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Today’s NCAA calcs has State at 55 after last nights win. That’s a new high water mark for the season, but will likely move one way or the other when everyone finishes their mid-week games.
To beat the 9-9 horse one more time….If you look how far ND dropped with a home loss, no intelligent person would believe that State could finish the regular season with 0-3 and still be a lock for the NCAAT.
I may have been too quick to dismiss the positive effect that the quadrant system will have for mid-majors. I happened to think about Sendek’s tenure and remembered how few Top25 wins he got while at State. Which means that a lot of the wins that got Sendek and State into the NCAAT would be reduced in “value” if the quadrant system was used.
Just another way of saying that Selection Sunday will be more interesting than normal this year.
Using the NCAA’s numbers Miami moved up to 31 and ND fell to 68 after last night’s game. You can expect those to fluctate as everyone else plays their mid-week game.
I was disappointed that no posted the new Dance Card results. But then I was even more disappointed when I found that their web page hasn’t been updated for the weekend games. I wonder why.
realtimerpi.com predicts us to sweep the last 4:
IIUC, this site is counting every game at greater than 50% probability of winning as a win. There are others than are both calculating a % chance of winning and then using that percentage to calculate final conference standings. Teamrankings.com is one such site.
Right now State’s predicted record is 10.2-7.8 and 5th place…which I’m pretty sure is State’s best predicted finish so far this year.
https://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-basketball/team/nc-state-wolfpack/projections
What the predictive algorithms are missing is the temporary effect an injury can have on future games. Just another reason to NOT use predictive algorithms like kenpom when extending NCAAT bids.
VaWolf… you don’t have a short (3-4) list of those teams in your pocket, do you?
Sorry but no. But if I was going to put a list together, I would start with the teams between State and the burst point on the Dance Card list.
Then the next step would to identify the mid-majors that are currently leading those conferences that don’t have any other candidates for an at-large bid. The bubble teams don’t want an upset in these conference tournaments. (Those conferences that are only get one bid regardless don’t concern us.)
What the NCAA is trying to do is set up an analytical system that basically takes all responsibility off of them to make any decisions.
GC, I withdraw my previous response and want to take another crack at this.
I don’t believe that they are trying to pass off responsibility onto an algorithm. But it’s obvious that they are trying to reduce complaints. I hope that they are trying to address the concerns of their member schools (ie coaches, AD’s, and conference commissioners)…and not idiots in the media. But there’s always the possibility that the changes are trying to address both.
Specifically, the mid-majors don’t like the RPI and didn’t think that their road games against power conference teams were given enough weight. So the Selection Committee used the advice from the geek squad to come up with the different ranges in each quadrant (home/neutral/away) and are including five new algorithms in the mix. If the Selection Committee uses the exact same yard stick to measure everyone, then the mid-majors shouldn’t have any complaints if they come up short.
But in the real world, losers are always going to complain. So it will be interesting to see exactly how the whining shifts this year.
The only folks that have any business ranking teams are the Vegas odds-makers.
IIUC, the science behind sports betting is not purely predictive. It’s designed to set the point spread so that an equal number of people bet on each team. That’s why the betting line sometimes changes as the date for the game approaches. I know very little about sports betting, so if I’m wrong maybe someone can correct my misunderstanding.
Right now, the Selection Committee is test driving five new algorithms as discussed above. Two of the new algorithms attempt to do the same thing as RPI…measure a team based on past accomplishments. The other three algorithms are designed to be predictive. If you look at the snip for State’s team sheets, there are three average rankings reported…one for the ones based on accomplishments, one for the three predictive algorithms and one for all six algorithms. AFAICT, no one knows exactly how these averages are going to be used.
The issue with the predictive algorithms is that they all include the final point spread of the games. So if predictive algorithm(s) were the only one(s) used by the committee, teams would no longer pull starters at the end of the game because suddenly winning by 30 would be better than winning by 10. We’ve already watched this exact scenario play out in college football in the BCS days and the NCAA has already said that they do not want that to happen in basketball.
Plus. I’m biased. Every time State has been close, they’ve gotten in. I was worried about Sendek’s last year and had given up the year TJ Warren won ACC POY. But State got in both times.
