🏀 Outside the ACC - February 2024

Men's Basketball
22

Yeah, the odd secrecy around it doesn’t do them any favors.

23

Kansas (vs Houston) and Kentucky (vs Tennessee) home underdogs on the same day. Wild.

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24

Five Top 25 matchups this weekend and 4 of them are Top 10 matchups:

#8 Kansas hosting #4 Houston at 4 on ESPN

#7 Duke at #3 Carolina at 6:30 on ESPN

#12 Iowa State at #18 Baylor at 8 on ESPN2

#5 Tennessee at #10 Kentucky at 8:30 on ESPN

And then tomorrow #2 Purdue at #6 Wisconsin at 1 on CBS

Best time of the year for CBB!

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25

Do we care (for our metrics) whether Florida or Texas A&M win this game?

26

Who gave A&M those jerseys they look like the jerseys a set costume director give you for the Fresh Prince episode when he plays basketball

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27

Florida I think. They are one of our 2 Q 1s and we need them to keep it. Plus Texas an and m is on the bubble. They will likely always be a q2 win

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28

Are you thinking that Florida is a tournament lock then?

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29

https://twitter.com/RockChalkBlog/status/1753896974783255000

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30

I they could definitely miss but they have some good wins especially a road win at kentucky

31

This one’s probably a wash from our perspective - A&M won’t cross the threshold to give us a Quad 1 win, and Florida won’t drop low enough for us to lose the Quad 1. We’ll probably be competing with both for an at-large bid, and we’ve beaten both. :person_shrugging:

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32

Florida and A&M both on the bubble like half the P5 Conference teams. Florida is better for us. Really good game though.

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33

Sheppard and Dillingham balling out has kinda obscured the fact that Justin Edwards has looked like Just A Guy for Kentucky rather than a top-5 prototypical wing recruit.

34

Chance Mallory will be our Zakai Zeigler: trade an inch for like 8-10% better from 3 on heavy volume (the Maryland 247 guy compared him to steph curry lol).

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35

Refs in this Gonzaga-St. Mary’s game have lost control of this game.

36

Duke UnC same … just blatant stuff being missed… RJ Davis stepped completely out of bounds with the ball - ignored

1 Like
37

Josiah-Jordan James has had kinda a weird career. Usually former 5-stars don’t stay for that long (even if you’ve disregard the COVID year aspect), they either are gone to the league at some point, or gone for a new start if they aren’t on a league trajectory.

38

I would like a switch to WAB as well. The ultimate decision should be based on team resumes – wins and losses – not based on a model’s assessment of how good that team is. And I say this as someone who believes the KenPom-type models are the best predictors we have! But they still shouldn’t be the primary criterion for NCAAT selection. Show me what you’ve done.

For fun, go to Torvik and sort by WAB (rightmost column). See who would benefit from a pure WAB system. (FYI, Virginia would currently rank #34. Not a big shift for us.)

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39

If there is such a thing as a good loss then our loss to Wisconsin has become very understandable. They are a really good basketball team, and are essentially tied with Purdue at the half.

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40

The CBS broadcast is so next level compared to the ESPN half assedness.

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41

I like that every game counts for something resume-wise. Mid-majors who don’t get Q1 opportunities are more fairly treated by WAB; e.g. Princeton right now has about the same WAB than Kentucky, which reflects that there is some difficulty to stringing together the sheer quantity of wins that they have done. The risk/benefit adjusts to the difficulty of the games; e.g. Teams don’t get a lot of benefit from what are now Q4 games, but there are big punishments for losing even 1-2 of those games, which feels right to me.

Also, it eliminates the edge cases that come with the quad system when opponents ranked are on the borders of quadrants; an away game against team #74 really shouldn’t be treated much differently than one against team #76, but that actually matters under the quad system.

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