I swear I won't mention this again this season,but the fact that people put any credence in Lunardi makes me just a little bit insane.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club
I swear I won't mention this again this season,but the fact that people put any credence in Lunardi makes me just a little bit insane.
I think I'd actually rather be a 10 or 11 seed than an 8 or 9. Baylor/Gonzaga avoision is devoutly to be wished.
A movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it.
---Roger Ebert
Some questions cannot be answered
Who’s gonna bury who
We need a love like Johnny, Johnny and June
---Over the Rhine
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club
I would love for Duke to be an 11 seed in this tournament. Avoiding Baylor/Gonzaga as long as possible would be ideal. Michigan is looking scary lately, too. One of those other B1G teams between Ohio State and Illinois looks like they will get a 1 seed, too. The one that gets left out, which I am guessing will be Ohio State, will end up as a 2 seed with either Baylor or Gonzaga. Avoid that region as best you can.
My ideal situation for Duke would be that they get an 11 seed with a team like Villanova or Iowa as the 2 seed and then hope the 1 seed gets upset in the Sweet 16.
This season, at least right now, Joe Lunardi's chronicling of Duke's potential rise works to our advantage. Should Duke make the field as an at-large, the casual basketball fan's response goes from "What are they doing there?" to "At least we were warned about this."
Even in past years, when I paid closer attention to college basketball in general and followed most multi-bid conferences throughout the season, there would always be a handful of at-large teams in the field (like an 11-7 SEC team) that were so aggressively average that they still escaped my radar. In some ways, to a non-ACC fan, that's Duke this year.
Since this year has shown (if nothing else) the allure of money with regard to televised sports, I'm sure CBS would be delighted to have Duke in the field...
Yeah, that is a very good point.
To be clear, Lunardi is in no way impressive, especially in terms of aligning with seeds. His schtick was "I get the field almost exactly right", which is not terribly impressive but still serves as a useful barometer. It's less a matter of skill than simple tabulation. But he does at least get the "neighborhood" right.
So in addition to your point, the fact that Lunardi has us so close to the field means we probably really are so close to the field. Maybe we're actually "in" as of right now, maybe we're really in the "next 4 out" rather than "first 4 out", but we're probably not far from where Lunardi has us.
And, obviously, a lot of play left. If we can win at least 2 of the next 3, we're probably in good shape to make the tourney. Winning all 3 would put us in very good position to make the tourney.
The 11 plays the 6 in the R64 and then the 3 in the R32. You get the 2-seed in the Sweet 16. I see being a 10 or an 11 as pretty much the same as most of the #2s are not all that different from most of the #3s.
But, I am rooting for Duke to run the table and be a #5 or #6... a kid can dream, can't he?
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If I'm Mark Few, one trip to the championship game ever (a loss), and trying to build a legendary rep, heading one of the two clear best teams in the country, I'd love to beat [a somewhat marginal] Duke along the way. 1s often have to play someone who's matchup toxin, or underseeded, or or or. Weird stuff happens. You gotta play who's in front of you. I'd rather be able to say I beat Duke--Mike Krzyzewski--on the way to a title.
A movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it.
---Roger Ebert
Some questions cannot be answered
Who’s gonna bury who
We need a love like Johnny, Johnny and June
---Over the Rhine
The counterargument is that wherever we are seeded is likely to be an underseeding. We are playing FAR better basketball right now than we have over the course of the season. Torvik says that over our last 10 games, we've played like a 3 or 4 seed. So basically unless we miss the tournament by losing 2+ of the remaining regular season games, we're going to be almost certainly seeded several spots below where we are playing. An 8/9 seeded Duke means we're probably playing like a 4 seed. If we win out including the ACC tournament, that would mean we're playing like a 1 or 2 seed but would likely only get a 5 seed or so. So in Gonzaga's case, while getting a chance to scalp Duke sounds nice, facing the equivalent of a 5 seed in the second round seems a really unfortunate circumstance for the likely #1 overall seed.
Yes, they would still be favored, but I doubt that is a matchup they want in round 2.
If we are playing like an 8/9 seed come tournament time, we probably don't make the tournament, or at best it is in a play-in game.
Big test for the Dork polls seems to be in the making. Loyola-Chicago is ranked #11 in the NET, #10 in KenPom, #14 in Torvik, #16 in BPI, #21 in the AP poll, and #22 in the Coaches poll. But the mocks like Lunardi and USA Today are giving them an 8-seed, presumably because of their scheduling/lack of quality wins (Lunardi puts them in Gonzaga's subregion; USA Today puts them with Baylor).
