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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4219274, member: 289"] When Steve Hyder was doing the post-game shows for SU, (a couple of decades ago), he was asked how come our talented 1998-99 team had looked so good starting the season 8-0, including a win in the Maui Classic and then stumbled to a 15-12 record the rest of the way, ending the season losing an 8-9 game to Doug Gottlieb's Oklahoma State Cowboys. Why did they get worse? He gave a great answer. He said that maybe the team didn't get worse - they just failed to get better, at least at the same rate other teams were getting better. These are collegiate athletes, not seasoned professionals. They are not baseball cards you can trade with your friends and assemble teams of known quantities based on proven records. The beauty of rooting for college players and teams is that they can evolve and get better as the season progresses, although there's no guarantee they will. A college basketball season is like a horse race. The standings will be in a certain order and distance at the quarter pole but change throughout the race. Some horses will slow down, others speed up. Then we see what they will look like at the end. Except the current system halts the race before the stretch and seeds the teams based upon their standings at the quarter pole. It can't be spun that the ACC was the worst power conference at the beginning of the season. There's no point in parsing the value of the wins or losses: our record was clearly worse than the others. There is no way in the insular conference season to change those perceptions. But obviously, ACC teams improved considerably during their conference season and other conferences did not or at least not at the same rate. Because it also can't be spun that the ACC has been the best conference in this tournament in games that are at least as important as the ones played at the beginning of the season. Yes, NCAA tournament games tend to be close and could go either way. But they are not 'random', anymore than Syracuse's close losses this season were random. Winning 10 of 12 games that could have gone either way is an impressive thing, just as losing 7 of 9 games decided by 5 points or less or in overtime is an unimpressive thing. (You competed with those teams but that's not the same thing as beating them.) In reality there are not two seasons in college basketball: the regular season and the NCAA tournament. There are three seasons: the non-conference schedule, the conference season and the NCAA tournament. And the current system evaluates teams in the first and last of them. it could be made fair if conference and non-conference games were more integrated as they are starting to be as conference schedules expand. The committee could also base their evaluation of conferences on more than just the present year and acknowledge that if you do well in a strong conference, even in a 'down' year, you must be a pretty good team. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?