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I always enjoy looking at the ACC just before the ACCT starts and discuss who needs to do what to get an at-large bid to the NCAAT. As a precursor to
[See the full post at: Bubble Review]Damn that Alpha Wolf for messing up tables! 🙂
I try fellows, I try, but there are not enough hours in a day.
Very good analysis but I will simply it. Win the games on your schedule and you will go to the NCAA Tournament. Lose a few and you go to the NCAA Tournament. Lose more than 10 games and the chances go way down. RPI be damned. Win your games you go, lose your games you don’t. One key and one key only, score more points than your opponent and stop complaining if you don’t.
VaWolf, great work. Since you have done such detailed analysis, there is not much we can say.
To beat the bubble, my simplified version:
1. Win 20 games;
2. Win all ACC home games (8 of these);
3. Steal 2 or 3 ACC road games.If we do these 3, we are in everytime.
I’ll agree, txpack, but if you win all ACC home games (8) plus 2 away, that’s 10-6 in conference, and you would easily have 20 total wins unless you were absolutely horrible in your OOC schedule. With 10 wins in conference right now, we’d already be 20-9.
At this point, we just need to win.VaWolf – Good stuff.
This is why some of us think that there’s still an inkling of a chance that we could obtain an at-large bid if we win our next 4 games and lose in the championship. In order to do that, we will have beaten 4 teams w/ very respectable RPIs (in all likelihood beating 4 teams w/ RPI’s <65) – and we will have a solid record in our last 12…At the very least we will have beaten UNC on a nuetral court, won @ Miami, and beaten either UMd or VaTech and whomever we faced in the semi’s.
Unfortunately, our real time RPI has plummeted to the mid 90s – so we’d have to have a meteoric rise, but if we win those 4 games and lose to a solid opponent on the road, we just might have it.
One side note – I really think we were just a couple of tweaks of the schedule from being much closer to the bubble than we are now. 7-9 in the ACC isn’t an awful record – and one would think could typicall land you in the 50s to the 70s w/ a respectable OOC. Unfortunately, our OOC had the worst of both worlds, 3 solid teams (2 of them on the road) – which we lost to – and a bunch of horrid other squads. Effectively, we were kicked off the bubble early by this OOC. With a better one, we might only need 2 victories in the tourney and a 3rd tourney win would have surely got us in.
Good write-up with some nice humor … even though I am a message board monkey and that hurt my feelings 😉
“But before you jump in too hard on demanding a consistent formula, I need to point out that if the NCAA Selection Committee strictly used the Dance Card formula, then NC State would have been left out of the tournament in 2003 and 2005. As always, be careful what you wish for.”
^I’m glad they leave some room for interpretation / debate as opposed to something hard-lined or ultimately formulaic. As long as there isn’t a consistent trend of obvious errors (snubs and/or unworthy teams getting in) then I don’t have a problem with this. This one area is definitely why a team like St. Mary’s (Ca) is even being discussed as getting Patty Mills back from injury is obviously huge for them. I don’t necessarily think that the Gaels deserve a bid, but I don’t mind the debate.
As for conference tourny wins – which I absolutely agree have a huge impact – I will offer one notable exception. In 1998, Florida State (then under current Hole assistant Steve Robinson) went 6-10 and lost the first round of the ACC tourny to guess who – NC State. Yet the Noles were the last team in as a 12 seed. IIRC, Florida State had defeated Duke, UConn, and the Holes that season and had a couple of other big victories that helped them overcome such a shoddy profile. This would seem to add weight to the “Big wins mean almost everything and bad losses don’t cancel them out” category. I think this is a pretty huge exception, b/c if I am remembering correctly the Noles didn’t exactly finish strongly before losing to State in that Thursday night game. That squad seemed to defy every criteria save for “big wins.”
^I think there have been a couple of other similar situations since then – from power conferences of course – but I’m having trouble recalling them.
FYI, 1998 was one of the years where the 9 league conference had the 1 seed play the 9 seed on Thursday and the winner advanced to the semis, while the 7 and 8 seeds faced each other on Thursday night and would have had to win 4 games in 4 days to win the tourny. So technically, you were better off finishing 9th to have a really good shot at winning the tourny as opposed to 7 or 8. It was also the year of the Bersticker crotch grab … if only karma would have worked before our eyes.
wulfpup – In 98 FSU actually won their first round NCAA tourney game against TCU (I think.) They should have won their second round game but collapsed.
The 98 tourney was tweaked after NC State made a run to the final from the play-in game the year before. A lot of folks felt bad that we had to play four games in 4 days. In true bureaucratic fashion, they changed the tourney for one year in order to avoid the same exact thing again. Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they left open the window for another team to play 4 games in 4 days….
“wulfpup – In 98 FSU actually won their first round NCAA tourney game against TCU (I think.) They should have won their second round game but collapsed.”
^I remember. They lost to Bryce Drew and Valpo after Drew’s heroics against Ole Miss. And you are correct about FSU’s first round opponent – it was TCU. Valpo played Rhode Island in the Sweet 16 that season … wacky stuff … that makes the tournament great.
even though I am a message board monkey and that hurt my feelings 😉
It just doesn’t seem like a real entry if I don’t take a shot at someone. Thanks for letting me know who I hit. 😉
I also took a pot shot at Alpha and got a response from him as well. I probably shouldn’t pick on Alpha because he is the only one around here that can even spell HTML, not to mention all of the other work he does here…and did even before he started directly contributing to SFN.
Actually if you go 32-0 and lose in the final game it all means nothing. So until we get that mentality back at NCSU we have to dream and hope. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with that. I just relish the day when we don’t have to discuss whether we are on the bubble or in. I mean we went through that with Sendek!
Hey, the ironic thing if you look at the ‘Dance Card’ is that they had to use software developed by the SAS Institute. The same SAS institute that would not be there if it was not for the Statistics Department at NC State. Nice to know my University helped someone predict with a high percentage the teams that would make the Dance.
The NIT is about to get it’s first automatic qualifier as 1 seed UT-Martin is about to go down to Morehead St. in the OVC semis.
On a side note, Lunardi’s latest projections have the Big 10 with the most teams in at 8. That’s 73% of probably the worst major conference in college basketball. What a crock of shit.
“But before you jump in too hard on demanding a consistent formula, I need to point out that if the NCAA Selection Committee strictly used the Dance Card formula, then NC State would have been left out of the tournament in 2003 and 2005. As always, be careful what you wish for.”
Is it just me, or does that statement seem to kind of contradict itself? I mean Vawolf is using terms like “strictly” and “formula”, the same terms that NCSU BB was predicated upon back in those days. And then he implies that NC State wouldn’t have even made The Dance back then, if some unwaivering, strictly monitored computer robotic software SYSTEM was set up to take away all emotion as well as any human aspect out of the selection equation.
I find that kind of ironic myself.
^Oh, and BTW VaWolf, thanks for even more ammo!!! I’m going to have add on, this stuff has really started to pile up over the last couple of days. 😉
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