cbssports.com Top 25 +1 Rankings

[samspann1]

still #4

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/rankings/top25

 

[DomeStranger]

I like his logic and the way he explained why each is where. That ranking is hard to argue with. Good job Gary.

 

[HoustonCuse]

If we were Virginia, we'd be spitting fire over this.

 

[pearl31]

Interestingly, we also went up a spot (or two?) in the RPI after yesterday's game.

 

[DomeStranger]

If we were Virginia, we'd be spitting fire over this.

I wouldn't expect to jump a team who's got 2 less losses and a tougher schedule in and out of conference. To think they should be ranked ahead of us is absurd.

Virginia played a crap non-con. They only played 2 decent teams in their non-con and lost them both and they lost to Green Bay.

 

[DCHoo]

I wouldn't expect to jump a team who's got 2 less losses and a tougher schedule in and out of conference. To think they should be ranked ahead of us is absurd.

Virginia played a crap non-con. They only played 2 decent teams in their non-con and lost them both and they lost to Green Bay.

Virginia's non-conference Strength of Schedule (SOS) is rated #30, Syracuse's non-conference SOS is rated #98.

Virginia's non-conference schedule included 5 teams currently in the RPI Top 50, Syracuse's non-conference schedule included 3 teams currently in the RPI Top 50 (using liverpi.com).

We did not perform as well as Syracuse in the non-conference portion of the schedule, but if Virginia "played a crap non-con" then Syracuse played an even crappier one.

 

[Marsh01]

Virginia's non-conference Strength of Schedule (SOS) is rated #30, Syracuse's non-conference SOS is rated #98.

Virginia's non-conference schedule included 5 teams currently in the RPI Top 50, Syracuse's non-conference schedule included 3 teams currently in the RPI Top 50 (using liverpi.com).

We did not perform as well as Syracuse in the non-conference portion of the schedule, but if Virginia "played a crap non-con" then Syracuse played an even crappier one.

crap or non crap we went undefeated (Minny-Indiana-Villanova-St Johns-Baylor-California) and you did not and we also didnt lose to Tennessee by 35 points.

 

[DCHoo]

crap or non crap we went undefeated (Minny-Indiana-Villanova-St Johns-Baylor-California) and you did not and we also didnt lose to Tennessee by 35 points.

True, I'm not disputing that. I was just pointing out that it is silly to call our OOC schedule crap, when Syracuse's is "crappier" by a significant margin. At the end of the day, I am fine with Syracuse being ranked higher and having a higher seed than us, based on overall body of work. We stumbled out of the gates and that shouldn't be dismissed.

 

[Orange Barrel]

UVA 2-3 vs. RPI Top 25.
4-4 vs. RPI top 50.

SU 3-2 vs. RPI Top 25.
7-2 vs. RPI top 50.

 

[Marsh01]

True, I'm not disputing that. I was just pointing out that it is silly to call our OOC schedule crap, when Syracuse's is "crappier" by a significant margin. At the end of the day, I am fine with Syracuse being ranked higher and having a higher seed than us, based on overall body of work. We stumbled out of the gates and that shouldn't be dismissed.

Virginia had a very solid ooc schedule and that will be taken into consideration but that is why, despite your 17-1 regular season record you are projecting at a 2-3 seed. I think the Tennessee loss was the real black sheep in the room. Had that been a 2 point loss perception would have been different.

 

[DCHoo]

Virginia had a very solid ooc schedule and that will be taken into consideration but that is why, despite your 17-1 regular season record you are projecting at a 2-3 seed. I think the Tennessee loss was the real black sheep in the room. Had that been a 2 point loss perception would have been different.

Don't dispute that at all. The TN loss is a black eye, and yet, that may have been the butt kicking we needed to right the ship. If so, I'll take it.

 

[Madbiker]

Parrish showed some solid logic throughout his rankings. I doubt today's AP poll will be as kind to SU. The poll has become more of a what have you done lately type of thing.

 

[DomeStranger]

Virginia's non-conference Strength of Schedule (SOS) is rated #30, Syracuse's non-conference SOS is rated #98.

Virginia's non-conference schedule included 5 teams currently in the RPI Top 50, Syracuse's non-conference schedule included 3 teams currently in the RPI Top 50 (using liverpi.com).

We did not perform as well as Syracuse in the non-conference portion of the schedule, but if Virginia "played a crap non-con" then Syracuse played an even crappier one.

RPI is a flawed tool, a couple bad apples can spoil the bunch.

Virginia's best non-con wins are SMU (39) and Missouri St (92)

Congrats on the big wins!

Meanwhile SU handles: Villinova (5), Baylor (42), Minn (47), Cal (51), St Johns (62), Indiana (76) and EMU (87).

Nothing to brag about but I think our non-con had more of a challenge. Same with our conference schedule even though the RPI doesnt really reflect it.

 

[HoustonCuse]

RPI is a flawed tool, a couple bad apples can spoil the bunch.

Virginia's best non-con wins are SMU (39) and Missouri St (92)

Congrats on the big wins!

