Some things just roll off the tongue.
Sorry to all the tea-totaling moralists reading this post. It is what it is. And what it is, is the truth.
I was going to start this week's post talking about NET and RPI and Bracketology, but I watched the second half of the 2012 game in Manhattan and the first half of the 2014 game in Manhattan this morning and at that point, all I could think of is how proud I was to listen to the kids use any musical beat to chant FVCK KU during the home win in Manhattan. It really was a thing of absolute beauty.
With that off my chest, lets get to the numbers that nobody understands and everybody wants to complain/debate about.
The latest polls are going to come out this morning (probably before I am done typing this) and K-State fans everywhere are going to lose their minds when KU (after taking their worst beating in decades) stays ahead of K-State (after administering their worst beating in a decade).
Fear not Feline Fanatics. This will be a good thing. Everybody knows that Big Daddy Bruce teams play so much better as the underdogs. I was actually surprised when the line came out at +5. I expected a couple points higher at +7. K-State is better. You can argue they are better at every position except for one or two in the starting lineup. But you have to figure the combination of Allen Field Shack and how the Zebras call the game are good for about 9 points. So in my mind, that means the oddsmakers see K-State as a 4 point favorite on the road.
There has been a lot of debate since Saturday on how the metrics view K-State and how that plays when it comes to humans seeding the tournament. @ksu_FAN and I don't always agree on how the metrics will be used, but if you have any questions about what makes up a quad 1 win or loss or any of the other portions of the metric, he is your resident nerd.
One of the things that gets overlooked when it comes to seeding is that the committee takes all 68 teams selected and ranks them 1-68 on an S-Curve. They then use that S-Curve to place teams on the seed lines. If I remember correctly, last year, K-State was ranked 34 on the curve. That was well above (about 20 spots) where they were ranked in the RPI.
What none of us know is how the committee will establish those rankings. Will the NET be the primary ranking tool. Will the AP poll provide the first 6 or so lines and then the advanced metrics take over? Who knows. What I can tell you is that last year, 20 of the first 24 seeds came from the top 24 of the RPI. The other 4 teams were ranked in the top 25 of the AP poll.
If you haven't seen it already, ESPN used a graphic of Joe Lunardi's bracket at the beginning of the K-State game and at that time, he had moved K-State down to the 7 line which would be right in line with their NET Ranking. He had Texas Tech as a 4 and KU as a 3 which would be one seed line off for both of those teams going into the game Saturday night. After the game, he switched them and they were on the seed lines that coincided with their NET ranking.
If you need an all inclusive site to look at NET rankings and a host of other metrics (including team sheets), you should look at Warren Nolan's website. It has tremendous information.
http://warrennolan.com/basketball/2019/net
Lunardi believes (and he has said publicly multiple times) that he believes the committee is going to use the AP rankings and the NET rankings as the primary tools for ranking the teams on the S-Curve. I accidentally offended @Derek Young on Saturday on twitter because I said I couldn't understand why people were having such a hard time understanding the way that Lunardi was placing teams in his Bracketology.
There is a good chance Lunardi is wrong, but if he isn't, K-State is going to end up with a much lower seed line than most people expect. If he is, I am going to owe @ksu_FAN a shirt.
One of the things that is hard for people to accept is that it is much easier for a team to move down in the rankings due to a hit in the metric than it is for teams to move up. The last 5 minutes of the Texas game in Manhattan really hammered K-State's efficiency numbers and that is really hard to overcome. There is a reason that coaches would rather take a close loss (single digits) than trying to foul at the end of the game and risk driving the loss into double digits. But those single game's don't work in the inverse. Texas doesn't get helped by their win at K-State as much as K-State gets hurt by it. K-State's incredibly efficient effort against Oklahoma State did nothing to help their NET rankings in the short term. We are now 80% of the way into the season and it's really hard to bump the efficiency numbers in a positive way.
Think of it like a batting average. Once a player has 500 at bats, it's very easy to have a cold streak and really drop the average, but it's very hard to move the average back up.
I am not smart enough to know what K-State would have to do to get their NET into the teens, but I would guess that it would have to be incredibly significant. Just look at Texas Tech's result against Kansas. They have a 40 point win against a top 20 NET team in a game where they were incredibly efficient and they don't move a single spot in the rankings. North Carolina had wins at #1 Duke and #22 Florida State and moved up 1 spot in the rankings while Duke and FSU lost 6 spots collectively.
