So, I need to have something in the case that the NCAA reverses course and releases a bracket.\u00a0 But here is the thing – since there is not going to be a tournament, I don’t have as much of a desire to sift through team sheets to rank the teams.\u00a0 What I really want to do is use the next three weeks that I would have poured my heart and soul into college basketball, and spend it to see if I can improve some of my processes.<\/p>\n
What if I can come up with an analytical process to simulate the selection committee process?\u00a0 What if I can clean up my datapull codes so that I don’t have to copy and paste 30 Oral Roberts box scores into my dataset?\u00a0 \u00a0What if I can finally build a model to predict the games?\u00a0 What if I can actually get decent night’s sleep during March? What if I can actually play games with my kids while we are all forced to lock ourselves in our houses to wait for the virus to disappear?\u00a0 There seem to be so many ways to do this without needing to rush.<\/p>\n
Unless of course they announce the bracket today.\u00a0 Then, I will be sad.\u00a0 So, I am going to do an extremely lazy job of this – so that I can get a bracket done in the next hour or two.\u00a0 And then, will continue to refine my rules.<\/p>\n
We already locked our pool.\u00a0 Now, we have to look at the bubble.\u00a0 I have to still figure out 19 bubble teams.\u00a0 The easy way to do this is set some logic rules and be done.\u00a0 For example, I can widdle the field in a couple ways – first, the committee has never selected a team worst than 82nd in the rankings (to my knowledge) – and that team was a small conference school that was ranked in the polls that the RPI just didn’t like.\u00a0 If you are not in the top 80 of the NET, you are out.\u00a0 I can also widdle things down by removing teams with less than a .533 winning percentage (according to CBS Jerry Palm – that is the worse record to get an at-large bid).\u00a0 \u00a0Sorry, Boilermakers – but you are out.\u00a0 Surprisingly, this didn’t happen as much as in past years, but you can also remove teams that have 0 Quadrant 1 victories – if you didn’t beat at least someone in the top part of the league, you don’t get in.<\/p>\n
But there are still a bunch of teams left.\u00a0 It seems to me that you should be able to take any major conference team with a conference record that is 3 games over 500.\u00a0 With so many bubble teams at 9-9 or 10-10 in conference, it seems like a 11-7 team in the same conference should be in.\u00a0 Welcome to the bracket…..<\/p>\n
Of those teams, the one that worries me is Mississippi State – they only have 2 quadrant 1 wins….\u00a0 But hey – rules are rules……<\/p>\n
Next, the committee tends to give only 4-5 spots to mid-majors, tending to be the best available from each of the conferences that have multiple teams under consideration.\u00a0 \u00a0This includes typically a surprise like Temple.\u00a0 But it also last year had the surprise of Belmont – they rewarded a regular-season champ who lost in their conference tournament.\u00a0 \u00a0If I do that for 2020, those teams are:<\/p>\n
I am a little worried about Northern Iowa – numerically speaking, their profile looks almost identical to Belmont.\u00a0 But their is one big difference.\u00a0 Belmont lost to Murray State in their tournament – a team that was also under consideration in 2019.\u00a0 Northern Iowa lost to Drake, and was actually stumbling their way to the end of the season.\u00a0 If the tournament was going on, I guarantee this weekend would be a tough weekend for Northern Iowa as they wait to see if their win against Colorado was enough.\u00a0 But still – rules are rules……<\/p>\n
OK – now down to 7 left.\u00a0 If these all go to the major conferences, I can simply rank those teams by conference and then bring some teams in.\u00a0 This gives me the following remaining teams:<\/p>\n
So – I think the Big 10 three are the safest because of all the hype around how strong the conference is.\u00a0 Oklahoma also feels good based on how they finished the season.\u00a0 Marquette makes me a little nervous – but they have a top 30 NET ranking – this tends to be a guarantee for a major conference bubble team.\u00a0 Colorado and Texas Tech also make me a little nervous because they really stumbled down the stretch.\u00a0 They are in because they were both ranked in the polls until the last few weeks when they started their losing streaks.<\/p>\n
This leaves the following teams currently on the outside looking in.\u00a0 Each of them have some reasons why they could claim they should be in, but also clearly have enough issues that they aren’t in….<\/p>\n
I think if I had to rank them – first four out:<\/p>\n
Others that were left that didn’t fail one of my other rules (in order by NET ranking):<\/p>\n
So – there you go, now to see if I can quickly rank my 68 teams so that I can play with analytics or simply relax the rest of the afternoon…….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I need to have something in the case that the NCAA reverses course and releases a bracket.\u00a0 But here is the thing – since there is not going to be a tournament, I don’t have as much of a desire to sift through team sheets to rank the teams.\u00a0 What I really want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766","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=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1773,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions\/1773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}