Gonna talk a little bit of NASCAR. First, though:
It Wasn’t That Big an Upset (1-Seed Talk)
Regular readers know that Auburn isn’t that good. Regular readers probably also suspect that Florida, playing at home, wasn’t all that big an underdog. Still, Saturday’s win in Gainesville was fun, and it brought Florida up out of NIT certainty back onto the bubble while starting the wheels in motion towards what could be, God-willing (just kidding that’s sacrilegious), an Auburn collapse.
From here, the Tigers host Mississippi, visit Tennessee and Mississippi State, and host South Carolina. They should win three of those. Win all four, they’re likely a 1-seed barring something seismic in the SEC Tournament…right?
It’s unclear. We learned on Saturday that the committee views Gonzaga as the best overall team/résumé in the country (the former likely far outweighing the latter, in this case), followed by Auburn, Arizona, Kansas, Baylor, and Kentucky, in order. Beyond those six, it’s impossible to see a convincing case for a spot on the top line at present, and it’s hard to see one materializing unless Purdue or Texas Tech or Tennessee or Illinois goes unbeaten from here out. Our model doesn’t see anyone finishing the year unbeaten from here. Not even Gonzaga, which is part of why our model’s low on the Zags.
Gonzaga deserves some attention here. Our model is clearly rather wrong about them. Yes, they’re fairly likely to lose one more game, but it’s far from assured, and it wouldn’t be all that bad of a loss. They’re the best team in the country, head and shoulders above the field, and the committee knows it, which is probably a good thing. Still, they’re an unusual case, and our model’s grand weakness is its poor ability to deal with unusual cases. With Gonzaga, specifically, it’s hard to forecast how the committee will treat a team with the number one ranking in KenPom and NET but a résumé, by most metrics, outside the top ten. We’ll be looking back through the last few years for clues on this, and thankfully, it may have happened recently with the Zags themselves. More to come.
One thing that our model may be capturing here, in its current form, is that for as advantageous as Gonzaga’s last two regular season games (at San Francisco on Thursday, at Saint Mary’s on Saturday) are, those other five teams have better slates of opportunities. Kentucky and Auburn will quite possibly play one another in…oh man, it’s in Tampa? Why would you move a tournament from Nashville to Tampa? Tampa gets unfair hate, I understand that, but…it’s Nashville, guys. Anyway, Kentucky and Auburn will quite possibly still play one another, Baylor and Kansas play in Waco on Saturday and perhaps again in Kansas City, and Arizona gets to play at USC (comparable to San Francisco and Saint Mary’s) before a rather likely rubber match with UCLA. That’s more meat than Gonzaga sees on its own plate, and while I’m guessing our model’s wrong to have Gonzaga on the 2-line, the disparity between Auburn/Kentucky/Kansas/Baylor’s remaining opportunities and those of their western counterparts may be overblown.
It’s worth noting here that Arizona has a lot of potential killer losses left. They make the altitude trip this week. They host the NorCal schools next week. They may have to play Oregon in the Pac-12 semi’s. If they drop one or two of those, it’s easy to see them landing on the 2-line, which could, in a scenario in which, say, Kansas or Baylor steals the top overall seed, or Arizona slips to sixth overall and the South 2-seed gets taken by someone else, leaves Arizona and Gonzaga in the same region, possibly also with Texas Tech. Not all that likely, but a scenario that could really open things up, benefitting…
Let’s update our categories.
Contenders
Gonzaga spent the weekend holding off Santa Clara at home. Kentucky sent Alabama packing from Lexington after the Tide made it competitive in the first half, but not the second. Arizona struggled against Oregon but held off the Ducks in Tucson. These remain the three, and reasonable forecasts (not reflections) do have them all on the top line right now. Each is its conference tournament favorite, and while Kentucky and Arizona will likely each lose one more along the way, winning those conference tournaments should be enough, or even possibly more than enough.