If they're really a top 10 or 15 team, how unfair is it to make them an 8-seed? For that matter, how fair is it to the 1-seed to have to play a top-tier team in the second round? If they're really 8-seed quality, what's the point of the NET?
I've found historically that the AP poll does as good or better a job of predicting what the Committee will do re: seeding at the top of the bracket as any of the metrics. So, looked at that way, for Loyola to be ranked around 20 but generally mocked as an 8 seed (not just by Lunardi -- the Bracket Matrix consensus has them an 8 also) isn't too far off. Maybe Loyola is really a 6 seed rather than an 8. I don't think the NCAA has ever suggested they would strictly go by the NET rankings.
You left out:
The Tournament Selection Committee is on a fool's errand. This is a problem every year, but in the time of COVID, it is worse than ever. There were very few non-conference match-ups that had any meaning, so the TSC is trying to create seeds among teams in different conferences, when the only evidence comes from games between schools in the same conference.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Not even a remotely comparable situation.
Kentucky 2014 spent the entire regular season in the top 25, falling out at the very end, dropping from 14th to unranked in a 3-4 stretch that included two losses to third-ranked and then top-ranked Florida. They won two in the SECT and then ran afoul of Florida a third time in the final. That final stretch wasn't really that bad (a couple non-Florida conference losses though), but it took a season-long top 25 team down to the tier of the just unranked--which of course is where sevens and eights live. So maybe they should have been a seven. They were never even remotely in danger of missing the NCAAT.
However this Duke team finishes, the Miami loss was a really bad one, and Duke has spent the entire month of February in severe NCAAT jeopardy, with a possible happy outcome starting to come into view.
Wichita State lost a one possession game to Kentucky. WSU was pretty good but widely regarded as the weakest 1--both got sent to the West, usually a punishment for eastern and Midwestern teams who stumbled late. People were definitely not writing metrics-based articles on 538 about WSU as one of a top two, down from which there's one of the biggest gaps between teams two and three in the last two decades. And that's where Gonzaga is.
Eights do upset ones, and late February Duke is better than Groundhog Day Duke. But this comparison is way off.
Also, you should have to play someone good in the second round. Eights and nines are supposed to have roughly the 29th-36th best resumes in the whole country, surrounding the 90th percentile. I'm pretty sure Mark Few knows that, and if things break bad, he's not going to be whining about how the nefarious CBS-genunflecting NCAA seeding committee conspired to screw him with Duke.
Baylor had an efficiency margin of +34.84 coming into the ISU game. Today, their EM is down to +33.00. That is a fairly large move but still gives Baylor a pretty big leg up on the #3 team, Michigan, which has an EM +30.59. Gonzaga is in another stratosphere at +38.30.
To put that +38.30 in perspective, here are the annual EM leaders over the past decade. These are all post-tournament numbers, so not exactly a good match to pre-tournament figures but still...
2020- Kansas +30.23, Gonzaga +26.95 (last year was a pretty weak year at the top in college basketball, would have made for a wild tourney... oh well)
2019 - Virginia +34.22, Gonzaga +32.85, Mich St +30.81, Duke +30.62
2018 - Villanova +33.76, Virginia +29.53, Duke +28.86
2017 - Gonzaga +32.05, Villanova +29.88
2016 - Villanova +32.01, UNC +29.82
2015 - Kentucky +36.91, Wisconsin +33.72, Duke +32.48
2014 - Louisville +30.41, Arizona +30.11
2013 - Louisville +32.92, Florida +31.18
2012 - Kentucky +32.59, Ohio St +30.07
2011 - Ohio St +33.47, Duke +28.42 (what about only games in which Kyrie played?)
2010 - Duke +33.29, Kansas +31.85
As you can see, Baylor would be the top team most years in the past, though not every time. This year's Gonzaga though has a higher EM than any team over the past decade. In fact, if you go back even further in Ken's database (back to 2002), you cannot find any year where Gonzaga's +38EM would not be easily the highest in the land (wish I could find numbers on 1999 Duke!!). We will see if it holds up for Gonzaga into the post-season, but it would appear the Zags have a real shot at being a truly legendary team this year and going down as one of the greats in the history of the sport.
-Jason "and yes, I will be cross posting this into the dork poll thread seeing as it is about 98% dork poll content" Evans
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