NC State's NET was also bolstered by margin of victory against their lowly non-conference schedule. If you look at their RPI, which doesn't take into account margin of victory, they were 98. Prior to NET rankings this discussion wouldn't even be had.
As a Pitt fan, does NCSU/Clem not getting in scare you?
- Thread starter Sean Miller Fan
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I do wonder what Pitt's general ceiling is in the ACC. Best they finished was 5th in the regular season, and cracking that top 5 is tough, but doable.
You hope that Capel doesn't end up in a situation like Brownell at Clemson - 9 seasons and only 2 NCAA appearances. Or Christian at BC... showed improvement, but then went back downhill.
The blue bloods will give Pitt hell. But you don't always need to finish higher than them or beat them to have success. Think of all the years they beat Syracuse and UConn in the old Big East, but Syracuse and UConn have the Final Fours/National Championships to show for, whereas Pitt just the Elite 8 and some Sweet 16 appearances.
Hoping for Pitt to end up back at their old level and be a UVA like program seems like a pipe dream. But being at a Syracuse/VT/FSU level, winning 9-12 or so ACC games and making the tournament again, always a threat to anyone, seems doable.
You hope that Capel doesn't end up in a situation like Brownell at Clemson - 9 seasons and only 2 NCAA appearances. Or Christian at BC... showed improvement, but then went back downhill.
The blue bloods will give Pitt hell. But you don't always need to finish higher than them or beat them to have success. Think of all the years they beat Syracuse and UConn in the old Big East, but Syracuse and UConn have the Final Fours/National Championships to show for, whereas Pitt just the Elite 8 and some Sweet 16 appearances.
Hoping for Pitt to end up back at their old level and be a UVA like program seems like a pipe dream. But being at a Syracuse/VT/FSU level, winning 9-12 or so ACC games and making the tournament again, always a threat to anyone, seems doable.
Pitt is rarely going to finish higher than Duke UNC, UVa, and Louisville. Pitt has to become FSU, VT, Miami, ND (Miami/ND down this year I know). Finish between 5th and 8th and win enough games to get in.
Yeah, pretty much my thoughts - Miami and ND have typically been in that group too.
Pitt beat more NCAA Tournament teams than NCSt and finished with only 3 conference wins. This is simply another contrived, forced topic...
The notion that UNC, Duke, Louisville and UVA are going to be nearly unbeatable every year is plain silly. Very recent history proves such.
Louisville once Mack gets rolling.
How many games per year do you think Duke, UNC, UVa (with Bennett), and Louisville are going to lose to teams other than that? 8? Maybe? That's not enough quality wins to split amongst 6-7 prospective NCAAT teams from the middle of the pack?
This league will be drastically different in 5 years (year 6 of Coach's contract). Easily Williams, K and Boheim could be gone. Just because you are a blue blood doesn't mean continuity. NC struggled with Doherty and Guthridge (after Smith's recruits left). Syracuse has realy slipped since joining the ACC and can't see Boheim's replacement reversing the trend.
Believe it or not Hamilton in 70. Larranga will be by the start of next season. It wouldn't shock me to see Christian, Pastner and Manning gone this week.An Brownwell really hasn't distinguished himself. Buzz is rumored to be headed to TX A&M.
When we joined the ACC, I thought the best we could do is play for 5th to 7th consistently. Maybe have a breakthrough year and be in the top four. Just too tough with Duke, UNC and Louisville.
But all that is about to change. Add in no more one and dones which the best programs have lived off of somewhat leveling the playing field. Still K will get his pick of the guys coming in but after the top 10 FR each year. The talent is about equal.
Should be fun because I feel we're positioned nicely as long as Coach meets my expectations. And if you ask him. I'm sure he thinks I set the bar too low for him.
Believe it or not Hamilton in 70. Larranga will be by the start of next season. It wouldn't shock me to see Christian, Pastner and Manning gone this week.An Brownwell really hasn't distinguished himself. Buzz is rumored to be headed to TX A&M.
When we joined the ACC, I thought the best we could do is play for 5th to 7th consistently. Maybe have a breakthrough year and be in the top four. Just too tough with Duke, UNC and Louisville.
But all that is about to change. Add in no more one and dones which the best programs have lived off of somewhat leveling the playing field. Still K will get his pick of the guys coming in but after the top 10 FR each year. The talent is about equal.
Should be fun because I feel we're positioned nicely as long as Coach meets my expectations. And if you ask him. I'm sure he thinks I set the bar too low for him.
Believe it or not Hamilton in 70....put Jim Furyk and Hamilton in a room with 1000 folks who do not know them and ask them which dude is 70 and which is 48... think they go 1000 for 1000 in getting it wrong...
I heard it on the radio this morning. Once I got to work I checked it. I used three different sources to confirm. Still can't believe it.