Sorry to all the tea-totaling moralists reading this post. It is what it is. And what it is, is the truth.
I was going to start this week's post talking about NET and RPI and Bracketology, but I watched the second half of the 2012 game in Manhattan and the first half of the 2014 game in Manhattan this morning and at that point, all I could think of is how proud I was to listen to the kids use any musical beat to chant FVCK KU during the home win in Manhattan. It really was a thing of absolute beauty.
With that off my chest, lets get to the numbers that nobody understands and everybody wants to complain/debate about.
The latest polls are going to come out this morning (probably before I am done typing this) and K-State fans everywhere are going to lose their minds when KU (after taking their worst beating in decades) stays ahead of K-State (after administering their worst beating in a decade).
Fear not Feline Fanatics. This will be a good thing. Everybody knows that Big Daddy Bruce teams play so much better as the underdogs. I was actually surprised when the line came out at +5. I expected a couple points higher at +7. K-State is better. You can argue they are better at every position except for one or two in the starting lineup. But you have to figure the combination of Allen Field Shack and how the Zebras call the game are good for about 9 points. So in my mind, that means the oddsmakers see K-State as a 4 point favorite on the road.
There has been a lot of debate since Saturday on how the metrics view K-State and how that plays when it comes to humans seeding the tournament. @ksu_FAN and I don't always agree on how the metrics will be used, but if you have any questions about what makes up a quad 1 win or loss or any of the other portions of the metric, he is your resident nerd.
One of the things that gets overlooked when it comes to seeding is that the committee takes all 68 teams selected and ranks them 1-68 on an S-Curve. They then use that S-Curve to place teams on the seed lines. If I remember correctly, last year, K-State was ranked 34 on the curve. That was well above (about 20 spots) where they were ranked in the RPI.
What none of us know is how the committee will establish those rankings. Will the NET be the primary ranking tool. Will the AP poll provide the first 6 or so lines and then the advanced metrics take over? Who knows. What I can tell you is that last year, 20 of the first 24 seeds came from the top 24 of the RPI. The other 4 teams were ranked in the top 25 of the AP poll.
If you haven't seen it already, ESPN used a graphic of Joe Lunardi's bracket at the beginning of the K-State game and at that time, he had moved K-State down to the 7 line which would be right in line with their NET Ranking. He had Texas Tech as a 4 and KU as a 3 which would be one seed line off for both of those teams going into the game Saturday night. After the game, he switched them and they were on the seed lines that coincided with their NET ranking.
If you need an all inclusive site to look at NET rankings and a host of other metrics (including team sheets), you should look at Warren Nolan's website. It has tremendous information.
http://warrennolan.com/basketball/2019/net
Lunardi believes (and he has said publicly multiple times) that he believes the committee is going to use the AP rankings and the NET rankings as the primary tools for ranking the teams on the S-Curve. I accidentally offended @Derek Young on Saturday on twitter because I said I couldn't understand why people were having such a hard time understanding the way that Lunardi was placing teams in his Bracketology.
There is a good chance Lunardi is wrong, but if he isn't, K-State is going to end up with a much lower seed line than most people expect. If he is, I am going to owe @ksu_FAN a shirt.
One of the things that is hard for people to accept is that it is much easier for a team to move down in the rankings due to a hit in the metric than it is for teams to move up. The last 5 minutes of the Texas game in Manhattan really hammered K-State's efficiency numbers and that is really hard to overcome. There is a reason that coaches would rather take a close loss (single digits) than trying to foul at the end of the game and risk driving the loss into double digits. But those single game's don't work in the inverse. Texas doesn't get helped by their win at K-State as much as K-State gets hurt by it. K-State's incredibly efficient effort against Oklahoma State did nothing to help their NET rankings in the short term. We are now 80% of the way into the season and it's really hard to bump the efficiency numbers in a positive way.
Think of it like a batting average. Once a player has 500 at bats, it's very easy to have a cold streak and really drop the average, but it's very hard to move the average back up.
I am not smart enough to know what K-State would have to do to get their NET into the teens, but I would guess that it would have to be incredibly significant. Just look at Texas Tech's result against Kansas. They have a 40 point win against a top 20 NET team in a game where they were incredibly efficient and they don't move a single spot in the rankings. North Carolina had wins at #1 Duke and #22 Florida State and moved up 1 spot in the rankings while Duke and FSU lost 6 spots collectively.
