NCAA Bracket Travesty

[CaseyGarrisonforPrez]

Utterly disappointed. When you get snubbed on a near annual basis though, you develop mechanisms to deal with it, but with the LB's losing it makes it all the tougher. I want Moats on the phone with the Conference USA commissioner ASAP, let's do our best to do that. It worked for UAB.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

The problem is that they get to play 10 games a year in conference against top 25 teams. If they win 2, that's the reason they get in. They aren't any better sometimes but they have something on their resume that smaller schools rarely get simply because they get the opportunity. I agree it sucks.

Let's look at teams that played atleast 8 games against top 25 teams. That's actually fewer than your suggestion of 10.

Do you know how many of these teams won 20% or fewer of their games against the top 25 and received atlarge bids?

The answer is 2
Michigan - With 7 top 50 wins, 10 top 100 wins, and only 1 bad loss, should they have been left out?
Georgia - With 21 wins and their worst loss coming to a bubble team, should they have been left out?

bigdawg, the real problem is that you have your facts wrong.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

Wow, we don't need BCS fans to look down us, we can do it ourselves. Some of the points about MSU are legit, but I don't get how it is supposed to work. The committee has said they not paying as much attention to RPI. What they do look at and is brought here is SOS and quality wins and bad losses. Based on WHAT? The "irrelevant" RPI!! We end up with the crazy situation where MSU at #41 is a quality win that helps your resume but #76 Colorado is not, but the talking heads have Colorado in and MSU out. How does that make sense? I know MSU didn't play the toughest schedule but the RPI takes all that into account. It is not exact but the #41 team that wins their conference shouldn't get in over the #76 team who didn't? Again other than the eye test which is a joke the other stuff they look at is based on the RPI but then you ignore the RPI itself??

The RPI is not good for comparing teams directly, as in Team A's RPI is X and Team B's RPI is Y. Individual RPIs are often lower or higher than they should be.

The RPI is good for comparing a team's entire resume. One win might have come against an overrated #43 RPI team, but another win might have come against an equal opponent who is underrated as #81 in the RPI. With 30+ games on the schedule, it almost always evens out. That is, unless a team is consistently playing opponents who are all over/underrated. That would be a very rare case indeed. Unless that is your argument, it should be pretty easy to see why the RPI is good as a whole, but not for a direct team by team comparison.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

These threads get confusing to me. The conference season is over, the tournament is over....this is the time that all the teams cheer FOR each other. The more teams we get in the NCAA, the NIT, the CIT, whatever, is better for OUR conference. Every thread I am reading seems like a lot of people wanting to blast MSU and why they should not get it. The occassional post from another schools fan trying to justify it is refreshing, and where it should be.

If MSU makes it in, are you going to cheer for them to lose in the first round because they are a conference rival? I would hope not.

Just seems kinds strange the way people react to this stuff.

We aren't talking about what we want. We are talking about what is right. I wanted MSU to make it. Simultaneously, I knew that they didn't deserve it. What's the problem with that?

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

Will Villanova and Marquette seriously get in over MSU?

Go look at their bodies of work. Both are 9-9 in the Big East, which is decent...a lot of wins agains the bottom feeders with one or two decent in coference wins. Both played complete joke out of conference schedules just to get their win totals up.

One or two decent in conference wins?

Marquette beat a 2 seed, two 3 seeds, and a 5 seed twice for a total of 5 wins against top 5 NCAA seeds.
Missouri State's best win against a tournament team was over a 14 seed.

Is there any sanity left in the world?

[Sycamore_DevilDog]

ISU-B toughened their schedule by giving up a home game to go on the road and play Notre Dame. Granted it was a substantial payout to the Trees, but it also was good for the OOC portion. I also remember some of the pracks on here ridiculing Lansing for doing so.

I agree with all of you that the league needs to re-institue penalties for poor scheduling and the teams guilty of this know who they are and the Trees aren't one of them.

[Jamar Howard 4 Pres]

Let's do a little blind resume test:

Team A: 25-8, RPI of 42, 14-8 against top 200 RPI, won a conference title, has a couple of great CBS storylines with their coach in particular, winner of postseason tournament in 2010, also school was biggest snub in Tournament history previously.

Team B: 21-11, RPI of 37, 17-11 against RPI top 200, losers of 4 in a row, played below seed last year in the NCAA Tournament.

Team C: 18-12, RPI of 76, an awful 10-12 against RPI top 200, also underachieved with likely NBA lottery pick.

Which team do you take? Clearly it would be between A and B I would think. Yet B is seen as a lock and C is getting ESPN love too while A is an after thought.

Did you know that bubble teams (on average) win over 75% of their games against teams 50-200?

Team A (Missouri State) played 21 of their 23 "top 200" games against 51-200. What was their winning % in those games? 67%!

Team B (Villanova) played 14 of their 28 "top 200" games against 51-200. What was their winning % in those games? 79%

It looks like your "top 200" number was a very terrible category to use.

[valleychamp]

MSU was a good team this year, that won a lot of games, but it is hard to argue that they should be in the tournament quite frankly. They had ample opportunity to get an at-large, but they lost every single meaningful non-conf game. Wichita had the same problem. If wsu or msu were able to just win 1 or 2 of those big non-conf games that they both played, they both may be in the tournament. But they failed in every instance.

As bad as the MVC was this year, we truly were only a handful of non-conf wins away from being a 2, even 3 bid league.

[BirdmanBB]

For the committee to give bids to UAB and VCU (who I like) and a 14 seed to ISUb, it must say volumes of what they think about the missouri valley.

In a year when college basketball is down overall, we blew it bigtime.

I think next year CU could be a potential top 25 team. If that happens to be the case, we might be able to squeeze an extra bid in next season.

[MVCfans]

For the committee to give bids to UAB and VCU (who I like) and a 14 seed to ISUb, it must say volumes of what they think about the missouri valley.

In a year when college basketball is down overall, we blew it bigtime.

I think next year CU could be a potential top 25 team. If that happens to be the case, we might be able to squeeze an extra bid in next season.

While the bracket buster certainly didn't help the MVC, I suppose an argument could be made that VCU's bracket buster win at Wichita State helped them gain an at large bid.