So the NCAA changed from one bad rating system (RPI) to another bad rating system (NET). Yes I would still be having this discussion if the NCState RPI were 98 because Sagarin's #25 (or #33 recent games) is a far better measure of what a team's ranking should be than either RPI or NET. IMHO, this is demonstrated by the Sagarin predicted point spread for games being virtually identical to the initial gambling odds point spread (before wagering caused fluctuations) demonstrates its validity.
I'm not sure how you draw that conclusion based on the fact that the NET rankings have NC State at 33 and Clemson at 35. The NET rankings don't have any bias against those teams at all. Had the committee used the NET rankings and only the NET rankings then they'd both be in. If there was any bias in the decision, it most certainly was NOT in the NET rankings.
Actually it really wasn't, because the NET formula caps margins of victory. Their 50 point win over Mt. St. Mary's only counted as a 10 point win, and a 10 point win over a team that bad doesn't really help.
If anyone wanted the top 64 Sagarin teams, they’d abolish the selection committee.
They have a committee who is not beholden to any objective measures, so being so outraged is rather silly.
The NCAA absolutely blew it with NC State. They published the NET and said "this is what we are going to use to evaluate teams", then turned around and said to NC State "oops, sorry we didn't mean it". Coupling that with the mistake they made with Michigan and Michigan St, made this year one of the committee's worst ever.
"If anyone wanted the top 64 Sagarin teams, they’d abolish the selection committee."
Absolutely! I would love to see it done away with. But, you are correct, that won't happen because it would kill the selection Sunday TV drama that is so beloved by ESPN because of viewership.
For 1, you have to blame the Big Ten for keeping that 3PM Sunday time slot. This seems to happen to them a lot. Who could forget them giving Wisconsin a 6 seed to play us as a 3 after they won the Big Ten Tournament. I think they were ranked in the Top 10 that week.
The funny thing is that the committee chair said that MSU beating Michigan allowed them to jump Michigan (to the #6 overall seed). Yay. They jumped Michigan to get put in the same bracket as the #1 overall while Michigan gets the weaker Gonzaga bracket.
Just want to clear up some misconceptions. The NET and RPI is a comparison tool and not a ranking. It's used to give some semblance of how you can compare teams that don't play each other or like opponents. For instance, how do you compare Pitt and Creighton? Secondly. It's a computer system that has some flaws. A team's NET will be higher if it plays Duke 30 times and loses all 30 than playing and winning 30 games against RMU.
The committee takes the ranking and then uses it for their purposes i.e. Quad 1 wins etc.
Secondly the committee doesn't fill out the bracket using a snake system. An example is the placement of Michigan and Michigan St. The committee has MSU ranked 5th but is in Duke's region because of DC's proximity to Lansing. Right or not the committee takes the top ranked team and places them closest to their campus. Then the next ranked team goes to the next closest site. And so on and so on for the top four seeds. There's good and bad. This time it's bad because DC is probably a flight so it doesn't matter because the other 3 sites also include taking a plane. Now if the locations were Chicago, Dallas, Tampa and LA then playing Duke in Chicago may be more ideal for MSU.
Why and if it is a good thing the NCAA does is probably a good debate once the season and recruiting draws to an end. Think about it. Let's say we were MSU this year. Would you rather play Duke in DC (and be able to get there easier) or Gonzaga in Anaheim? Pitt alumnus and fans on the west coast are not permitted to give their opinion.
The committee takes the ranking and then uses it for their purposes i.e. Quad 1 wins etc.
Secondly the committee doesn't fill out the bracket using a snake system. An example is the placement of Michigan and Michigan St. The committee has MSU ranked 5th but is in Duke's region because of DC's proximity to Lansing. Right or not the committee takes the top ranked team and places them closest to their campus. Then the next ranked team goes to the next closest site. And so on and so on for the top four seeds. There's good and bad. This time it's bad because DC is probably a flight so it doesn't matter because the other 3 sites also include taking a plane. Now if the locations were Chicago, Dallas, Tampa and LA then playing Duke in Chicago may be more ideal for MSU.
Why and if it is a good thing the NCAA does is probably a good debate once the season and recruiting draws to an end. Think about it. Let's say we were MSU this year. Would you rather play Duke in DC (and be able to get there easier) or Gonzaga in Anaheim? Pitt alumnus and fans on the west coast are not permitted to give their opinion.
I think they should just snake the whole thing. Stop playing around with the seeds. It's better to play Gonzaga in Anaheim than Duke in DC. We are also forgetting that as the #4 overall seed, Gonzaga is more likely to lose before the Elite 8 than Duke. Michigan, by losing, got a much easier path than the team that beat them thrice. Just use a little common sense. The integrity of the "National Championship" should not be jeopardized because one team's fans have to be on a flight for a couple more hours or have a drive of 5-6 more hours. As a Pitt fan, I can tell you that I want Pitt to have the easiest path, period. I'd rather them have an easier path through Spokane and Portland than a tougher path through Columbus and Philly.
Of course they were/are rankings. If they weren't then "top 25 wins" would be meaningless. If you aren't using the NET (or the RPI) to rank teams then how do you know who is in the top 25 or 50 or 100?
