on a run but now man it’s tough.
Also how is Villanova the top seed but has to run the gauntlet? I think the Badgers could beat them. Their getting it together and those bigs could really pound nova though. I also loved Florida, smu, then duke, and I think they had a tough 5 that I’m blanking on. Seems like they did not get rewarded
This is hilarious–and true.
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I honestly believe we would beat Gonzaga by 5-15 and Saint Mary’s by 20-40 points.
We’re the next team behind South Carolina, and I bet it all came down to the fact that we lost to them on the road all the way back in December. Honestly, you can’t expect the committee to be able to watch all the games each team plays in (or even most), but it becomes especially hard when committee members are current ADs with full time jobs to boot.
I’m not sure what the current composition of the committee is, but I feel like it should be heavily favored towards retired ADs/basketball coaches that have the time to pay attention to the teams they are seeding.
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I doubt it. Gonzaga is legit … besides, the difference in competition from conference to conference isn’t as drastic as you would think.