Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

#2 Villanova
#20 Creighton
#24 Butler
#27 Xavier

Just like last year... 4 teams in the top 15-20 going into conference play then towards the end only going to be 1-2 up there. How the ACC can beat up on eachother and not hurt anything compared to how the Big East gets hurt in the ranking system for beating up on eachother is not comparable.

JohnW22 wrote:Just like last year... 4 teams in the top 15-20 going into conference play then towards the end only going to be 1-2 up there. How the ACC can beat up on eachother and not hurt anything compared to how the Big East gets hurt in the ranking system for beating up on eachother is not comparable.

This kind of gives weight to some of the arguments made by the guy from Bona. The lack of garbage at the bottom of the league hurts the top teams. If the bottom 3 teams were truly horrible, that would be 6 easy wins for the top teams. Instead, Xavier is now facing 3 very difficult games that could result in them getting as low as a 10 seed if they get swept, which would equal a serious possibility of a first round exit in March, and little chance to advance past the first weekend. A balanced league is fun to watch, but a fair amount of separation works better if you want multiple high seeds in the tournament. It could be even worse next year, as most of the weaker teams seemed poised to improve.

Next year the BE is going to be straight up cutthroat. DePaul will be the only team in the league without realistic NCAA preseason expectations.

The ACC has 7 teams with 5 or fewer conference losses right now 6 of the 7 are in the AP top 25 this week.
The BE has 4 teams with 5 or fewer conference losses right now. 3 of the 4 are in the AP top 25, and a 4th is 27th.

so really there isn't much difference quite frankly, just with the ACC not having to play each other 2x, they have the ability to have more teams with good records.

Also would say Creighton and Xavier are hurt somewhat by the polls with regards to some voters dinging them for their injuries.

The polls start out terrible, but they do generally improve as the season goes on. I don't know if I can get too upset about Providence and Butler falling out of top 25 last season, or Xavier this season. TBH I don't think AP/Coaches are ACC biased in any way. And fortunately, the selection committee isn't bound to the polls when they make the bracket. At least I don't think they are.

It's not a bad arrangement to have the 9th place team Georgetown still breathing (albeit on life support) for an at-large bid at this point. I am not against expanding to 12, but adding a team to pad team records is totally unnecessary. Gaming the RPI system is going to be less and less effective anyway.

herodotus wrote:

JohnW22 wrote:Just like last year... 4 teams in the top 15-20 going into conference play then towards the end only going to be 1-2 up there. How the ACC can beat up on eachother and not hurt anything compared to how the Big East gets hurt in the ranking system for beating up on eachother is not comparable.

This kind of gives weight to some of the arguments made by the guy from Bona. The lack of garbage at the bottom of the league hurts the top teams. If the bottom 3 teams were truly horrible, that would be 6 easy wins for the top teams. Instead, Xavier is now facing 3 very difficult games that could result in them getting as low as a 10 seed if they get swept, which would equal a serious possibility of a first round exit in March, and little chance to advance past the first weekend. A balanced league is fun to watch, but a fair amount of separation works better if you want multiple high seeds in the tournament. It could be even worse next year, as most of the weaker teams seemed poised to improve.

It's more complicated than that. Everything is constantly being re-evaluated. For example, Indiana was a top ten team when Butler beat them back in December. That win helped to boost Butler into the top ten. But since then Indiana has fallen out of the rankings and isn't even getting votes anymore. No one is treating that as a top ten win today even though it was at the time it happened.

It isn't just the voters who have dropped the Big East teams lower; the computers have as well. Looking at something like Sagarin's predictive rating, Butler has fallen to #25 and Xavier has fallen out of the top 25. This has nothing to do with the opinions of voters. And it wouldn't have been helped by garbage wins over a weak bottom of the league because his formula has nothing to do with wins and losses. What the trend suggests is that some of the opponents have turned out to be weaker than they appeared in the fall and that the recalculations reflect that.