Conference Watch

[jncuse]

As some have probably noted I do have great interest in watching how the tournament field develops over the course of a year.

The period between the start of the season until January 1st, essentially establishes the frame for the tournament. It's not individual teams that distinguish themselves now, but it is the conferences that really improve the chances of their members. How conferences perform the next 2 months will have a high correlation to what conference has the most seeds and what conference dominates the pod seeds.

While a team's individual RPI may not matter that much come tourney time, the tournament does look at RPI for quality wins. So teams just beat on each other and get more top 50 wins.

The best example is the PAC-12 last year. While they had no dominate teams in pre-season, almost the entire conference performed quite well (If I remember correctly, 11 of their schools were in the top 75 in RPI entering conference play). That just allows them to beat on each other have a bunch of top 50 wins, and makes it hard to get bad losses. The PAC-12 also benefited last year from the decline of the Mountain West.
But in recent years the PAC-12 has also had seasons of only 2-4 teams. And this was because the conference did very poorly in November and December.

People here have also pissed on the new Big East, but as long as they have a high Conference RPI entering season play, they will get 4-6 teams in the tourney.

How does this impact Syracuse? Last year it certainly mattered as a bubble team. Hopefully for this year, it is only impacting us in terms of where we get seeded in the POD. Point is that we should be cheering for the ACC to win every out of conference game. But I don't always -- I would rather see Duke lose.

 

[jncuse]

While it is still quite early with out of conference games for the next 40 days, especially some of the bigger tournaments, just some early observations. The next 10 days will be key and these numbers will start to be more relevant.

Current Conference RPI
1. Big East .655
2. ACC .588
3. Big Ten .571

- The Big East has a 25-7 record with the hardest schedule so far, so it is doing well. But as I said there is a lot of games still left.

- Still too early to say it will be a step up or step down for any of the Power 5.

- The AAC has had a brutal start at 20-13 against a weak schedule and is currently #14 in conference RPI, as UConn, Temple and Tulsa have had tough starts. The AAC was #7 last year which allowed it to be relevant right around the bubble. It looks like they may not be players around the bubble at all this year.

 

[omniorange]

Nice posts. I do something similar since 2009, but I track only the scheduled games amongst the P6 plus. The "plus" every year includes UConn (previously in P6), Gonzaga, Wichita State, Cincy (previously in P6) and Memphis (although I am starting to rethink this one since Pastner left) as well as year specific non-P6 teams that are in the AP Top 25 by the end of the first full week in December AND in Pomeroy's Top 50 list at that same time. This year's early candidates are St. Mary's (seems to be a lock) with Rhode Island and Dayton having an outside shot of being in the "plus" category.

The ACC has 43 games scheduled (possibly 44 if Rhode Island makes the final cut) of which only 5 have been played with a record of 2-3.

The Big East this year has already played 15 opponents in the P6 and have a 9-6 record against them. They still have 23 more games scheduled against such opponents. That's 38 teams in the P6 plus category for a 10 team league. It's too early to say how well they will finish OOC, but they are definitely off to a great start and if it continues could get 1 or 2 teams bids that might otherwise have had one, simply by doing well in the Big East conference regular season.

Cheers,
Neil

 

[Orange2389]

absolutly, i'm with you on that one

 

[Madbiker]

NC State getting punked by Creighton in the Paradise Jam. Not good for the ACC.

 

[pearl31]

great stuff, as usual, jn!

 

[Briancuse]

NC State getting punked by Creighton in the Paradise Jam. Not good for the ACC.

I know a lot of people are high on Nit state, but they gave up what 112 tonight?

 

[SoBeCuse]

Creighton could take out half of the ACC regularly, imo. Good team.

 

[obliterata]

When Yurtseven, Rowan, and Kapita become available NC St will a tough team to beat.

 

[OrangeinOmaha]

NC State was gassed by the under 4 media TO in the first half. I think they were playing with a 7 man rotation and had 3 players with at least 3 fouls still playing in the first half so depth was a real issue for them.

I really don't wanna get to far ahead of myself here but this Creighton team is honestly better than the Doug McDermott years. It's an actually balanced team compared to just having a superstar with 4 average players around him.

