Originally Posted by
Kedsy
The numbers you cite don't tell the whole story, because Virginia plays at a much slower pace than Duke. If Virginia played as many possessions as Duke has, that 20 point average margin would be almost 25.
But be that as it may, if Duke had performed better than Virginia against a better schedule, by definition Duke would be ahead of Virginia in the computer rankings. At this point, I assume the real reason Duke is behind Virginia is that our efficiencies were worse while Tre Jones was out with his injury. But if that weren't true, and UVa was still ahead of Duke, it would be because UVa performed better against their schedule than Duke did against their's. The only reason to say that a team lower in the computer rankings should be considered better than a team or teams ahead of them is because the computer system is flawed. But my big issue is, if the system is that flawed, it doesn't make sense to use that same system for the ancillary evaluation.
For example, if you're using a team's performance against the "top 50" as secondary information because you don't entirely trust the overall ranking, but you determine which teams are in the top 50 based on the same rating system you don't entirely trust, that doesn't make a lot of sense, at least to me.
And, as ice-9 said, if, e.g., schedule strength is a major part underlying the computer ranking, using schedule strength as a separate, supporting evaluator is double-counting, essentially saying that schedule strength should be counted more than it already is in the ranking calculation. And again, if you think that, it means you think the computer system is flawed, presumably too flawed to be relied upon (which begs the question, why are you even using it?).
The obvious answer is to find a computer ranking system that isn't flawed (or at least is minimally flawed) and then live with what it tells us. But apparently that's either too difficult or not acceptable, so I guess we'll have to live with what we have.