Remember, wins arent enough. We have to beat the spread. 1st game vs NC A&T. Need to win by 30+. 40 or 50 if you can. Every possession of the season is equally important. I hope teams are starting to realize this. Clemson realized it late last year and ran up the score a few times and Brownell said something like he had to because of NET.
Who is ready for NET season?
- Thread starter Sean Miller Fan
- Start date
Let’s just start the season off with a UPitt89 bubble watch right from the get go.
If you play better your NET ranking will reflect that. If you play worse your NET ranking will reflect that.
Play better and there is no need to worry.
Right. But "playing better" means blowing the teams out you are supposed to and keeping your feet on the gas. It also means, instead of conceding a game down 20 late, you press, trap, foul, do everything you need to do to cut into that margin. If I'm coaching a team, I am pressing and fouling to the end to the point the whole place is booing. You have to cut into the scoring margin.
Or you could play better, and then your rating will reflex what you are doing on the court.
We seemed to be the only fan base who was so unhappy with the NET last year. But all of the computer metrics (Pomeroy, Sagarin) all had us around the same ranking as the NET.
I hear that!!
Although, after our 1-3 start last year, that would have seemed a bit absurd.
In fact, we ended the season after the NCAA tournament at 56 in NET but 59 in Pomeroy and 56 in Sagarin, even after our tourney wins. At some point, one just has to realize the NET isn’t as flawed as Pitt fans (or at least one particular Pitt fan) thinks it is.
The slip in performance after Fede got injured probably cost a little. Might have won a game or two more regular season and wound up closer to 50 vs 56 if had beaten Notre Dame and possibly won the 2nd Miami game
Because, truthfully, we really werent that good. NET and the computer metrics do a fairly good job ranking talent and we werent that talented. But what we did do was put together a great resume by beating good teams. But some bad losses, some blowout losses killed our NET....again because we weren't that good. And for me, its not the best 45 or so teams, its the best 45 or so resumes. And I dont give 2 shits about point spreads. A win by 1 counts the same as a win by 40 for me.
Also, we werent the only fanbase upset. Brad Brownell addressed why he had to run up the score and Steve Forbes said he is paid to win by 1, not beat the spread.
Which just goes to prove the point, which you argued against over and over and over last year, that it isn't actually all about a team's NET ranking, as you were convinced it was.
If we are 35-0 with 35 one point wins on selection Sunday we will be a number one seed. Absolutely guaranteed. If we go 17-16 with 17 big wins and 16 one point loses we are extremely unlikely to make the field. It won't matter what our NET is in either case, just like last year it didn't matter that our NET said that we shouldn't have even been close to getting in.
At 17-16 with 17 blowout wins and 16 1 point losses, our NET would be in the 20s and we'd have a good chance of making it and that's stupid. NET overweights scoring margins. And I know that they dont ONLY use NET but NET is the most important metric. It is used as a baseline. You can only move up or down so many seed lines from your NET. NET is why we were the 2nd to last team in and wouldn't have made the field had we not made a 2nd half comeback vs GT. The Duke and WVU blowouts cost us 10 spots or more in NET.
The true measure of any model is validating it with real world results. In this case, the best real results are the NCAA tourney games. Is there any analysis from last year of how well the projected ratings from these models performed with accurately predicting results? We all know the Iowa State / Pitt game was a huge miss
My biggest argument with all these models:
- wins need to be capped at say 20 points
- winning needs to be weighted more than just the score differential
- the systems are too closed in that the pre-conference games create a conference strength tiering that is impossible to change once the conference season starts. So it’s too weighted to early season results.
The biggest flaw for me is that NET seems to arbitrarily decide which conferences are good, and which are not, before the season even starts. And perhaps other rankings fall victim to this too.
And then it becomes an excruciating splitting hairs affair the rest of the year, just to move up a spot here and there because you only play conference games.
I’ll just use last year as an example. The Big 10 had 8 teams finish between 31 and 41 in NET. All crucial and universally acceptable NCAAT spots. But how realistic is it that is actually true? That 8 big 10 teams are between the 31st and 41st best teams in the country? Zero percent chance of that, but they are propped up by conference performance, and the system fails in some ways here.
