Both the Shockers and Eagles crushed their opponents on Tuesday to move on to the Round of 64.

Since I continue to moan, I will continue with my jabs.   This year, there were six regular season conference champions from the smaller conferences (excluding Atlantic 10 and American which got multiple bids) that then needed an at-large bid when they lost their conference tournament championship that had an RPI < 60

Only 1 of them actually got into the field – and the committee made them play their way into the final 64 teams.   And that team got there by beating a major conference team with an RPI > 60 tonight in Dayton by 20 points.

Wichita State showed without a doubt that they are one of the best 64 teams.  Maybe the rest of the major conference schools should thank the committee for having the wisdom of only inviting one of these talented teams to the tournament.   Well, all those schools except Arizona – who was already mis-seeded as a 6 seed and now has to play the Shockers on Thursday.  And maybe Miami FL, Villanova and Kansas in case the Shockers continue to demonstrate they belong.

With the Tuesday games, I have to start handicapping the teams before I am really ready.  But since when have we really gone to the Handicapping page expecting wise and sage opinions from the Lunatic.   Sleep deprived quick decisions and insane commentary made off of gut instincts is what everyone should be looking for – and those expectations are something the Lunatic can easily meet.

The first four games are picked for right now.  Who knows – maybe I will change my mind by the time the games start tomorrow.    You can go there to see my insane guesses, to see what the Vegas oddsmakers think about the game (probably more insightful), or simply to see when your favorite team is playing – since it also has the times of the games.

That being said, I know that I can’t let go of the fact that I think the bracket has been seeded poorly.   At some point, I will probably rant more about this – still not sure how Texas A&M is a 3 seed, Kentucky – the team that was co-champs with the Aggies and then beat the Aggies in the conference championship – is a 4 seed, and my Boilermakers – who are ranked 10th in the final Coaches Poll and 12 in the AP Poll – are a 5 seed.   But since we are talking about Handicapping, I thought this was interesting.

• None of the 8 seeds are currently favored to win over the 9 seed
• VCU – a 10 seed – is a 4.5 point favorite over the 7 seed Oregon St
• Gonzaga – an 11 seed – is a 1.5 point favorite over the 6 seed Seton Hall
• The 3 Big 10 teams that drew 5 seeds are larger favorites in their games than 2 of the 4 #4 seeds (so Vegas thinks that half the games the Committee thinks are the better 4 seeds against worst 13 seeds will be closer than the 5-12 games)
• #3 seed West Virginia also has a lower line (which is probably more a statement that 29-5 Stephen F Austin shouldn’t be a 14 seed).   But #3 Utah’s line against Fresno St is also only 9 (which puts it lower than Maryland and Indiana and even with Purdue’s line).  So Vegas thinks even half of the 3-14 games will be closer than three of the 5-12s.

I will end my evening with this.   While I don’t really like Coach John Calipari from Kentucky, he said some things that I thought really were spot on accurate in a fun rant about how they could be seeded behind the team they just beat for the SEC Championship

• He mentioned that you still have to play the games – you can’t count on someone else later in the bracket will be there.  You play who you play and you need to win those games.
• He questioned what was the point of playing the Sunday games.  The way the bracket was released, it appears that the seeding was decided before the SEC and Big 10 Championships.   He believes playing the championships on Sunday hurts the SEC teams because it puts it to close to the deadline of the bracket.  From looking at what happened to Kentucky and Michigan State, I think he was right.
• He had another interesting statement which I think is true.   He mentioned that the poor seeding doesn’t hurt the team that was misplaced.  If they are really a better team then where they are seeded, they are going to win the game.  It actually hurts the team that they play.  And the Vegas odds show that.  The 12 seeds are supposed to be the best of the small conference champions.  So the Vegas lines are suggesting that either the committee got all the 12 and 13 seeds wrong, or more likely, the 12 seeds should never have expected to see Purdue or Indiana in their path.

Those small conference champs might pull those upsets.   Chattanooga went 29-5 and Little Rock went 29-4 for a good reason.   As Calapari said, you have to play the games.   And that probably is the best part of the tournament.  Once Thursday comes, everyone stops worrying about the decisions of the committee and everything gets decided on the court.   You have to win 6 games (or 7 for the 4 play-ins) to win the championship against what should be close to the best 68 teams in the country, whether you are seeded right or not.

