jncuse
I brought the Cocaine to the White House
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Conference performance up to the end of December is huge in framing the NCAA tournament.
By the end of December even if we don't know the teams per se from each conference that will be at the top or in the middle, the tournament fate of whomever ends up in middle of the pack in conference may have already largely impacted.
We are still early enough in OOC season so the results and rankings below can certainly change. But certainly enough games have been played to show potential trends.
To put it simply if a conference dominates out of conference, it will generate many top 50 schools in the NET -- which impacts Q1/Q2 wins. And in the end its Q1/Q2 win that frame the tournament. The best example of how out of conference play matters is the BIG. The last 2 years they have done very well OOC, and accordingly a large number of teams in the tournament. 3 years ago (or 4) they sucked in OOC, and a team that went 13-5 in conference, Nebraska, was excluded because they could not get quality wins.
It's a very flawed system in a way, but it is what it is. It's the reason that sometimes dominant conferences in terms of # of seeds and top seeds don't always perform well. Because the metrics determining the field are way too skewed by games in November and December. But its hard to come up with a reasonable alternative.
So who are the best conferences this year? Unfortunately I could not find any NET by conference stats -- not even sure if there is an official NET yet. But when you aggregate a group of results the RPI will correlate fairly strongly to what the NET will spit out. So I have looked at Conference RPI year to date.
(From WarrenNolan)
1. Shouldn't be too surprised to see the Big East at #1. Seems to match with what we have seen in the results.
2, A little surprised that the BIG is comfortably in #2. Could be the sample size is low enough for the RPI to do stupid things. I suspect part of it is they have probably played more game against P5+1 schools than the others.
3. The ACC at #7 is not a good sign. Seeing us grouped with the Pac-12 seems like a reasonable comparison as to where it stands right now.
4. The MAC is just an RPI screwup -- they have probably played a really tough schedule as a group ... they will be out shortly.
An interesting conference to watch is the Mountain West. People may remember around 2010, that they were a fairly significant player in terms of getting at large bids, typically being a 3-5 bid conference for a little while. They have since normalized to being a 1 or 2 bid conference for a decent amount of time.
This year the Mountain West teams have beat - Creighton, Oklahoma, Arizona St, Washington, Ole Miss, Cal. Not necessarily the elite of the P5, but a number of wins nonetheless. This should bother an ACC or P12 team, since the Mountain West might be tracking to be a 3-4 team conference again.
By the end of December even if we don't know the teams per se from each conference that will be at the top or in the middle, the tournament fate of whomever ends up in middle of the pack in conference may have already largely impacted.
We are still early enough in OOC season so the results and rankings below can certainly change. But certainly enough games have been played to show potential trends.
To put it simply if a conference dominates out of conference, it will generate many top 50 schools in the NET -- which impacts Q1/Q2 wins. And in the end its Q1/Q2 win that frame the tournament. The best example of how out of conference play matters is the BIG. The last 2 years they have done very well OOC, and accordingly a large number of teams in the tournament. 3 years ago (or 4) they sucked in OOC, and a team that went 13-5 in conference, Nebraska, was excluded because they could not get quality wins.
It's a very flawed system in a way, but it is what it is. It's the reason that sometimes dominant conferences in terms of # of seeds and top seeds don't always perform well. Because the metrics determining the field are way too skewed by games in November and December. But its hard to come up with a reasonable alternative.
So who are the best conferences this year? Unfortunately I could not find any NET by conference stats -- not even sure if there is an official NET yet. But when you aggregate a group of results the RPI will correlate fairly strongly to what the NET will spit out. So I have looked at Conference RPI year to date.
(From WarrenNolan)
1. Shouldn't be too surprised to see the Big East at #1. Seems to match with what we have seen in the results.
2, A little surprised that the BIG is comfortably in #2. Could be the sample size is low enough for the RPI to do stupid things. I suspect part of it is they have probably played more game against P5+1 schools than the others.
3. The ACC at #7 is not a good sign. Seeing us grouped with the Pac-12 seems like a reasonable comparison as to where it stands right now.
4. The MAC is just an RPI screwup -- they have probably played a really tough schedule as a group ... they will be out shortly.
An interesting conference to watch is the Mountain West. People may remember around 2010, that they were a fairly significant player in terms of getting at large bids, typically being a 3-5 bid conference for a little while. They have since normalized to being a 1 or 2 bid conference for a decent amount of time.
This year the Mountain West teams have beat - Creighton, Oklahoma, Arizona St, Washington, Ole Miss, Cal. Not necessarily the elite of the P5, but a number of wins nonetheless. This should bother an ACC or P12 team, since the Mountain West might be tracking to be a 3-4 team conference again.
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