 

[obliterata]

The Pac-12 went 1-4 and the SEC went 2-4 tonight, not exactly a stellar night for those 2 conferences although they mostly lost to good teams.

 

[Knicks411]

Loved all of these threads last year. Some of the best stuff on the board.

 

[jncuse]

Here are the current conference RPI as we start to get more games. This will get quite a bit more telling after this weekend.

• Big East and ACC are still clear at the top.
• SEC with a good start for them
• Big 12 is hard to tell. Their SOS is so weak right now.
• PAC 12 is doing really bad. (,5251 is terrible for a P5 conference RPI).

I also like to consider # of schools currently top 75 in RPI as that is a good indicator of how easy it will be for a conference to get good wins and avoid bad losses come conference play. That was the formula for the Pac 12 last year. That being said invididual team RPI does produce strange results early on
Big East - (60%) 6 of 10
ACC - (73%) 11 of 15
PAC - (33%) 4 of 12

I believe the PAC-12 had 10 schools in the top 75 around January 1 last year -- a bunch of decent teams. Needless to say they have to turn it around.

This is not to say I am a fan of the RPI by any means to measure teams. And even if an individual team RPI is not that important to a committee, the conference RPI is really important because it dictates top 50 wins which is key at the end.

KENPOM

The KP rating is starting to get more relevant as results are almost connected enough.

KP really likes the ACC
5 of the top 8 teams in the country.
11 top 50
13 top 65

This is a really tough conference

 

[jncuse]

I like using the RPI Forecast tool to project. It's certainly not without its faults, but what it does is takes the current results of a team and uses the Sagarin rating to project the rest of the games. It then spits out teams projected resume entering conference tourney. So the 2 driving factors in it as of now would be a) Conference Success to Date and b) A Team's Sagarin Rating.

http://www.rpiforecast.com/faq.html

It's interesting to note that the ACC is projected to have the top 4 RPI's by season end. This is all very early, but it certainly seems the ACC will dominate the POD seeds this year. Based on the resume above Syracuse would probably be a 3 seed.

With the mechanics of the NCAA Tournament bracket, if Syracuse is the third best team in the ACC it will be hard to get to New York City regional. The top 2 teams in the ACC will likely get the Memphis and New York City regionals. Even at #2 it may be tough, because Duke may take New York City. If Syracuse is the 4th best ACC team it could get into the New York Region.

In terms of the aim for Buffalo, that is still attainable at the 3 line. The presence of other ACC teams is not much of an issue because they can play in Greenville and Orlando.

 

[SUMBA]

At some point we may have to choose between playing tradition rivals in "recruiting" games and better teams. Looking at the SOS projection our 42nd is significantly below the rest of the ACC, which are all in single digits. Playing cupcakes cost us in the mid 00's when we were left out of the dance despite having arguably better records than some tourney teams.

Uconn and Georgetown are forecast at 129 and 123, respectively. St. John's is the best of the bunch at a 95 projection. Too bad we don't play Villanova, which would likely help our RPI win or lose. To paraphrase Adrian Cronauer: This is not gonna look good on our resume! I understand the recruiting and nostalgic values of these games but unless our former BE brethren improve from these projected levels we may have to rethink scheduling them.

While I agree with jncuse that the RPI is not the be-all-end-all to the committee, it is an extremely important measure. The number of top 50 wins is determined by-guess what? I also think that the RPI functions as the first cut for the committee. However, it is not enough to get a team into the tourney by itself. The year that Missouri State finished with an RPI that would normally ensure NCAA inclusion, they were something like 1-8 vs the top 50. The committee that year correctly discerned that the high RPI was something of a numerical fluke. Whether or not the RPI was "gamed" (as the Missouri Valley Conference was accused of doing at the time) was rendered irrelevant.

Thanks to jncuse for these informative posts. I follow the RPI much more closely than I do the rankings but I don't have the time for such detailed work. I am glad that someone does!

 

[Cusefan0307]

At some point we may have to choose between playing tradition rivals in "recruiting" games and better teams. Looking at the SOS projection our 42nd is significantly below the rest of the ACC, which are all in single digits. Playing cupcakes cost us in the mid 00's when we were left out of the dance despite having arguably better records than some tourney teams.