And then it becomes an excruciating splitting hairs affair the rest of the year, just to move up a spot here and there because you only play conference games.
I’ll just use last year as an example. The Big 10 had 8 teams finish between 31 and 41 in NET. All crucial and universally acceptable NCAAT spots. But how realistic is it that is actually true? That 8 big 10 teams are between the 31st and 41st best teams in the country? Zero percent chance of that, but they are propped up by conference performance, and the system fails in some ways here.
I’ll agree with a lot of your thoughts. My biggest complaint with NET is the over-emphasis on scoring margin.
For me, scoring margin should be considered only in terms of 3 categories, a close win, comfortable win and blowout win. What defines all those 3 is up for debate, an example for me, I always thought of a close game as one within a couple possessions with 3 or so minutes to go. I’m with you in capping the scoring margin at 20 pts or so. Anything there and above is considered a blowout and weighted the same.
Can add multiples to the above based on quality of the opponent and home/away/neutral game location.
Fede got hurt in the Georgia Tech game in the ACC tournament, not the regular season. He was healthy and played 32 minutes against ND and 26 minutes against Miami.
Last season, the ACC finished with six sub-100 teams in the NET rankings. The average NET of those teams (Syracuse, Boston College, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, Florida State, Louisville) was 197. The Big East, Pac-12 and Big Ten combined had seven sub-100 teams at the end of last year. But the ACC's bottom tier impacts the NCAA tournament projections around its best. The problem is that this league's basement is the worst in the country. Improvement there will define the league's strength and success this season.
Injuries decimated the ACC in the non conference schedule and a lot of teams were getting blown out. And the non conference schedule has a ton of influence on the NET, which is just another efficiency ranking system just like Torvik or Pomeroy or Sagarin or whoever you want to use. The NET uses efficiency on offense and defense and it is efficiency based.
The entire ACC needs to run up the score margin in the non conference schedule, not just Pitt. And the NET ranking is only one part of this. Because of the ACC's poor non conference performance, even when some of these teams were a lot better when they got some of their injured players back, it was too late, the effect on the NET rankings and the Quads were already set in place. The hole was too deep to dig out of for the ACC. The entire conference needs to be better including Pitt.
And Pitt essentially put itself in a giant hole last year from the early season results. The game against Alabama State last year for example was a huge blunder by Pitt which punished our efficiency. We have 3 teams on this schedule this year that look like bottom of the barrel Quad 4 teams. We better push the gas pedal down and beat each of them by at least 25-30 points if we are going to keep scheduling teams like this.
The one big flaw with all these efficiency sites is, it takes zero account whatsoever in regard to injured players. For example, Quinten Post plays for Boston College. He was one of the best players in the ACC last year and will be one of the best players in the ACC this year. He is a 7 footer that scored 16 points per game last year and shot 43% from 3. He missed the entire non conference schedule last year, and BC took on losses to Maine, Tarleton State, New Hampshire, and was blown out by other teams like Nebraska. BC's efficiency numbers were terrible going into ACC conference play. But when BC got their star 7 footer back on offense and defense, they won 9 ACC games because of it. And BC winning all these games had a negative effect on the other teams losing to them or struggling against them. All because BC didn't have their star center in non conference play and their efficiency metrics were awful because of it.
Scoring margin shouldn't matter at all. A win is a win. A loss is a loss. If Team A and Team B play the same schedule and have the exact same wins and losses but Team A won every game by 30 and all losses were by 1 and Team B won all their games by 1 and their losses were by 30, they'd have the same record against the same teams but their NET ranks would be separated by 30-40 slots. We cant be ranking scoring margin. That is for Vegas, not for the NCAAT selection.
Like I said, I don’t like the over-emphasis on scoring margin and like you feel that W vs L should be most important.
However, scoring margin does provide some beneficial indicator or differentiator of team worthiness w/r to tournament qualification and seeding and if the powers to be insist on considering it, my preference would be to make it no more refined than something along the lines of what I described.