Possibilities
To be completely transparent, I don’t remember who we put in this sphere on Saturday. It’s been variable, and that’s both a feature and a bug. Possibilities are teams of which you can say, “Yeah, I can see it,” but you shouldn’t have any real confidence. Kentucky and Arizona might belong here, but at the same time, you have to have more than one contender (otherwise we’d use a Favorite/Challenger/Possibility classification system, which we may yet turn to depending what happens from here). Right now, it’s Baylor, Kansas, Auburn, Houston, UCLA, and Duke. We draw the line before Texas Tech, because their offensive efficiency is hard to believe in. This also excludes Villanova, but Villanova just struggled to put away Georgetown, and as exciting as that game last week in Rhode Island was, national championship-caliber teams should probably win comfortably against Providence no matter where the game takes place.
You may note the exclusion of Purdue, who was a 2-seed in Saturday’s committee preview. Purdue cannot play defense. We’ve given them plenty of opportunities, and they’ve shown they can’t do it. At some point you have to draw the line, and we drew it a while ago. Beyond them:
UCLA’s performance Saturday flew under the radar, but a 26-point win over Washington, even at home, isn’t anything to scoff at. It came on the heels of a 20-point win, also at home, against Washington State, and that’s also nothing to scoff at.
Johnny Juzang’s injury’s a concern for the Bruins. There’s no getting around that. He’s listed as a game-time decision tonight, though, and we’re still weeks away from the tournament. This isn’t something to put too much worry behind. UCLA is not a team you should expect to play like they did down the stretch last March. But they’re a team that’s shown, many times both last year and this year, that they’re capable of that sort of thing. Thankfully for Gonzaga, Arizona and UCLA won’t be in the same region. Not thankfully for Gonzaga, we’re probably actually looking at Gonzaga in the West and UCLA…also in the West. Along with, again, quite possibly Texas Tech (if they aren’t on the same line as UCLA, since Kansas and Baylor will likely be in the South and Midwest and Lubbock is a long, long way from Philadelphia), whose offense we don’t respect but who we sure wouldn’t want to play.
Tonight, Baylor goes to Stillwater in the biggest game of the night, while UCLA hosts Arizona State in the other game featuring one of these teams. There’s bubble action elsewhere—West Virginia goes to TCU, Indiana visits Ohio State, New Mexico State and Seattle show down for possibly the WAC regular season crown (and Loyola and UNC try to avoid disaster against Illinois State and Louisville, respectively)—but were this college football, these would be the only two games we cared about even a lick. It’s not college football, so we care about the others, but these are the big games. Can Baylor and UCLA avenge their respective low points?
Safe Again, Cyclones
Speaking of low points, last Saturday was one in Ames. Iowa State had just vomited up a winnable game against Kansas State at Hilton, the offense couldn’t score, and a last-place Big 12 finish was looking devastatingly likely. Then, the Cyclones went to Fort Worth and won, and then, they came home and beat the pants off of Oklahoma. Their best game since December. And they’ve played some good games since December.
Iowa State, we should note, did not speed it up as we’ve suggested. Instead, they shot 74% on two-point attempts and 53% from deep. That works too. If they keep doing that, they can play as slow as they want. In fact, they should play as slow as possible if they’re shooting like that. Don’t risk numeric reality bringing you down to earth.
As a product of being such a glacial game, nobody really lit up the stat sheet in a volume sense. Izaiah Brockington did lead the charge, scoring 22 points on 13 attempts without registering a turnover, and Tristan Enaruna provided some efficient minutes off the bench. Notably, the team forced turnovers on 28% of Sooner possessions, their highest rate in a little while. Turnovers make the world go round for Iowa State, and forcing them keeps it spinning the right direction.
The upshot of the result is that Iowa State’s pretty safely in the NCAA Tournament. They could still miss it, but if they win two of these next four, they’re probably safe, and they’re probably somewhere between a 6-seed and a 10-seed, which could be fertile ground for a Sweet Sixteen shot. A great season once more.
Fun with Daytona
We missed on all eleven of our Daytona picks, but to be fair to us, it was a longshot-heavy portfolio. We did have a 100-to-1 play (David Ragan) alive at the end—he finished eighth—and we were fractions of a second from hitting on Bubba Wallace at 22-to-1. Excited to keep working on this line of betting. Sad to miss a superspeedway, though. Lot of randomness there. Excited for Talladega when it comes.