 

My apologies for the delay – in my playing with Python to create the cheat sheet, I got a little bit carried away with formatting.   But the cheat sheet is available under the research tab – it provides you a side by side view of some of the basic statistics (RPI, Adjusted Scoring Margin, Records, Schedules, etc.)

That way, for those of you who don’t want to build a statistical model with the Schedule dataset (which now also has the last 5 Sunday games in it), you can still get some data at your fingertips to make a decision.

Enjoy the information!!!  Let me know if something looks off!!!!

Maybe it is just the fact that CBS dragged the selections out, or maybe it is because I had one of my worst bracketologies in years, but I have probably all kinds of comments that I could make about the brackets.

But that is a rant for another time – the entry form is up and running, so you can make your picks!!!!   Good luck to everyone in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They are crushing my soul is what they are doing.   I think they had actually announced the entire bracket by this point last year.   No idea of the structure of the bracket, and watching Charles Barkley not understand how to use a touch screen is painful – can’t imagine how rough this has to be for the bubble teams to watch these guys basically talk about the bracket that has been announced instead of just releasing the remaining teams.

 

So exciting – even if my Boilers did lose by 4 points to Michigan State.   I have posted by bracketology page, we will see how I do.

 

I have a feeling that I am going to do poorly this year – but to be honest, I think all the bracketologists will be wrong this year.

There is so much disagreement amongst the commentators on the bubble teams.   Do you value regular season championships for the small conferences (Akron, San Diego St, Wichita St, St Marys, Valparaiso, and Monmouth sure hope so).   Or do you value teams that have demonstrated the ability to beat some of the top teams but also have a lot of losses (like Syracuse or Michigan).

Right now, I found myself able to sort out who I thought were the top 23 teams, and then start to throw up my hands.   I will be excited to see who the committee picks!!!

On a side note, schedules are updated through all of Saturday’s games – just 5 more games before the Selection Committee chooses the 68 teams that will get to dance this March!   VCU and St. Joseph’s will both try to make sure they don’t have to worry about if the Selection Committee will choose them (my guess is they are both safe, but why take a chance).  Connecticut will try to ensure that Memphis won’t steal another bid from the bubble.   Michigan State will try to see if they can lock up a #1 seed by taking the Big 10 championship – while my Boilermakers will try to stop them.  Kentucky and Texas A&M will battle to see who wins the SEC.   And another top 50 RPI regular season champion from a small conference will do their best to try to earn their ticket to the dance and not leave the decision up to the committee as 28-4 Little Rock tries to win the Sun Belt conference against Louisiana-Monroe.

Should be an exciting Selection Sunday!!!!!

 

I don’t normally post links to other sites – you should be able to find these on all the major sports sites.

But I don’t think I have seen two crazier moments.

First, Cincinnati and Connecticut obviously knew they were both on the bubble – because they sure put on a show.   Late in the third overtime, Cincinnati hit a three pointer which looked like it gave them a 3 point victory.  But the Huskies inbound the ball and hit a 3/4 court shot to send the game to a fourth overtime – where they ended up prevailing.

Then, there was the nightcap of the Big 12 semifinals.  West Virginia makes a great defensive play at the end with a 1 point lead with just 1.8 seconds left.   After hitting a free throw to extend the lead to 2, Oklahoma inbounds the ball to their star, Buddy Hield, who dribbles up to half court and lets it fly, making the half court prayer.   But after video review, the ball is found to be barely in his hand when the clock struck 0, and so the miracle winning shot is taken away and West Virginia continues on to play Kansas for the title.

Just crazy – if this is anything as a sign of things to come in the tournament, it is going to be an awesome March!

Well, it is ready through Thursday’s games!   For the most part, the file is the same as normal – maybe a couple extra fields of information.   The biggest data difference is that I noticed the NCAA RPI pages classify the conference tournament games as conference games instead of post-season games (which makes perfect sense when you think about how they use the non-conference strength of schedule and record).

So, I have not gone through the trouble of marking those games off with a flag of 2 stating they are the tournament games.

But for those of you who want to do crazy statistical research, build models, or just have all the schedule data at your fingertips to evaluate teams, the data is there in the research links under 2016 Schedule.

Obviously, remember the traditional Lunatic disclaimers.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks against RPI data – but there are a lot of games, and so I will not make the claim that I have checked every piece of the dataset.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tradition, I will give you some more details.