Meanwhile SU handles: Villinova (5), Baylor (42), Minn (47), Cal (51), St Johns (62), Indiana (76) and EMU (87).

Nothing to brag about but I think our non-con had more of a challenge. Same with our conference schedule even though the RPI doesnt really reflect it.

I'm not sure if you get the newspaper, but UVa put a beatdown on us just two days ago. Why are you pointing to games in November to say they aren't as good? If we played them in November, I am quite sure we would have won, but their team has gotten better throughout the year and ours has worn down and been hampered by injuries. The team we put on the floor Saturday was not as good as theirs. Unless we get Grant back at 100%, we have no chance of being the team that won Maui, destroyed Indiana and Villanova, and beat Duke. Rocket science, this is not.

 

[BuffOrange]

RPI is a flawed tool, a couple bad apples can spoil the bunch.

Virginia's best non-con wins are SMU (39) and Missouri St (92)

Congrats on the big wins!

Meanwhile SU handles: Villinova (5), Baylor (42), Minn (47), Cal (51), St Johns (62), Indiana (76) and EMU (87).

Nothing to brag about but I think our non-con had more of a challenge. Same with our conference schedule even though the RPI doesnt really reflect it.

I was going to write a much longer post but I think this covers it pretty well. I do think UVA's non-conf. schedule was better than we're giving them credit for (a lot of those teams are underrated if you go by kenpom's rankings)...
But since almost all of their tough games were losses, who cares? Just looking at the wins is probably the best way of doing it as that way you're neither punished or rewarded for losing to a good team.

 

[DomeStranger]

I'm not sure if you get the newspaper, but UVa put a beatdown on us just two days ago. Why are you pointing to games in November to say they aren't as good? If we played them in November, I am quite sure we would have won, but their team has gotten better throughout the year and ours has worn down and been hampered by injuries. The team we put on the floor Saturday was not as good as theirs. Unless we get Grant back at 100%, we have no chance of being the team that won Maui, destroyed Indiana and Villanova, and beat Duke. Rocket science, this is not.

Put down the newspaper and read the thread. All I am saying is their body of work doesn't justify them being ranked ahead of SU. Even the Hoo agrees with that, you don't?

 

[Knicks411]

UVA didn't have a crap non-conf schedule, they had a crap non-conf performance. Big difference.

For rankings, and more importantly, seeding, we have a much better resume than our performance would indicate over the last month or so. We've played 8 games since the first Duke game. I'd say we have 3 or maybe 4 what I would term (a term I am making up as I type right now) good performances. By that I basically mean a performance indicative of a very strong team @Pitt, @Duke, and maybe @Maryland. Pitt is a solid team, beating them on the road (and even if Tyler misses, we lose by 1) is good, Duke is a very strong team, taking them to the wire at Cameron is a good performance, and you can argue winning a road game at Maryland is solid as well. We also beat clemson at home by 13 in a low possession game, so I'll include that as well.

But th at also includes 4 pretty bad performances. Beating NC State and ND at home in close games is not the sign of a very good team. BC; let's not even get into it.

So to get back to this specific topic; if i'm seeding a field of 68 today, using the NCAA criteria, I'm seeding SU ahead of UVA. if they are playing on a neutral tomorrow, I'm picking UVA to win. (If they are playing tomorrow and I'm gold Jerami is 100% healed, I'm hesitating a little more, but probably still going slight edge to UVA)

 

[HoustonCuse]

Put down the newspaper and read the thread. All I am saying is their body of work doesn't justify them being ranked ahead of SU. Even the Hoo agrees with that, you don't?

This is not a tournament seed we are talking about it is a weekly ranking. Of course they should be ranked ahead of us right now. Do you see anything that says we are playing better than them right now or that we are the better team right now? And if you want to talk body of work, we compiled our body of work with Grant being a huge part of our lineup. He's gone. We are not the team that compiled that record. What is our body of work if we never had Grant on this team?

 

[Cusefan0307]

I was going to write a much longer post but I think this covers it pretty well. I do think UVA's non-conf. schedule was better than we're giving them credit for (a lot of those teams are underrated if you go by kenpom's rankings)...
But since almost all of their tough games were losses, who cares? Just looking at the wins is probably the best way of doing it as that way you're neither punished or rewarded for losing to a good team.

This is why I think Kenpom is overrated. Kenpom tells me that Pittsburgh and Ohio State are better than North Carolina, and that Ohio State is virtually as good as Michigan. Theres no way those two teams would ever be favored right now on a neutral court against UNC.

 

[Knicks411]

This is why I think Kenpom is overrated. Kenpom tells me that Pittsburgh and Ohio State are better than North Carolina, and that Ohio State is virtually as good as Michigan. Theres no way those two teams would ever be favored right now on a neutral court against UNC.

This is an interesting one, because the Ken Pom projected lines are almost always very close to what the actual Vegas lines are. Not sure we'll ever get those exact matchups to know what the vegas line would be.

 

[HoustonCuse]

This is an interesting one, because the Ken Pom projected lines are almost always very close to what the actual Vegas lines are. Not sure we'll ever get those exact matchups to know what the vegas line would be.

