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

[Xudash]

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.

Gotta look at the big picture. Which is better:

A. St. John's, in the biggest media market and closest proximity to the Tournament every year, gets some big upsets during Big East. Rejuvenates the fan base, such as last night during the sellout crowd, and sets the scene for a monster year next year. Mullin's job is secure. Downside is Big East **MAY** get 5 bids instead of 6, or 6 bids instead of 7. May lower a team's seeding during the Big Dance.
B. St. John's goes 1-17 again in Big East play. Mullin's job is in question. Recruiting falls off the map. Some key players leave. No hope for next year. Team once again heading for a rebuild in the coming years.

Did you see what happened just a couple weeks ago before the Syracuse game? NY Post headline on the PSU game was "Chris Mullin doubts arise as St. John’s hits new rock bottom". Sima also transferred around that time, and there was talk of transfer for other major pieces. St. John's is absolutely not in a position to start from scratch again. A lot of Big East teams are currently playing as well as they possibly could (Nova, Creighton, Butler, Xavier). Three big time teams that need to wake up are Marquette (starting to), St. John's and DePaul. Those 3 teams have a high ceiling and aren't anywhere close to it.

Nailed it. Big East is interesting in that most schools are located in a pretty large city. So really, the larger the city the more important it is for that team to do well.

Populations:
1. NYC - 8.5 million
2. CHI - 2.7 million
3. PHI - 1.5 million
4. IND - 800k
5. MIL - 700k
6. DC - 650k
7. OMAHA - 450k
8. CIN - 300k
Small: Providence, Seton Hall[/quote]

FYI, MSA data are much more relevant to this discussion than the population existing inside the defined city limits. Cincinnati's MSA measures approximately 2.2 million.

[XUFan09]

Keep in mind for SJU- the team is the fourth least experienced team in the country and under performed OOC. Most of their losses were very close. Their Kenpom is #96 and their RPI should head in that direction.

SJU was a brutal loss last year because they finished 1-17 in Big East play but I see them finishing with an RPI around 100 this year.

I understand why intuition would lead one to conclude this, but SJU is probably going to be one of those weird cases this year where advanced metrics and RPI differ significantly. Here's a link to their RPI Forecast profile, which uses Sagarin Ratings. Sagarin Ratings currently put SJU at #92, so it's pretty close to Kenpom.

Sagarin currently projects 6 conference wins as most likely for SJU, and Kenpom agrees. This would put their expected RPI at 157.6, the average of a number of outcomes determined by surrounding teams and the variance of their own SOS. The next most likely outcome per Sagarin is 7 wins, which puts them at 141.0, followed by 5 wins (172.6) and then 8 wins (124.4).

Quite simply, they are pulled down by an expected non-conference RPI of 240. It's going to take a lot of wins to overcome that. Like I said, it's not the end of the world, but it is unlikely that they finish around 100 in the RPI.

http://www.rpiforecast.com/teams/St.%20John's.html

[Bill Marsh]

I'm only getting caught up in the numbers as much as the numbers influence tournament selection and seeding. I've said that I could reasonably see them getting as many as 7 conference wins, so clearly my own judgment isn't tied to what their projected RPI says of them. You seem to think I don't expect much of SJU simply because I've explained that numerically they don't look good, never mind what I've said to the contrary.

St. John's is very likely going to be a sub-100 team per RPI (and not even borderline). That's a fact and it's because RPI isn't nearly as dynamic as Kenpom, Sagarin, etc. Now, a loss to a team outside the RPI top 100 is the definition of a bad loss. Therefore, the loss to SJU is likely to be a bad loss for Butler. It's that simple, regardless of whether it's fair. Though individual members of the Committee who cover the Big East might be able to give better context to the numbers, the first look for Butler is still two losses to sub-100 teams. By first look, I'm referring to the profile sheet of every potential tournament team that the Committee members get, which are primarily based on the RPI. This isn't the end of the world, but it makes things tougher for Butler.

If it was up to me, Kenpom and other advanced metrics would be used to judge the quality of opponents, because they better reflect the ebbs and flows of a season to which you refer (and are better metrics in general for the difficulty of an opponent, anyway). In that case, SJU would probably not be a bad loss unless they tank from this point on. Unfortunately, the RPI is the foundational criteria for the Selection Committee, and by mid-season, it's not that flexible to allow for a team noticeably improving like SJU might be in the process of doing.

Now, if you REALLY think there is even a moderate probability that SJU will win 10+ conference games, considering the other teams in the league, then we are operating on different premises. "It could happen" does not automatically translate to it being remotely likely.

Of course they could.

[SJU1987]

SJU's Darien Williams is a much bigger guy than I thought he was going to be. A real tough dude ! He had a good 3 pt shooting percentage in junior college .

[stever20]

If you are a Butler fan, don't hang your head...honestly we have been way overdue for wins like these, you just happened to be the one to fall victim. When you underperform for so long, you are bound to steal some you weren't supposed to get regardless of who it is. We were one of the most unlucky teams in basketball during OOC before the Cuse win (KenPom actually ranks luck and we were top 10 worst in all of division 1). The law of averages swings the other way eventually. It's really such a shame we played so poorly in OOC...if we would have done well and avoided bad losses while winning 2 of those Minny/MSU/PSU/VCU games plus our Cuse and #13 Butler win, we would be a top 25 team on Monday. We can't look back, gotta look forward. Teams know not to take us lightly now, so we have to keep up the intensity. We all knew we had the talent to beat the best teams, we just didn't put it together until recently.

One really big question for me is why is Williams not getting more playing time? He can be erratic at times, but he has shown a very light touch around the rim and he can even make mid range and 3 pt shots. He was a 4 star recruit playing at Iowa State and he did well until he got hurt. He should be getting more PT especially given that Sima is gone and Amar has been hurt. Though Amar is now back, he's still better than him and should play over him. By the way, random point but I liked listening to Holtmann in the huddle mic'd up. He actually got me all pumped up and I'm not even a Butler fan Mullin still has a ways to go but man I hope we turned the corner. Turning the corner in the sense of consistently decent play not always winning.

Congrats to you guys, your team played harder and did what they had to do to win. Butler's players need to realize they aren't going to win games just because there's a number next to their name because they don't have the talent to beat anyone of substance, let alone a Big East team on the road without a good approach on both ends of the court. The Johnnies are going to be really talented for the next few years, really hope they get to a consistent high level of play going forward.

No let down at DePaul, and a tough competitive game vs.Creighton and I'll start feeling good about the Redmen.

The thing is, I don't think after seeing what DePaul did to Nova on the road, if DePaul beat St John's- if I were the Redmen I wouldn't be acting like all is just totally destroyed- that it was a total let down.