Nov 30 PItt WVol pairing
- Thread starter oldpanther
- Start date
Common opponents between pitt and Michigan, at first glance:
Mich defeated ND 3-0, and also defeated them a 2nd time 3-1.
Disrespect shown to Pitt with the 12 seed, IMO.
5 ACC teams in as expected. Duke, Syracuse, Louisville, FSU, and Pitt.
When the highest RPI team you play is 23 and you only play two top 25 RPI teams while others are playing 10 or 12 or more you are going to get disrespected. There are consequences to playing a crappy schedule, and we just found out what one of them is.
To put some numbers to it, here are the number of top 25 games played by the 16 seeded teams:
Stanford - 13
Minnesota - 11
Illinois - 12
BYU - 3
Texas - 9
Wisconsin - 13
Nebraska - 13
Penn State - 12
Creighton - 9
Kentucky - 6
USC - 15
Pitt - 2
UCF - 4
Marquette - 9
Oregon - 10
Washington State - 9
Stanford - 13
Minnesota - 11
Illinois - 12
BYU - 3
Texas - 9
Wisconsin - 13
Nebraska - 13
Penn State - 12
Creighton - 9
Kentucky - 6
USC - 15
Pitt - 2
UCF - 4
Marquette - 9
Oregon - 10
Washington State - 9
Not sure if it is disrespect. It is our conference and the fact that we haven't been a national player for a while. That will change soon though, since this team is going to be good for the next few years.
That is where I have a problem with BYU's seeding. BYU's schedule was just as bad as ours. Now, I know they beat Stanford, but they also have one of their best players hurt.
They played three teams that got a top 16 seed and beat them all. Their schedule wasn't great, but they also beat USC and Marquette at Marquette. They also beat Duke twice and Syracuse once by a total of 9 sets to 1 to put an ACC spin on them.
Clearly the conference strength is an unavoidable problem, but if they are basing seeding for the 2018 tournament on previous seasons' performances, (perhaps unrealistically) that is not supposed to happen and is the very definition of disrespect. I don't think any school fell as far from their RPI rank to their seeded rank than Pitt. Sure, you can point to where Pitt's opponents' RPIs ended up, but you can't logically utilize opponent RPIs as a critique if the actual team in question's RPI is more readily disregarded, not to mention using absolutely arbitrary dividing lines like "top 25" for comparison of schedules. Opponent RPIs aren't more accurate than the actual team's RPI. All of those judgements result in introducing personal bias into a purely quantitative calculation to justify arbitrary rankings, which are what selection committee seedings are.
In any case, I hope getting a seed lower than the RPI and AVCA rank gives them a little chip on their shoulder.
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What are we looking at as far as TV for these games? Will our crew do them? Kind of like ups crew did them on btn last year?
It's as if you've never paid attention to how the NCAA seeds their tournaments before. The NCAA has always used record against the top 25 as something they look at. They have always used strength of schedule as a separate criteria, even though strength of schedule is also a component of RPI. And the process for all sports has personal judgements involved. If they didn't they wouldn't need a committee, they could just sit down with the final RPI list and fill in the bracket.
Thank god they've never done that, because with how dumb a metric RPI is going strictly off RPI would be really, really stupid.
2 questions:
Do they reseed after the 1st/2nd Rounds and what are the chances Pitt can host again?
What men's college hoops conference would you compare ACC women's volleyball in terms of how it ranks vs other leagues? A10 bball?
Do they reseed after the 1st/2nd Rounds and what are the chances Pitt can host again?
What men's college hoops conference would you compare ACC women's volleyball in terms of how it ranks vs other leagues? A10 bball?
No, they don't re-seed. The brackets are final. If we win first 2 rounds, we most likely face Texas at BYU (provided they win and so does BYU). Almost no way to host 3rd and 4th round. Getting past Michigan won't be a cakewalk since they had an 11-9 record in Big 10, which is stacked.
Both BYU and Texas would have to lose in the first two rounds for us to host rounds three and four. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.
That’s the odd thing - ACC got 5 teams in the tourney, 4 at large. In mens hoops that’s like being one of the major conferences. So why is the ACC such a bad conference?
Pitt’s 29-1 record in volleyball was treated like a Mid-major hoops team doing that by being rated the 12th best team.
Actually even mid-majors aren’t treated that poorly. Think of St Joes back 15 years ago with only one loss playing a weak ooc and conference schedule. In comparison they were the #1 overall seed with same situation.
The difference is that the top volleyball teams are much better compared to average teams than in MBB. There are five B1G teams ranked above Pitt, which implies the voters think a large portion of that conference could have run the table in the ACC.
The Red Sox were by far the best team in baseball last year with a .667 record. Right now there are 8 NFL teams with a better winning percentage. You can't compare records across sports.
I don't know that it's necessarily bad, but it does lack top teams. The best teams in the Big 10 and PAC12 would run through the ACC like a hot knife through butter. The second best team in the ACC would be lucky to finish in the middle of the pack in those leagues.
But it’s not if some of those higher ranked teams didn’t lose a bad game or to an ACC-level team in addition to their many others losses to ranked teams.
Take PSU- they lost to a sub .500 OSU who didn’t make tourney (in addition to several other teams) . Pitt’s lone loss was to a tourney team. So odds are PSU wouldn’t have run the ACC table either.
I’m not saying you aren’t correct about level of play in B1G. I’m just saying 29-1 in any sport inany conference is not easy. If Duke played in the MAC in basketball they might lose 1 time. A #12 ranking for that record playing in what is probably the 4th best conference and beating 2 other top 20 ooc schools seems wrong.
Ohio St is a sub .500 team because of how good the Big 10 is in VB. PSU would have had a record very similar to ours in the ACC.
We didn't beat two other top 20 schools. We beat 23 and 25. Penn State beat six teams in the top 25, 19, 21, 20, 11, 21 and 4 (note, all six better than our best win). They lost to one non-top 25 team, the same as us. The difference is how many losses do you suppose we would have had if we had played 12 games against the top 25 instead of 2? I guessing it would have been just a few more than one.
Also, the ACC is probably not the 4th best conference. The ACC conference RPI was actually 6th. It's just like what we see in basketball every year. If you conference schedule isn't as difficult you need to schedule your non-conference games with that in mind. If you don't, you pay the price. We didn't. Being the 12th overall seed is the price for that. Look at what Creighton did. Their conference RPI is 11th, so they went out and scheduled a bunch of tough OOC games. They found a way to play 9 top 25 games when we only played 2 of them. Stuff like that matters. It always has. It almost certainly always will. One thing Pitt needs to do for next year is significantly step up the OOC schedule.
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