That may speak to KenPom's value more as a simulation tool rather than a strict ranking tool. Still, he doesn't simulate specific matchups to my knowledge. And of course getting games wrong doesn't complete invalidate his modeling approach even though there are always people waiting to jump on one miss in the predictions.

For a one or two posession type game, he's probably running a 10,000 or 100,000 replication Monte Carlo sim where one team wins 52% of the games. Even a perfect system will be wrong in the ballpark of 50% of the time for a game like that.

Also, no modeling system in the world is going to predict something like Syracuse's loss to BC. Any model of that event would tell you that if the game was played 100,000 times, Syracuse would win 99,000 of them. The actual game, which is a one-time unique evet, just happened to be one of the other 1,000 outcomes.

 

[BuffOrange]

UVA didn't have a crap non-conf schedule, they had a crap non-conf performance. Big difference.

For rankings, and more importantly, seeding, we have a much better resume than our performance would indicate over the last month or so. We've played 8 games since the first Duke game. I'd say we have 3 or maybe 4 what I would term (a term I am making up as I type right now) good performances. By that I basically mean a performance indicative of a very strong team @Pitt, @Duke, and maybe @Maryland. Pitt is a solid team, beating them on the road (and even if Tyler misses, we lose by 1) is good, Duke is a very strong team, taking them to the wire at Cameron is a good performance, and you can argue winning a road game at Maryland is solid as well. We also beat clemson at home by 13 in a low possession game, so I'll include that as well.

But th at also includes 4 pretty bad performances. Beating NC State and ND at home in close games is not the sign of a very good team. BC; let's not even get into it.

So to get back to this specific topic; if i'm seeding a field of 68 today, using the NCAA criteria, I'm seeding SU ahead of UVA. if they are playing on a neutral tomorrow, I'm picking UVA to win. (If they are playing tomorrow and I'm gold Jerami is 100% healed, I'm hesitating a little more, but probably still going slight edge to UVA)

Good summary of the last 8 games.

I wonder if Grant's health was built into Sunday's spread or not. I'm guessing it wasn't but if it was, we've got to be a pick 'em at worst on a neutral court w/ him healthy.

I guess we could find out in the ACC finals; although if that happens, I think a win in the semi's would boost our current "Vegas ranking" more than it would UVA's.

 

[Knicks411]

That may speak to KenPom's value more as a simulation tool rather than a strict ranking tool. Still, he doesn't simulate specific matchups to my knowledge. And of course getting games wrong doesn't complete invalidate his modeling approach even though there are always people waiting to jump on one miss in the predictions.

Yeah, I've mentioned this before. In general, it seems like a system like Pomeroy has a much higher burden of proof, so to speak, than other systems. No one says the AP poll is flawed when the #5 team loses to the #20 team.

Also, no modeling system in the world is going to predict something like Syracuse's loss to BC. Any model of that event would tell you that if the game was played 100,000 times, Syracuse would win 99,000 of them. The actual game, which is a one-time unique evet, just happened to be one of the other 1,000 outcomes.

This is totally true; I think Pomeroy had us at 99% to win that game. (May have been BPI and Pomeroy was 97% or something like that)

And yes, as far as i know, there's no way to predict the specific matchup. So a team with a .987 rating is going to be the same point favorite over a team with a .975 rating (picking 2 random numbers) regardless of how the two teams match up specifically.

I wonder if Grant's health was built into Sunday's spread or not. I'm guessing it wasn't but if it was, we've got to be a pick 'em at worst on a neutral court w/ him healthy.

I think the line closed around -4.5 on Saturday, so if you give 3 or 3.5 points for home court, even if Grant's health was factored in (Vegas is pretty sharp, I bet it was) yeah, roughly pick em sounds pretty good. Though that was before they whupped us. If Grant was healthy and we played them again, I bet it's UVA -2 or so?

 

[BuffOrange]

This is why I think Kenpom is overrated. Kenpom tells me that Pittsburgh and Ohio State are better than North Carolina, and that Ohio State is virtually as good as Michigan. Theres no way those two teams would ever be favored right now on a neutral court against UNC.

Pitt was +3 @UNC two weeks ago, which would indicate they probably would be a slight favorite. Losing to FSU at home since then might be enough to change that, but it's not as far off as you probably think.
Good chance they meet again in the quarters.

 

[Cusefan0307]

Pitt was +3 @UNC two weeks ago, which would indicate they probably would be a slight favorite. Losing to FSU at home since then might be enough to change that, but it's not as far off as you probably think.
Good chance they meet again in the quarters.

The biggest deficiency IMO Kenpom or any model has, is it's inability to take into account the ebbs and flows of a season. Some guys get injured, how do you statistically account for that? Some guys slump or play out of their mind. There really is no way to statistically count that. My eye tells me that the Pittsburgh of the last two weeks isn't as good as the UNC of the last two weeks. We are playing awful right now, but we have beaten two top 10 Kenpom teams. Kenpom is a good measure to me when looking at pace, offensive, and defensive efficiency, but like any computer model it's not perfect.