I read somewhere on one of the boards that a 20 point win over a CCSU type at home is more valuable than a road loss by let's say 10 at a Gonzaga or neutral against a Houston. Not at all true. Importantly,margin of victory under the NET criteria,no. 5 is capped at 10 points. Irrelevant if Rutgers wins 88-53. A competitive road or neutral loss to an upper Quad win is worth,by my calculation about 150% of that cupcake home win over a 300 plus opponent.
Scoring margin and quality road and neutral wins
- Thread starter RU72
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Well, it's not exactly true because Gonzaga is like 50 points per 100 possessions (or ~33ppg) better than CCSU. So a 20 point home win against CCSU would be slightly worse than a 10 point road loss to Gonzaga. But FIG is right that the efficiencies are not capped and also the capped MOV thing is gone from the NET now so it's completely irrelevant.
Agreed - but it’s also true that at some point too many losses become too many regardless of who you lost to. Following this premise, how do you balance the two concerns?
Wins and losses are binary per game, but the advanced stats are blended across games. @ Gonzaga and CC (home) blend to a harder schedule than @ DePaul and @ UMass but the probability of going 0-2 in the former is actually much lower than in the latter.
The cap on total number of losses is 13.....that's the magic number. Fans can complain all they want, there are more teams who play their way out of a potential NCAA birth by the middle if December, trying to prove a point, than those who are smart and understand "resume ".
Quality wins (Q1 and Q2) and making sure you stay at or below 13 losses trumps anything and everything else. The sports media and NCAA basketball media want to "create content and discussions", about SOS, this league's RPI, where teams will be seeded etc.....all fine and dandy.
13 losses is the number 1 item to avoid for as long as possible, if you are in a Power 5/6 league. Once you get to 14 or more losses, it becomes very difficult to make the field.
Quality wins (Q1 and Q2) and making sure you stay at or below 13 losses trumps anything and everything else. The sports media and NCAA basketball media want to "create content and discussions", about SOS, this league's RPI, where teams will be seeded etc.....all fine and dandy.
13 losses is the number 1 item to avoid for as long as possible, if you are in a Power 5/6 league. Once you get to 14 or more losses, it becomes very difficult to make the field.
Yes and no. It depends a lot on what you do in conference. It’s really hard to finish middle of the pack 10-10 or 9-12 and get in without a quality non-conference win regardless of total loss count.
In my opinion, Indiana needed their neutral win over ND to get in the field with their 13 losses and it wouldn’t have mattered if it was 12. I think if you swapped out @ Syracuse and ND (neutral) for Maine and Central CT on their schedule - and they went 2-0 instead of 1-1 they would not be in.
I think for the most part the scheduling thing is being way over-thought, at least with regards to tournament selection. There is probably an optimal schedule but the only ways to really **** it up, imo, are to be insanely weak (which is impossible for a power conference team) or insanely strong (such that you can be a top 40ish team with a ~0.500 record). Anything in the middle is probably fine if you play well.
San Francisco was half a game worse against a similar strength schedule and got in. Not sure you can chalk that up to anything except random noise.
A team like Oklahoma basically provides the opposite example.
I guess San Francisco was half a game better, not worse (I looked at the final records including NCAA/NIT) but I think the point still stands.
Oklahoma supports the point I made. They were only even on the bubble with a 7-11 conference record because they had played such a tough non-conference. Iowa State made the tourney despite a 7-11 conference record because of quality non-conference wins. No way either would’ve even been close with soft schedules.
WF missed out with a 13-7 ACC record. It was because all they had on their resume was home wins over a First 4 team and UNC (not considered that great at the time).
I still don’t understand SF’s inclusion but it seems that the committee may evaluate mid-majors differently from major conference teams. They got in because of their NET which seemed to be greatly helped by getting 3 match ups with the Zags.
Had WF won 2 out of 5 Q1 games and not 1 they are probably in with the same schedule.
Oklahoma State is in the field if Pike and Hobbs were in charge of scheduling.
You have to look at this argument from all angles.
You have to look at this argument from all angles.
That’s not true - at least not for the portion of their schedule they can control (that’s what we’re talking about here - OOC scheduling and the risks of making them too hard).
Iowa State won out its non-conference slate. So no matter who they scheduled instead, their record could not improve.
Oklahoma beat the toughest two of their non-conference opponents (Arkansas and Florida). Just as Green is saying we can’t cherry pick to swap our Lafayette loss for a loss vs Gonzaga (vs replacing the NJIT win) you can’t say that adding Central CT types would replace losses to Butler and Utah State rather than those signature wins. It goes both ways.
Iowa State didn't play a particularly tough OOC? Bart has it ranked either #183 or #219 depending on which measure you use. Oklahoma's was #121 or #99. Their schedules were tough because of their conference, not because of some brutal OOC slate.
What’s your point? Their conference was very good, but they have no control over that part of the schedule.
BAC - if Iowa State hypothetically won out against Rutgers OOC schedule instead of their own - do they still make the field? I’m thinking not.
Let’s be clear, regardless - going 4-0 @ Seton Hall, @ DePaul, @ UMass and Clemson (home) is far from a given. I hated our schedule last year, but not because of the blended SOS per se. We scheduled 4 “losable” games - and only 1 was against a projected contender (and that game was on the road). High risk, low reward. In scheduling the worst possible cupcakes, we also left basically zero upside for beating a possible autobid or 2 (like SFA) and in my opinion the trade off wasn’t justified (I think the relative difference in probability of a loss at the RAC to Rider vs Lehigh is low).
My point is this is a tortured edge case that only works in hindsight. The question is whether Iowa State would have a worse chance of making the field before the season is played with a different schedule. Obviously if you take a bubble teams that won all of their OOC games and give them a counterfactual with a weaker OOC schedule that will be bad for them. No one is trying to claim that schedules do not matter to any individual team. The claim is that it makes little difference on average. There will exist situations that are the opposite (team would've been better off with a couple wins against weaker teams) as well.
Ill get back to you when i have to time to go back to the net site
That’s not what I’m doing. Hawk and a few others focused on overall SOS are saying the BIG schedule is strong enough that we can afford a fluff non-conference slate. The B12 slate was even tougher than ours - and yet I think Iowa State needed every bit of the difficulty of their non-conference slate.
I don’t actually think it would be that easy to find a clear historic example where a cake walk non-conference slate (of the magnitude ours might be at next year) would’ve helped a team that would otherwise be out get in. Here’s my best crack:
BAC - let’s fold OU in too. Since they lost at home to Butler, let’s assume they lose the Clemson game instead and win out the rest of our schedule. 2 less losses. No neutral Arkansas win. Road win at SHU instead but much weaker computer numbers due to the drop in SOS. In or out? Note that even if IN - our schedule for next year is looking potentially lot worse even than the one we’re giving OU in this example.
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