I get it – the media needs to write articles that assess the teams.\u00a0 And one of the easiest things to do is “reseeding the teams” and have tons of over-reactions.\u00a0 I remember reading this and thinking that some of these assessments were insane but I guess they do it to provoke comments \/ get more readers.<\/p>\n
At least I hope so, or otherwise\u00a0Myron Medcalf’s analysis for ESPN is worse than mine…..\u00a0 So, some of the massively incorrect assessments (including the one that irritated me the most because of my biases).<\/p>\n
All 4 of the 1 seeds are still 1 seeds – boring, but at least a fair assessment.<\/p>\n
At the 2 and 3 line, he switched Tennessee and Texas Tech.\u00a0 I totally understand that Tennessee did poorly against Colgate, but they did win.\u00a0 Considering that many thought they would have been a #1 seed had they beaten Auburn in the SEC championship, this is a little crazy.<\/p>\n
He moved Kansas and Auburn up to a 3 seed.\u00a0 I guess I can understand giving Kansas some praise after their 34 point win over Northeastern.\u00a0 But Auburn should have lost to 12 seed New Mexico State – they barely survived based on the strangest of endings.\u00a0 They did impressively beat Kansas in Saturday’s game – but here is my point.\u00a0 None of the 3 seeds lost in the first round.\u00a0 In fact, other than LSU who was almost shocked by Yale, the other three teams won by double digits.\u00a0 So, why is a team winning by 1 in shocking fashion jumping teams winning by double digits…..<\/p>\n
As we move to the 4 seeds, you would expect to see LSU and Purdue.\u00a0 You would be mistaken.\u00a0 Virginia Tech still was a 4 seed – but #6 Buffalo, #6 Villanova and #12 Murray State are now 4 seeds.\u00a0 Lets make sure I understand – Villanova beating St. Mary’s by 4 points is enough to move them over two 3 seeds and a 4 seed.\u00a0 I like the sentiment of saying Buffalo was mis-seeded as a 6 seed – and they really destroyed Arizona State, but I don’t think it is realistic to say that they would have been seeded that way.\u00a0 Murray State is simply ridiculous.\u00a0 Their dismantling of Marquette was impressive, and they have a start player.\u00a0 But are you really telling me that they are going to jump 30 or so teams to be ranked in the Top 16.\u00a0 Including over teams that also won their games.<\/p>\n
So, this is obviously where LSU and Purdue will be right.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Now we have Florida State, Wofford, Washington and Oregon.\u00a0 I get that Florida State played a close game with Vermont.\u00a0 Why can’t that be because Vermont is a pretty good team.\u00a0 Ask Murray State (who Medcalf put ahead of them) if they think Florida State is pretty darn good…. I can see the commentary that we would finally give the Pac 12 the credit they were due – but it also should mention this is saying that they would both be in the Top 20 (which none of the polls have).<\/p>\n
OK – we finally get to the place where Purdue is – they are now a 6 seed (ironically, behind Minnesota).\u00a0 He commented that Purdue played an ugly affair against Old Dominion (one of the top 40 defensive teams according to KenPom), but considering that Purdue only registered 0.94 points per possession against Conference USA’s top team, they should be lower than their 3 seed.\u00a0 So, because Purdue didn’t score very well against a team considered one of the better defensive teams in the country, that should knock them down from a 3 to a 6 seed.\u00a0 Lets ignore the fact that they played the entire first half without their starting point guard, and still managed to win by double digits (and cover the Vegas spread).<\/p>\n
That’s OK – at least that is better than the fate that LSU took – falling all the way to the 7th seed line.- that’s right, Medcalf took a team ranked in the top 12, and has them ranked as 26th out of the 32 remaining teams.\u00a0 So, I am all for knocking on LSU for allegedly paying their players, but at the end of the day, if we are re-ranking teams, that is an insane penalty for winning your game.\u00a0 LSU is clearly a top 16 team (and is heading to the Sweet 16 with their victory over Maryland).\u00a0 Saying that controversy moves them back a couple teams to make a point I can understand – but it gets silly when you knock them out of the Top 25 – I mean they were the SEC regular season conference champion and Medcalf puts the 3 teams that came in below them all in the top 12.<\/p>\n
I get it – we want to rank teams – I won’t be surprised that they do this exercise each round.\u00a0 But lets not over-react over one game.\u00a0 How a team plays against a mid-major conference champion (who is likely a really good team if they won both their regular season and conference tournament) does not replace what a team has done throughout the season in their other 30+ games that got them their initial seeding.\u00a0 That is simply not how this works.<\/p>\n
Well, I might need to find something else to rant about – Tennessee is up 21 against Iowa, which is not that interesting to watch….\u00a0 although pretty impressive by the Volunteers…..<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I get it – the media needs to write articles that assess the teams.\u00a0 And one of the easiest things to do is “reseeding the teams” and have tons of over-reactions.\u00a0 I remember reading this and thinking that some of these assessments were insane but I guess they do it to provoke comments \/ get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572","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=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}