However a team that had a higher OOC SOS that really hasn’t beaten anyone of note can get in ahead of us.
Not likely. If you have an example from the past, then we can discuss. The RPI is simplistic, but the selection process is not. So someone who has “pumped up” their numbers without key victories will not get in.
The best example I can think of right now was the year VT got a first-round bye in the ACCT, beat Miami, lost to UNC(?) and didn’t get in…but Miami did. Miami had several good victories, but Miami was VT’s best win by far.
After all if its about television ratings
I don’t think so. The Selection Committee is made up of athletic directors and conference commissioners. I believe that they work to get the best teams because they would want their teams treated just fairly in the future. In the end, most of the bitching comes from (a) idiotic talking heads (See Digger Phelps and Dickie V), (b) talking heads trying to stir up controversy (everyone at CBS), or (c) mid-majors that want an invite even though they didn’t beat anyone.
That was clearly put together by a State fan….not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The ACC Digital Network often puts together a 5+ min video that that they call a “condensed game”. Here’s the one from the good game against UNC:
What the NCAA is trying to do is set up an analytical system that basically takes all responsibility off of them to make any decisions.
I don’t think so. The Selection Committee appears to take every opportunity to distance themselves from the calcs that used to rule college football. No one algorithm is ever going to be able to take in every pertinent aspect and the Selection Committee is not going to turn all of that over to any one algorithm. Just one example is losing your leading scorer for several weeks, racking up a bunch of losses, then start winning again when he comes back (sound familiar?). The committee wants the ability to take things like that into consideration.
I briefly mentioned the mock Selection event. The articles from people who have attended over the past years have been unanimously impressed with how much work goes into the selection process. Most of the bitching comes from talking heads who like to hear themselves talk or are just interested in stirring up controversy.
I read a bunch of articles on this whole subject and linked most of them in the write-up. The “coaches” have complained about the RPI and want something different. I suspect that the bitching comes mainly from the mid-major coaches AND that they are bitching about the wrong thing.
The basic inequity between the power conferences and the mid-majors isn’t RPI calcs. It’s the simple fact that teams in the middle of the power conferences are going to have more chances at top-quality wins. For teams that are any good, more chances equals more quality wins and thus more bids.
If you go back and read the comments from the Monmouth coach, it sounds to me like he was trying to schedule teams good enough to get noticed, but bad enough that Monmouth could beat them. That’s a difficult line to straddle. But even if a mid-major is able to read the tea leaves and pick the right opponents, they have to play on the road.
Power conference teams aren’t usually interested in traveling to play mid-majors….because every OOC road game, represents lost revenue. Sometime during the Great Herb Debates, someone from the comments at SFN counted up and pointed out that State usually schedules about 10 OOC games in Raleigh every year. Assuming that the consistency of past schedules shows intent, it’s going to be rare for mid-majors to play many good teams at home.
Maybe the quadrant system will help mid-majors. Maybe they can schedule enough Q2 wins on the road to get an invite. But you need to know how many Q2 wins it takes to balance a Q1 win before you can draw any conclusions about whether this latest change will help the mid-majors or not.
What this means is some patsies that front loaded with power 5 school to get their cut of the gate and got killed have a higher sos than we do so their 17-9 record means more than our 17-9 record?
Let’s go back to what makes up the SOS:
Winning percentage of your opponents (with the games against you removed)
Winning percentage of your opponents’ opponentsSo the opponents’ RPI ranking doesn’t directly feed into SOS. But you’re right in that an opponent with an RPI of 120 is generally going to have a better winning percentage than one with a ranking of 250.
Since SOS is basically an “average” of your opponents winning percentage, it takes a lot of games against good teams to make up for 7 really, really bad teams. The Selection Committee doesn’t want teams to run up impressive records against unimpressive opponents. So when teams dig their own grave with a weak OOC schedule, those teams have to do something extra to earn a bid. This sequence of events is known to just about anyone that bothers to spend any amount of time studying the Selection Process. If Gott could figure this out, then I tend to think that anyone could.
You can put lipstick on UGLY, but it’s a waste of lipstick, it’s still UGLY…
This needed repeating. It could be useful in so many different situations.
I had to listen on the Tune-In Radio app, because the game was shown on a one-hour delay so that the network could show…..wait for it…..Top Valentine Day’s Movies of All Time.
