(1) THURSDAY, 12/29/16 - BU @ SJU

[stever20]

Our league-wide strategy should be to have all OUR teams in a competitive position to draw as much eyeballs, media, recruits, money into the league. The bids will come no matter what happens when you have #1 RPI

Except that with a 10 team round robin league, getting a 6th team in is absolutely no lock at all whatsoever. If Marquette or Providence finish 6th at 9-9(or worse)- they probably aren't making the tournament. Their OOC just wasn't good enough to make it.

You just can't say Big East is #1 league, they get 6 bids. Teams earn bids, conferences don't.

[FDS]

Very Scary...

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basket ... uys-crying

[ecasadoSBU]

Our league-wide strategy should be to have all OUR teams in a competitive position to draw as much eyeballs, media, recruits, money into the league. The bids will come no matter what happens when you have #1 RPI

Except that with a 10 team round robin league, getting a 6th team in is absolutely no lock at all whatsoever. If Marquette or Providence finish 6th at 9-9(or worse)- they probably aren't making the tournament. Their OOC just wasn't good enough to make it.

You just can't say Big East is #1 league, they get 6 bids. Teams earn bids, conferences don't.

Five should be the healthy number the league should strive for. Anything more than five is an extra. When a conference is TOP in RPI then its basically guaranteed a certain number of bids. Not six, I say five is the floor. Things really need to go wrong for the conference to end up with four (i.e the out-of-conference schedule turns out weaker than expected as those OOC opponents do terrible in their conference season). We shouldn't strive for six at the expense of the bottom two teams being doormat. That's not good for the future of the conference. When want to keep things fluid in the league. We want to ensure that if Villanova/Xavier/Creighton/Butler have a bad year sometime in the future there is a another bottom tier team ready to pick up the league. But if you create this divisions between the top half and bottom half it leaves little slack for our top teams to have a bad recruiting cycle in the future. Just the way I see it. Things are better when they are balanced...

[DudeAnon]

How about this quote from Jajuan Johnson of Marquette last night. "We watched Georgetown on film and we saw that they were lazy on defense and didn’t really want to guard."

[Jet915]

How about this quote from Jajuan Johnson of Marquette last night. "We watched Georgetown on film and we saw that they were lazy on defense and didn’t really want to guard."

Ouch....

[Jet915]

Very Scary...

http://www.espn.com/mens-college-basket ... uys-crying

Yeah, cant imagine how horrifying that might be, so glad everyone is ok.

[Bill Marsh]

How about this quote from Jajuan Johnson of Marquette last night. "We watched Georgetown on film and we saw that they were lazy on defense and didn’t really want to guard."

Ouch....

Bulletin board material for JT III. He should bring it up in practice every day for the rest of the season. How can his father watch such lazy defense without going nuts?

[Bill Marsh]

Our league-wide strategy should be to have all OUR teams in a competitive position to draw as much eyeballs, media, recruits, money into the league. The bids will come no matter what happens when you have #1 RPI

Except that with a 10 team round robin league, getting a 6th team in is absolutely no lock at all whatsoever. If Marquette or Providence finish 6th at 9-9(or worse)- they probably aren't making the tournament. Their OOC just wasn't good enough to make it.

You just can't say Big East is #1 league, they get 6 bids. Teams earn bids, conferences don't.

Five should be the healthy number the league should strive for. Anything more than five is an extra. When a conference is TOP in RPI then its basically guaranteed a certain number of bids. Not six, I say five is the floor. Things really need to go wrong for the conference to end up with four (i.e the out-of-conference schedule turns out weaker than expected as those OOC opponents do terrible in their conference season). We shouldn't strive for six at the expense of the bottom two teams being doormat. That's not good for the future of the conference. When want to keep things fluid in the league. We want to ensure that if Villanova/Xavier/Creighton/Butler have a bad year sometime in the future there is a another bottom tier team ready to pick up the league. But if you create this divisions between the top half and bottom half it leaves little slack for our top teams to have a bad recruiting cycle in the future. Just the way I see it. Things are better when they are balanced...

Exactly. Lucrative TV contracts aren't based on a bunch of bad games taking up air time.

[NJRedman]

How about this quote from Jajuan Johnson of Marquette last night. "We watched Georgetown on film and we saw that they were lazy on defense and didn’t really want to guard."

Ouch....

Bulletin board material doe JT III. He should bring it up in practice every day for the rest of the season. How can his father watch such lazy defense without going nuts.

Didn't Chris Mack call GTowns defense soft last year?

[Bill Marsh]

Unfortunately, this will probably be considered a bad loss for Butler, because RPI (and not Kenpom, Sagarin, etc.) is considered the basis for judging an opponent. Advanced metrics put SJU at the back end of the top 100, so a road loss wouldn't be a "good" loss but wouldn't be a bad one either. However, RPI Forecast puts SJU somewhere in the 150-170 range (A 10-8 conference record would probably be needed to get them in the top 100, but with good luck, 9-9 might do it). Luckily, the Selection Committee has a notable subjective component, so the members that cover Big East will make clear that the numbers aren't entirely fair for how well SJU sometimes plays. It just sucks that RPI alone don't tell the true story for Butler's loss when it's the central metric.

This won't sink Butler's tournament bid, but a protected seed just got harder. In the long run, though, SJU needs to experience winning and needs to build a winning culture. That's not just a switch that can be flicked on once a program is truly competitive, so there will be some victims along the way who get hit with the bad loss while the team is developing its potential.

I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. The outcome of the season for any of these teams isn't predetermined. St John's may come on in conference play and be a lot better than anyone thinks. I don't think so, but none of us can predict the future.

None of us can predict the future, but we can assess the probability of different outcomes:

- Butler is a likely tournament team, but their ambitions of a protected seed just got harder with their second sub-100 loss. There is just less room for error.
- Even if SJU is starting to come together, we know enough about them to say that it's very unlikely they will reach .500 or better. They narrowly beat Butler at home. Going into the game, their probability of victory was 25% per Kenpom. That's a solid minority probability. The Syracuse outcome is the only highly improbable outcome in their favor, and though it was ridiculous, it still represents only one data point. Now, I could see them getting between 5 and 7 wins rather than between 2 and 4, but getting up to 9 is very unlikely. Also contributing to this is the quality of the top half of the league.
- Without 9+ wins, a top 100 RPI is practically impossible. Their SOS would have to exceed expectations way too much and/or a lot of teams projected on the border of the top 100 would have to fall short of expectations.

I get that you're saying that we shouldn't assume SJU will suck again and that maybe they will be a tough out in conference. I bet they finish 7th or 8th, which is respectable this season. Unfortunately, too much is already set in stone for them numerically with their non-conference performance.

I think you're getting caught up too much in numbers. The beauty of college basketball over the pros is that these teams are evolving and developing all season long. Treating SJU just as a bad loss for a tourney bound Butler team assumes that both are locked in to a certain already established order of things here in December. I prefer to keep an open mind that it's poaainke for a team like St John's to come together and accelerate its pace of development over the next 2.5 months. Other teams - maybe Butler - may be passed by such a team(s) and fall behind in the standings. Just my preference in watching the season unfold. One game into the conference season is just too early. But that's just me.

I remember when St John's broke out with a series of upsets in January several years ago. The best college coaches are always working on continuous improvement, looking to get their team to be plaging its best ball in March. That's what the college game is all about for me.