I do believe that scoring margin matters somewhat in determining the quality of teams. And some would say, "well what's the problem then." At the end of the day, all that should matter is a W or L. You do whatever you can to win by 1. If that means you get into the tournament over a "better" team with fantastic scoring margins, so be it.
Wins should always be the most important metric to determine tournament qualification, especially quality wins against good NCAA tournament caliber teams. . College basketball is the only sport that wants to put efficiency metrics on par with actual wins which is ridiculous. There are so many sportswriters constantly talking about pomeroy and NET rankings instead of actual wins. Gary Parrish constantly does this, he just stares and quotes pomeroy all day long.
I just really dislike the notion that winning pretty or losing pretty should count for anything. If we lose to #1 Duke by 1, we should actually be pretty excited and that is ridiculous.
playing better means beating bad teams by 30+ points, hence the original post. if you beat a bad team by 5 points, and you beat a bad team by 30 points, the second game, you've played better..
but i agree with you guys, scoring margin is a dumb metric. quality wins is not. if you are beating a bad team by 40 points, one of these mickey mouse garbage matchups in november against a lower level team, no one should care. just win and move on. to use this as some sort of metric for a march tournament is pathetic.
Yeah, but scoring margin is a secondary result of efficiency, which you said.
If you’re efficient on offense and efficient on defense, you will probably score a bunch of points and give up very few points, especially against bad opponents. The fact that your good efficiency on both ends results in a large margin of victory is a lagging indicator, it’s not the driving indicator.
If we go back and forth with a really good Duke team and beat them by 2 at Cameron in a game that’s really well played on both ends, it will do more for our efficiency metrics than beating North Carolina A&T by 20. But efficiency is the goal, and efficient teams should be able to beat bad opponents by a bunch of points by virtue of their superior efficiency.
It does no such thing. As us making the tournament last year clearly shows.
It's like some of you guys are so dead set against the bogeyman that is the NET rankings that you simply will not look at how it has actually been used. Even though our favorite team showed just a few months ago that resume is more important than the NET number.
I think NET like Pomeroy does a fine job as a predictive system but it measures how "good" you are in terms of efficiency etc. I'd prefer a system that measures "accomplishment" more though for NCAA brackets, like Colley. A win should be a win.
I find it weird that football deemed computer rankings to be extremely flawed, and rightly created a committee to determine their postseason.
Where basketball already has a good system in place, but seems to be trending towards a singular computer system for determining the postseason, which has already shown massive flaws in a number of areas. Hopefully NET is never used as an exclusive qualifier for anything.
That seems completely backwards to me.
Where basketball already has a good system in place, but seems to be trending towards a singular computer system for determining the postseason, which has already shown massive flaws in a number of areas. Hopefully NET is never used as an exclusive qualifier for anything.
That seems completely backwards to me.
I agree with this. They need to de-emphasize scoring margins. I dont know how but I am sure some math nerd can figure it out. If we beat NC A&T by 1, that would be a disaster for NET and sure, that may mean we arent very good but what if we go 21-11 and are a pretty decent team. That 1 point win over NCAT could drop us 8 lines and put us out of the tournament. Stuff like that shouldn't happen. Just de-emphasize it. As Steve Forbes said, he is paid to win by 1, not beat the spread. But, no, actually now, coaches have to be aware of the spread and try to beat that when they can. If we are up only 18 on NCAT late, I am leaving starters in and full court pressing to try to bump that up to 30. Every possession of the season is equally important according to NET so no reason to put in walk-ons
In football there are only a handful of teams with a realistic chance to make the playoffs (obviously that changes next year somewhat), and a committee member can and likely does watch every game that every one of those teams plays.
In basketball, with the number of teams that you have that make the tournament and are in consideration to make the tournament, a committee member couldn't watch every game of every team even if that was their only job. And it's not.
And the real reason that football decided that the computer rankings were flawed was because they came in with a preexisting idea of what the rankings should be and the computer rankings, in some instances, told them that they were wrong. And people don't like being told that they are wrong.
