{"id":1005,"date":"2017-03-10T03:45:13","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T03:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2017-03-10T03:45:13","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T03:45:13","slug":"some-bubble-commentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1005","title":{"rendered":"Some Bubble Commentary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another reason to stop the &#8220;games to watch&#8221; articles is that I need to start on my horrible bracketology picks.\u00a0\u00a0 One of these years, I will figure the seeding piece of this out.\u00a0\u00a0 And I am so biased at this point, I don&#8217;t know that I can correctly predict what the committee does.<\/p>\n<p>But here are some of my thoughts (although I reserve the right to backtrack on some of these statements after I get a chance to look more thoroughly at team&#8217;s profiles).<\/p>\n<p>I am tired of how some of the media bracketologists are saying that Syracuse are still in the field.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Teams with much better RPIs were left out because they had a 200+ non-conference strength of schedule (they are 221).<\/li>\n<li>They played three non-conference games away from home &#8211; losing the only true road game to Wisconsin by 17, and their two neutral court games by 14 to South Carolina and 2 to Connecticut.<\/li>\n<li>They lost to St. John&#8217;s and Georgetown at home.<\/li>\n<li>Their only road wins are to North Carolina State (who fired their coach) and Clemson (who lost to everyone in the last minute).<\/li>\n<li>Boston College only won two games in the ACC this year &#8211; one of them was by 15 points against Syracuse.<\/li>\n<li>Their RPI is currently 84 &#8211; I get that it is not the best metric, but I only need 36 at large teams.<\/li>\n<li>I get that they beat Duke, Virginia and Florida State.\u00a0 But Indiana beat Kansas and North Carolina (two of the likely #1 seeds) and has a slightly better RPI &#8211; 79, and the experts say the Hoosiers need to get to the Big 10 final to have a chance.\u00a0 I agree with the assessment on Indiana &#8211; which is why it baffles me that Syracuse would be in after going one and done in the ACC tourney.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OK &#8211; I got that off my chest &#8211; I feel better now.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Other bubble thoughts<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Big 10 bubble just got confusing &#8211; Illinois and Iowa probably played their way out of the tournament by both losing by 20+ points.\u00a0\u00a0 But did Indiana somehow put themselves back into bubble consideration by beating Iowa?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will think about it more after they play Wisconsin.<\/li>\n<li>ACC bubble teams didn&#8217;t really help themselves either &#8211; Wake Forest also lost their quarterfinal game on Wednesday<\/li>\n<li>They might not have been the most impressive wins &#8211; but Pac 12 bubble teams USC and Cal keep winning their conference tourney games (although USC might have too much in front of them tonight with UCLA).<\/li>\n<li>TCU managed to upset #1 Kansas &#8211; could they end up being a bid stealer with two more victories in the Big 12.<\/li>\n<li>Congratulations to Xavier &#8211; they needed to show they could beat someone other than DePaul since they lost one of their stars to injury.\u00a0\u00a0 They did that today against Butler &#8211; a team who will be in the field.\u00a0\u00a0 Xavier looks like they punched their ticket to the dance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another reason to stop the &#8220;games to watch&#8221; articles is that I need to start on my horrible bracketology picks.\u00a0\u00a0 One of these years, I will figure the seeding piece of this out.\u00a0\u00a0 And I am so biased at this point, I don&#8217;t know that I can correctly predict what the committee does. But here [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions\/1006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}