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I’ve been working hard today to try understand the current lay of the land regarding NC State’s potential to earn an at-large bid to the NCAA Tourname
[See the full post at: Want NCAA Tourney bids? Play in a thin league #ACCHate]Not sure I see it this way. There are some really bad teams in this league. I wrote a post a week or so about the coaching hires at Wake, BC, GT and VT, and how that is adversely affecting the perception of our league. We need those teams to step it up. They are all bad.
There ‘bad teams’ in every league. That’s why it makes sense to use numbers instead of subjectivity. Also, we don’t all get to play those bad teams multiple times like the teams in other conferences due to the imbalanced schedule.
At the end of the day, many of these teams – St Joe’s, Colorado, Stanford, Az State, others – have done nothing or next to nothing outside of their league and are easily in with a similar number of wins vs the middle of their league as we have.
Going into the ACCT, Pitt had only one win against the Top-50 (Stanford) and was considered IN by every bracket that I saw. The key was that they lost no bad games…the worst were to FSU and State at home. So there is definitely value in having more wins, even if they came against bad teams.
But I think that the middle of the ACC is very weak compared to past years. This group won very few games against the RPI Top-50 and had a very poor record (2-22 before ACCT Friday) against the Top-4 seeds. By itself, WF won as many games against the Top-4 as the five teams seeded 5-9 did as a group.
So I agree that more weaker teams would make the middle of the conference look better. But the middle of the conference was undeniably weak this year.
Yes. Middle of the ACC was undeniably weaker than the middle of the ACC in past years.
I do not think if the middle of the ACC was weaker than any of the other conferences against which we are competing THIS YEAR. Miami beat Arizona State. FSU beat VCU and UMass. Duke & UNC were #3 and #4 in our league and they beat the likes of Louisville; Michigan; Michigan State; UCLA and others. Maryland beat Providence and lost to UConn by one point. We tied in the Big 10 Challenge.
We seemed to do well against these other conferences. Yet, teams who did not perform well against other conferences (ASU, St Joe’s, Dayton, others) appear to be getting rewarded.
I looked at something for a potential blog entry a few weeks ago talking about how weak the ACC was this year. I decided not to do it, but the linked graph (using today’s RPI rankings from ESPN) is what I was thinking about.
http://www.statefansnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Conference-Comparisons.jpg
This graph tells me that the middle of the ACC is substantially weaker than the best conferences this year.
X-axis is conference ranking divided by total number of teams in conference so that the last place team in each conference = 1.
Miami and Wake each finished a game over .500 (with terrible conference records). VT, BC, GT and ND were all under .500. I’m not seeing the lack of production for six teams in the Big 12, Big 10 and Pac 12.
One of the things that I haven’t looked as what each of the conferences are doing with their conference schedules. The grossly unbalanced model that the ACC is using could easily skew the conference to conference comparisons. I need to think about this before I say how much the ACC schedule affects the comparisons.
But another look, it appears the ACC, B1G, and Big 12 all have 7 teams that are ~ Top 55. PAC has 6 in that range. So maybe the size of the ACC is making the graph appear worse than it really is. (Referring to VaW’s graph here)
Luckily for you, the Bristol race is under red flag at the moment.
http://www.statefansnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Conference-Comparisons-2.jpg
I know absolutely nothing about the A-10. But the top of the conference appears weaker than the ACC, but the middle is stronger. But when you start making comparisons to mid-majors, that should pretty much settle the discussion on conference strength. So I’m not going to enter into cause/effect arguments comparing the A-10 and ACC.
So maybe the size of the ACC is making the graph appear worse than it really is.
Wouldn’t it have to be the bottom, that is undeniably deep in a bad way? Too many bad teams clogging the conference.
But another look, it appears the ACC, B1G, and Big 12 all have 7 teams that are ~ Top 55. PAC has 6 in that range. So maybe the size of the ACC is making the graph appear worse than it really is. (Referring to VaW’s graph here)
It’s probably not size, it’s probably a matter of top wins. The 5-9 seeds in the ACC just don’t have very many and that will make a huge difference on Selection Sunday.
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