As many of you know, one of my insane features is that I try to provide people with data about the teams in case they want to do research on the teams. Each year, we get several people who have demonstrated the power of statistics by building models in order to predict the games. Some of them have been extremely successful with this – especially Bill Kahn with his Bradley-Terry models, showing that even something extremely unpredictable as sports can be forecasted through good statistical techniques. But the part of this that has made me happy – and why I do this – is because a few people who were not statisticians but were taking a stats training course at work used this data for their class project and ended up having some success – including our 2006 champion, David Shaddick.

So, since that point, I decided to provide the scores to everyone in an attempt to provide people as much of a chance to try to leverage data to make their decisions. I realize that most of you will probably spend three to five minutes just looking at the teams and figuring who will do best – I probably don’t need a model to decide that the number 1 seeds will beat the 16 seeds… In fact, I typically spend so much effort maintaining the site that I just randomly pick late Wednesday evening.

However, if I can give people a chance to try to learn something about statistics in a very fun environment, it is well worth the effort.

If you notice something terribly wrong, let me know – no promises I have time to fix it, but at least everyone will know.

Enjoy the data!!!!

After Syracuse lost a tough ACC first round game against Pitt 72-71, Syracuse’s hall of fame coach Jim Boeheim had the following quote to make his plea to be included in the dance.

“The basketball committee is not the infractions committee,” Boeheim said (quote was obtained by ESPN)  “Their job is to pick the best teams for the tournament. These guys had nothing to do with any of this and should be evaluated on how well they played. They’ve been punished enough.”

To me, this is disgusting, and I hope the Selection Committee on Sunday comes back with this final answer.   Jim Boeheim is right that we are not the infractions committee, but unfortunately for Jim, they are not one of the best teams and thus did not make the tournament.

As of this year, lets be clear, the Syracuse players have not been punished – Boeheim was.   Wisconsin had their amazing coach retire, and all the Badgers did was play better for their interim coach.  Michigan State lost their best player for 4 games, and they didn’t lose their two games to the two teams that would be RPI equivalents to Syracuse’s losses to Clemson and St. John’s.   Yes, Boeheim missed 9 games, but Syracuse’s best players did not – those players finished as the 9 seed in the ACC tournament (only because Louisville was ineligible – where another hall of fame coach needs to just stop talking and accept his punishment – if what is being said is true, Pitino should consider himself lucky if the NCAA doesn’t go and slap a few more years of post-season bans on top of Louisville’s self-imposed sanctions), and lost to a fellow bubble team.

Syracuse had some great wins.   And the ACC has an unbalanced schedule – so their seed could be tied to having to play a tougher schedule.  But then come out and say that.  Say that you think that Syracuse has already shown that they are deserving through their victories against Duke, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, St. Bonaventure and Connecticut.  But stop giving excuses.  Its hard to believe the loss at Pittsburgh early in the season was because the coach was out – considering that the Panthers then went on to win two more times when the coach was on the bench.  That then makes it hard to believe that the loss to Miami FL – a better team than Pittsburgh – was also not simply because of going on the road against an excellent team.  And if you are one of the best teams, you simply don’t lose to 8-24 St. John’s.  So don’t go there.  Stop telling other people what their responsibility is – when you were punished for letting things get out of control on your watch.

The Selection Committee hopefully also knows that their job is to pick the best teams.  They don’t need a lecture on that from a coach who allowed academic fraud, illegal booster support, and failed compliance with drug testing on what their responsibilities are.   I will be honest that I haven’t looked close enough at the bubble to know if Syracuse’s resume deserves to be in.   But I do know that there are multiple regular season champions of small conferences that did everything that you should in the regular season including beating a top 50 RPI team from a major conference – including St. Mary’s (27-5), Valparaiso (26-6), Monmouth (27-7), and Wichita St (24-8) – that need an at-large bid because they were upset in their conference tournament.   If it is a punishment for a middle of the road power conference team to not make the tournament, it seems like it would be a harsher punishment to not award these regular season champions (who by the way, don’t have any legitimate punishments from the NCAA on their record).   And yet my gut says that at least one of these regular season champions will be going to the NIT – my hopes it isn’t because a hall of fame coach gave an excuse and a sad story to convince the committee that Syracuse’s players deserve the spot more – they simply don’t.

OK – my rant is over for now.  Who knows – maybe even I will put Syracuse in my bracketology work over the weekend when I look at team resumes.  But I won’t be giving Syracuse the benefit of the doubt for their 9 games while Boeheim is being punished – there isn’t enough evidence to believe his presence caused them to lose those 5 games.