It's May 10. Do you know where your backup big man is?
- Thread starter ColonelRutgers
- Start date
Other than Dickinson (Michigan) and Edney/Williams (Purdue), who are the other returning centers in the B10 at this point? I can't think of any guys 6'10" or bigger on any of the other teams, offhand.
That’s the point. It’s deliberate. We have better back up options than a Candido Sa type would add. It’s not that we can’t get kids like that - Pike probably doesn’t want them. The bottom line is very few teams have more than one “proven” big unless one of them is a returning Shaq type. And now that there’s no sit out requirement even those kind of kids might bolt for starting roles.
Cockburn, Wahab is transferring to Maryland, and Jackson Davis come to mind
Not by teams who had 2-7 ft tall Centers. If anything Big teams got beat by smaller quicker teams with athletes who can shoot, run and jump.
We discussed this at length all season. The B1G is the most physical conference, it's also the slowest compared to the other P5s (JY aside). This was a concern all year and it reared its head in the tournament. Personally if we had a guy like Mamu I think we'd really open things up.
Yes, we do...except I find it hard to believe he won’t have 2 fouls by halftime of every B1G game.
They actually use it to evaluate an entire country and declare a national champion.
The WCC won a national championship this season. Does that mean it is the best conference in the country?
Single-elimination tournaments are an awful way to evaluate how good any team/conference is. Do you honestly think that UConn was the best team in the country in 2014? That Wisconsin was better than Kentucky in 2015? That Oral Roberts is a better team than Ohio State this year?
The tournament is really fun and is part of what makes college basketball so great, but it is an objectively bad way to assess quality. Efficiency numbers (KenPom/Bart Torvik) and double-digit game samples (conference seasons, for example) are a much better way to evaluate.
Just because the Pac-12 way overperformed in April does not mean it was the best conference in the country last season.
Your point still stands, but the national champion was Baylor this year
Actually it does. Playing make believe games in your head doesn't make one conference better than another. Playing real games on courts does. The Big Ten was touted as the best conference for two years but when matched against other teams in must win games the BIG lost Pretending the BIG was better than how it played in real games and the PAC is worse is just being silly.
Oral Roberts beat Ohio State, a top-4 team in the Big Ten that was ranked in the top five nationally for weeks last season, in the tournament. Was Oral Roberts a better team than Ohio State last season? Would Oral Roberts finish in the top 3 in the Big Ten?
This is just one example. Your point has no merit. A one-game sample size, especially from a famously hectic tournament, is not enough to evaluate the strength of a team or a conference.
You are right. I think I was still so surprised at how that game went that I erased it from my memory.
An equal example is the fact Gonzaga beat UCLA in the Final Four. Concluding that the WCC is better than the Pac 12 because of that is equally dumb.
You're picking individual games. Overall, the B10 showed that they were overrated based on their showing in the tourney. If you want to make a case that earlier in the year, the B10 had a winning record against OC teams, that's fine, but when it counted, the B10 fell short. And to go back to your Oral Roberts example, they were better than Ohio State because they beat them on the floor. Maybe one team was better than the other earlier in the season, maybe not, and maybe Oral Roberts would have finished in the top 3, maybe not, but that's just speculation and any stats you might want to use to prove your point don't matter because they are based on what happened before the tourney. Results on the court are all that matter.
The B1G was not overrated, it didn't perform in the NCAAs...it is by far the best or 2nd best conference 3 years in a row now. The NCAAs is not an evaluation that erases 4 months of work and 12 months of recruiting.
Simply put, one input is not a good sample size for anything. You can argue that all the games the B10 played combine gives a good idea but really it’s imperfect at best and it’s designed to be that way. Of course, I do think it’s obvious the B10 was overrated but to me that’s just because the conference is outdated, not that it lacked players. Plus there’s plenty of things you can say about how playing in a tough conference can ware teams down come tournament time, and that all the teams were spent by March. Really, the system we use to rank teams does not actually measure what the best teams are and is a suboptimal practice, but it’s designed that way to keep it interesting.
Sorry, but since they didn't perform up to their seedings in the NCAA, they were overrated. Isn't that obvious?
The only way to truly evaluate how good a group of teams is:
a) a European soccer league season where each team in the league plays the others both home and away.
b) a playoff system that features best-of-5/7 series.
One-off games in a tournament where matchups are created randomly mean nothing in terms of being a sample size to evaluate the strength of a conference/team. Thinking so is so simplistic.
You know Oral Roberts would not have finished in the top 3 in the Big Ten, why are you pretending not to?
And what about previous years? The style of play and type of players in the B1G didn't change in one year and the conference record was good in 2018 and 2019.
They beat Ohio State, Florida, and lost to Arkansas by 2 points in the tourney, so I'm not "pretending" anything. So it isn't a stretch to say that they might have finished in the top 3 in the B10. I have an idea, why don't we forget about the tourney and let Kenpom, Andy Katz, or whatever determine the best team and the best conferences?
It’s more than a stretch, it’s completely idiotic. Just because you apparently don’t understand how numbers work doesn’t make them invalid.
The tournaments exist for entertainment (for both players and fans) not because they crown the best team as champion.
You're starting to get nasty, so I'll just finish my end of it by saying that what you wrote at the end is one of the more ridiculous things I've ever read, and that it makes it pretty clear that you've never played competitive sports.
Do you really think a single elimination, locked seeds tournament is an effective way to evaluate how good a team is?
I've said it before.
Everyone complains about CFB playoffs being too restrictive.
But never mention the NCAA tourney lets every Tom Dick and Jane into the tourney.
That includes our beloved Rutgers with a .500 conference record.
Imagine a 4-4 Big Ten Rutgers football team campaigning for the CFB playoffs berth.
As you said, the NCAA tournament is the most exciting. But functionally, not the best at awarding the "Best Team".
It's a simple sample size question:
30+ regular season games or at most 6 tournament games
In fact, in high school I was on a state championship team that was definitely not the best team in the state. The next year, we had a significantly better team that probably was the best team in the state, and did not win. Because I am not stupid, I didn't conclude after the one loss that actually this team must be worse. Anyone who has ever even watched non-competitive sports understands that performance varies.
Right. If we really just wanted to "identify the best team" we wouldn't even have conferences or tournaments. We would just play as close to a round robin schedule as possible and then use efficiency numbers or adjusted scoring difference to fill in the gaps. No one wants to do that because it would be boring as shit and sports is about competition not scientific experiments to identify the best team.
Oral Roberts finished fourth in the Southern Conference. We really slept on the SoCon, which was CLEARLY the best conference in the country based on your criteria.
I mean seriously, sit and just think about what you're saying. You are saying the team that finished 4th in the SoCon would finish top 3 in the Big Ten last season based on a sample size of three (3) games in a week.
Putting KenPom and Andy Katz in the same sentence might be the worst part of all of this. But to your point, I DO let KenPom tell me which the best conference is. It is easily the best way to measure it. I don't think that is how the national champion should be determined, but let's not confuse the team that wins the national championship with the best team in the country, because those are not always the same.
They also lost at Mizz (blown out), at OU (blown out) and lost by double digits at Arkansas during the season. Lost at Wichita and Okie State too. Putting aside not even competing for their own conference title, it’s not like they didn’t have opportunities in non-conference due to lack of games.
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