That may be true, but it's only because the NCAA made the moronic decision to artificially limit margin of victory. Had they not done that then it would be easy to see how losing to Duke could be worse, in fact could be far worse, than beating Robert Morris. The NCAA doesn't get to screw up it's own ranking system and then use the fact that their ranking system is screwed up to make stupid decisions. Or, well, it doesn't get to do that without getting deserved criticism for what it did.
This is false. The selection committee has always been consistent in saying that their members are free to use any criteria they desire in seeding teams. The issue is that the NET system does not accurately reflect the selection committee, not the inverse.
Why do we even need a selection committee? Place all the conference champs and let a good computer program select which additional teams teams are in whatever number of slots remain open. Then let it seed the entire tournament automatically from there from #1 to #64 based on their computer ranking.
Except they didn't get any wins vs. those top-tier teams. If either Clemson or NCSt had beaten UNC, Duke, or UVA, they'd be in. You can't just play in a tough conference and lose all the time. And let's face it: NC State and Clemson were .500 in league play, but remember who they got to play twice this year: Your Pitt Panthers. That helps their ACC record but not their tourney chances.
I also read a very helpful analysis that showed that one of the things the NCAA selection committee realized this year was that the NET needs fixed. In NC State's case, it's giving them too much credit for big, early-season wins against that terrible, awful, 353rd ranked non-con SoS. Their efficiency numbers were terrific against awful teams, thus dramatically inflating their NET. The NET will likely be adjusted next season to filter that sort of thing out. While the NET wasn't officially fixed this year to accommodate for that, the selection committee did the fixing. They ignored the inflated NET and left NC State out. Meanwhile, Clemson went 1-10 against Quadrant 1 teams. Again, as I said above, you don't get credit for playing great teams, you have to beat some of them.
I think, for example, if Pitt had somehow finished 9-9 in conference play this year, they would have been in the Dance. Imagine that we beat Iowa and finish non-con 11-2 (yes, keep the loss to Niagara). We also beat FSU, Ville, and ND. Let's assume we beat GaTech, Wake, Syracuse 1x, Clemson 1x, NC State 1x, and Miami. Then, we beat BC in tourney. There's your 10 wins (vs. 10 losses) and you're 21-12. Similar to Clemson. But we would have beaten Florida State, Louisville, Syracuse, St. Louis, and Iowa. Those are quality wins. That's at least four quadrant 1 wins (not sure if SLU was quadrant 1 or not). I think we're easily in the tourney with that profile.
In short: It's not just about the record. It's how you compile that record, and NC State and Clemson (in a year that Oklahoma, Ohio State, St. John's, and Arizona got in) did a woeful job of winning games of consequence.
P.S. Clemson lost to Mississippi State, Creighton, Miami, and NEBRASKA! Their only good win was Syracuse. NC State lost to Wisconsin, Wake, GaTech, and scored 24 against VaTech (they should have been left out just for that). They had better ACC resume than Clemson, on the strength of beating Clemson 2x head-to-head and also beating 'Cuse. But that was it. They literally beat NO ONE else. The non-con was a joke, and in ACC, they only beat the bottom half of the conference. If they pull off a win against UVA in the game they lost 66-65, they're dancing.
This is what I am talking about:
NC State went 1-9 vs the Top 22 including 0-5 vs the 1 seeds. Those 1 seeds didnt lose many games but NC State was penalized for not beating them. Almost 1/3 of NC State's schedule was played against teams ranked 22 or better. That's too many.
Now, look at St. John's. Their schedule was much more manageable. They played 1 game vs the Top 22, a 30 point loss to Duke. ONE GAME! SJU had no "guaranteed losses." Now, if we extend that out to the Top 35, SJU would have 4 wins: Nova, Marquette twice, and VCU. NC State would have 3 (Auburn and Clemson twice). If we extend to the Top 42, they'd both have 4 wins.
This is why I am saying that NC State was penalized for playing too many super tough games. I mean 1 of the reasons their NET was 40 spots HIGHER than SJU was because their schedule was so top-heavy. And yes, they only won 1. But SJU only played 1....and lost by 30.
So this is telling me 2 things:
1. Dont play such anchors in the OOC. OK, that's on NC State
2. Playing too many games vs Duke, UVa, UNC, and Louisville is going to hurt you because those teams are always too difficult to beat.
This is why I suggest that it would be better for the ACC to maximize its NCAA bids if the league was broken into thirds for "smart scheduling."
Going off the preseason poll, the Top 5 would play twice, 6-10 would play twice, and 11-15 would play twice. This would help ensure that a team like NC State would get enough games vs the middle of the pack. Those are the winnable games you need.
Well that's true, but NC State also played North Carolina twice and counting the conference tournament they played Virginia twice. Clemson played both Florida State and Syracuse twice. And of course counting the tournament they played each other twice.
Virginia Tech: Not pleased
