I do need to complain about Arizona State making the tournament.\u00a0 I simply can not understand how you can pick a team tied for 8th in the conference with an 8-10 record (who also lost in the first round of the conference tournament to the other 8-10 team) – but you don’t take a team that finished 2nd in the conference who then also made it to the conference tournament final.\u00a0 I am fine with you saying that USC doesn’t have enough of a resume, because their best victories by RPI are Middle Tennessee State and New Mexico State.<\/p>\n
Sure, Arizona State has two of the best victories in college basketball – they were able to beat Xavier and Kansas.\u00a0 I can also see someone saying Arizona State beat USC in the only game they played.\u00a0 But they won by 2 points at home.\u00a0 Home court advantage normally represents 4 points – so that outcome predicts that USC wins on at their home court or on a neutral court.<\/p>\n
If it is only about who you beat, why isn’t St. John’s in the tournament.\u00a0 They beat Villanova and Duke – so why does it matter they lost 17 games.\u00a0 Is that too much.\u00a0 \u00a0Well then how about Oklahoma State.<\/p>\n
I get that it is impressive you beat Xavier and Kansas.\u00a0 But it can’t simply be about beating 2 top teams.\u00a0 You have to beat the teams you are supposed to beat.\u00a0 Here is how Arizona State and USC did against their similar opponents.<\/p>\n
USC had a better record at every level than Arizona State against their like opponents.\u00a0 But USC finished over 30 spots in the RPI better than the Sun Devils.\u00a0 They also had a better KenPom rating, a better BPI rating, and a better Sagarin rating.\u00a0 That is probably because USC did better against like competition.\u00a0 It is fine if you want to say USC isn’t good enough – but you simply can not say that Arizona State is if USC is not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I do need to complain about Arizona State making the tournament.\u00a0 I simply can not understand how you can pick a team tied for 8th in the conference with an 8-10 record (who also lost in the first round of the conference tournament to the other 8-10 team) – but you don’t take a team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","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=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1218,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions\/1218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}