Uconn and Georgetown are forecast at 129 and 123, respectively. St. John's is the best of the bunch at a 95 projection. Too bad we don't play Villanova, which would likely help our RPI win or lose. To paraphrase Adrian Cronauer: This is not gonna look good on our resume! I understand the recruiting and nostalgic values of these games but unless our former BE brethren improve from these projected levels we may have to rethink scheduling them.

While I agree with jncuse that the RPI is not the be-all-end-all to the committee, it is an extremely important measure. The number of top 50 wins is determined by-guess what? I also think that the RPI functions as the first cut for the committee. However, it is not enough to get a team into the tourney by itself. The year that Missouri State finished with an RPI that would normally ensure NCAA inclusion, they were something like 1-8 vs the top 50. The committee that year correctly discerned that the high RPI was something of a numerical fluke. Whether or not the RPI was "gamed" (as the Missouri Valley Conference was accused of doing at the time) was rendered irrelevant.

Thanks to jncuse for these informative posts. I follow the RPI much more closely than I do the rankings but I don't have the time for such detailed work. I am glad that someone does!

I don't think anyone thought Georgetown and UConn would be this bad. We play enough RPI top 50 teams in the conference anyway. We aren't going to be anywhere close to the bubble IMO, so all this talk about RPI is just talk. It's not anywhere close to being as important of a metric as it used to be anyway.

 

[SUMBA]

I don't think anyone thought Georgetown and UConn would be this bad. We play enough RPI top 50 teams in the conference anyway. We aren't going to be anywhere close to the bubble IMO, so all this talk about RPI is just talk. It's not anywhere close to being as important of a metric as it used to be anyway.

Look at the forecast of the ACC teams at the top. The records are similar to ours and we play roughly the same conference schedule. The only difference is the SOS, which has to be accounted for the OCC SOS. The difference could mean the difference between a 1-2 seed or a 3-4 seed.

No one knowing that Uconn or G'town would be so bad is not relevant. My post states that we MAY have to choose between these teams and improving our SOS in the future.

 

[cuseattle]

Louisvile/Baylor will be a fun major conference test today. Bears are good and huge. The Ville is always well coached. Looking forward to it.

 

[GooseMutt]

Creighton could take out half of the ACC regularly, imo. Good team.

Yeah but not our top half

 

[GooseMutt]

Creighton could take out half of the ACC regularly, imo. Good team.

Are you suggesting Creighton will beat us, Duke , Virginia , Carolina, Don't think so but anything is possible

 

[GooseMutt]

Are you suggesting Creighton will beat us, Duke , Virginia , Carolina, Don't think so but anything is possible

And Louisvilke

 

[Madbiker]

We could improve our RPI dramatically by not playing absolute dogs (and RPI killers) like Cornell #322 and Colgate #235 and replacing them with teams in the #100-#125 area. Or at least get one of them off the schedule.

 

[Cusefan0307]

Look at the forecast of the ACC teams at the top. The records are similar to ours and we play roughly the same conference schedule. The only difference is the SOS, which has to be accounted for the OCC SOS. The difference could mean the difference between a 1-2 seed or a 3-4 seed.

No one knowing that Uconn or G'town would be so bad is not relevant. My post states that we MAY have to choose between these teams and improving our SOS in the future.

In theory yes. The Big East will still be competitive moving forward. Whether that include Georgetown and St. John's is TBD. We have had a rather strong OOC in recent years. Not being in a tourney like Maui or Atlantis has slightly decreased that this year. Next year we play Kansas in Miami, so your hypothesis may already be put into action. As far as this year goes, we get 3 of the 4 ahead of us in the dome. If we beat those teams and finish with a better record I don't see them being seeded ahead of us.

 

[Briancuse]

Louisvile/Baylor will be a fun major conference test today. Bears are good and huge. The Ville is always well coached. Looking forward to it.

Baylor has been really impressive thus far, they really put a beatdown on Msu yesterday.

 

[Briancuse]

I don't think anyone thought Georgetown and UConn would be this bad. We play enough RPI top 50 teams in the conference anyway. We aren't going to be anywhere close to the bubble IMO, so all this talk about RPI is just talk. It's not anywhere close to being as important of a metric as it used to be anyway.

Those clowns being so bad really hurts our sos, hopefully Sc and Monmouth can be halfway decent.