Even Tony couldn’t make the game sound good.
But a couple of the bracketologists have State in the last 4 in, but Syracuse as just out because we look better.
I don’t read minds, but when I look at a lot of brackets I doubt that they are really based on the assumption “if the selections were made today.” It looks to me like the bracketologists are mixing current facts with projections/predictions to fill their bracket.
SYR is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Before last night’s game, they had a good RPI, were .500 in the ACC, good OOC schedule, and several good wins. To the best of my memory, that combination has never been left out of the NCAAT. But if you look at their remaining schedule, it’s not obvious that they can finish with a .500 conference record. With <.500 conference record, you need an impressive win in the ACCT to get a bid. So it's not hard to see why people would leave them out of their brackets.
I do miss V and his creativity though, and it’s a real shame that probably half the living Wolfpack alumni never really saw him coach. If they did, they would have recognized just how ridiculous some of their pathetically weak attempts to prop up later coaches were.
There were plenty of old people that supported Herb. Some thought that he would eventually break thru. Some were happy with just making the NCAAT and a slim shot at a S-16. Some were happy just not being a laughing stock. Lastly, some subset of each of the first three groups didn’t think State could do any better.
The clear point here is that none of the above has anything to do with “game day experience”. More importantly, spending money on “game day experience” won’t fix 1 thru 3 above…
While I was at State, I sat between the 35 and 50 yd line for nearly every FB game. (I still remember that Sections 5 and 12 were on the 50 yd line.) Those seats have been sold and aren’t used by students anymore. So add “shitty seats” to everything else you mentioned.
btw… B’rer Roo is notHere but Here!
Good. I was wondering what happened.
“Does the experience and cost outweigh the convenience of watching it at home?”
This is what first ran through my mind. It’s good that people who are paid to care also recognize the basics.
But this surprised me:
“This issue is with lack of involvement of the college students. They no longer view attending sporting events as part of the university experience.”…Student attendance had decreased 7 percent since 2009,
This might be part of the problem:
Despite leading the nation in average attendance each year since 1997, Michigan has had issues recently selling student tickets.
His analogy was according to the quadrant system beating Rider at their home is the equivalent of beating Nova at your place. Are those two things even close to equal?
About 95 times out of 100, I automatically disagree with anything Bilas says. For instance, people often call the RPI calcs “simplistic”, outdated, and worse. While the RPI is obviously simplistic, the actual selection process is anything but. So back to Bilas, just because both wins are in the same column on a piece of paper, doesn’t necessarily mean that the selection committee will view both games the same (though it is a possibility).
Based on the statistical analysis behind the Dance Card, Top 25 wins were meaningful even though they were lumped in with the Top 50 wins. Things could change this year, but I still expect Top 25 wins to carry special weight with the Selection Committee. For now, all we can do is speculate…unless we find some articles on this year’s mock selection event. Baring getting some illuminating information, we’ll see what we see after Selection Sunday.
I forgot to provide a link to State’s team sheet in the article. I’ll just put the link here rather than edit the entry (again).
http://www.statefansnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Team-Sheet.jpg
Note that the losses to UNCG and N. Iowa will most likely stay in Q3…along with the Penn St win.
how are you doing up there twix and tween the ‘hoos and ‘Hokies ?
Holding your own I’m sure, as they’re too busy talking to and about each other to pay State any attention…
That’s pretty much always the case. Though both sides enjoy it when State can beat UNC or Duke.
So hopefully he learns that two or three of these games need ot be against better competition.
It would be more productive to eliminate most/all of the 200+ games than to just change a few out for tougher teams.
This fan base may learn to appreciate the importance of the non-conference schedule this year.
Don’t be so sure. The Herbavores never did.
For far too long I’ve heard these arguments that the non-conference didn’t matter, just in in the ACC and it takes care of itself.
SYR’s resume from last year is the perfect counterpoint to this flawed line of thinking. Combine a horrible OOC SOS with one of the weakest ACC schedules and you end up with SYR’s resume from last year….something like 6 Top 50 wins and an RPI ranking near 80.
Anyone find this on-line? ESPN3 blacked out the game in VA.
You can listen on the Tune-In Radio app
