There is a video out there on ESPN where Stephen A Smith says that he doesn’t want to see Cinderella in the Championship game.\u00a0 To be fair, he was not disrespectful in any way against Loyola – he said they had a great season and their Cinderella run is a nice story.\u00a0 But he did say that while Cinderella is nice in the early rounds he wants to see the top 2 teams in the Championship game, and between Loyola-Chicago and Michigan, he wants to see the Wolverines because Michigan is clearly the better team.<\/p>\n
But here is a thing to think about.\u00a0 Loyola-Chicago started off the season 9-1, with their only loss being a road game to Boise State (the runner-up in the Mountain West).\u00a0 Their ninth win was an important one – this was the one that they went on the road and beat Florida.\u00a0 It was also important because they lost Clayton Custer in that game to an ankle injury.<\/p>\n
In the next five games, the Ramblers would lose three of them.\u00a0 \u00a0Since Custer returned to action in their road game against Northern Iowa, Loyola-Chicago has won 21 of their next 22 games, with their only loss being a 2 point loss on the road to Bradley.\u00a0 Of course, in those wins includes one against Miami FL from the ACC, Tennessee (the SEC regular season co-champion), Nevada (the Mountain West regular season champion), and Kansas State from the Big 12.<\/p>\n
This team has gone 30-2 in games where their star guard has played.\u00a0 I totally understand that they are in a smaller conference.\u00a0 \u00a0I totally understand that Michigan is also a very hot basketball team at the moment.\u00a0 Being from the Big 10, I even think that Michigan probably wins this game.\u00a0 But there is a reason they play the games.\u00a0\u00a0If basketball was played on paper, we wouldn’t have needed to have a tournament – we could do what the BCS\u00a0used to do for college football and have Virginia play Villanova for the championship (and we would be listening to experts complaining about why Kansas, Xavier, North Carolina or Duke deserved to play in the game instead of Villanova).<\/p>\n
People anchor to rankings and seedings.\u00a0 \u00a0Loyola is an 11 seed – the Selection Committee had them ranked as the 46th team in the tournament.\u00a0 But this is because the mid-majors don’t get the chance to play anyone.\u00a0 We give the argument all the time that if the Big 10 or ACC team played in the Missouri Valley Conference, they would probably be better than 15-3, so lets turn the argument.\u00a0 If Oklahoma (ranked 40th) had to play a 5 game schedule, with a road game against Florida followed by neutral court games against Miami, Tennessee, Nevada and Kansas State, how many of us believe they would go 5-0 (by the way, in case this influences your decision, the Sooners were 3-11 away from their home court this year).<\/p>\n
Florida beat Gonzaga (15) and Cincinnati (8) on neutral courts and Kentucky (17) and Auburn (13) at home.\u00a0 Tennessee beat Purdue (7) on a neutral court in November (not to mention Kentucky on the road).\u00a0 \u00a0So, there are 5 teams the committee ranked in the top 17 that didn’t\u00a0go undefeated against that schedule (and they didn’t even play all 5 games).\u00a0 This Loyola team is more comparable to those top teams than they are to ones that were 10 and 11 seeds like Oklahoma or Arizona State.\u00a0 \u00a0But because only one of those games happened before the tournament, the committee doesn’t give the small conference team the benefit of the doubt – they must have simply ran up a bunch of victories against poor teams.<\/p>\n
If Loyola beats Michigan on Saturday, they will still be Cinderella – because they are an 11 seed from the Missouri Valley Conference.\u00a0 \u00a0But to say that they aren’t one of the top two teams is unfair.\u00a0 \u00a0If a team wins 31 of 33 games, including games against the SEC co-champion and Big 10 tournament champion, there is no one who should say that team isn’t one of the best.\u00a0 \u00a0If Loyola-Chicago beats Michigan and gets to the championship game, we should all be excited about having the chance to watch history as a mid-major champion demonstrates that they are truly one of the best teams in basketball – not feel cheated because we are not watching the best teams play.\u00a0 Cinderella might have started off in rags, but she ends up being a princess because she was the best of all who came to the dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a video out there on ESPN where Stephen A Smith says that he doesn’t want to see Cinderella in the Championship game.\u00a0 To be fair, he was not disrespectful in any way against Loyola – he said they had a great season and their Cinderella run is a nice story.\u00a0 But he did […]<\/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-1352","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\/1352","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=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1353,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions\/1353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}