I’m on tilt.
Not actually. Just a couple dumb comments. But man, commenters can really get under your skin. Got a guy saying our NIT Bracketology model’s wrong (it’s NIT Bracketology, first of all) because it doesn’t have Virginia in there after the Duke win, and that would be a fair critique, or at least question, were it not for the fact the bracket was posted before that game. Same guy, or maybe it’s his buddy (I forget), is mad that we don’t think Syracuse’s top 80 NET ranking is going to get them in when the at-large cut line for the NIT is way below 80 most years.
Anyway, for as frustrating as those reading comprehension standardized tests were in grade school, maybe they were measuring something that does need to be measured.
Duke Isn’t That Good
I wish I’d staked this claim harder before Monday, but while a proper takeaway from Virginia’s win in Durham is, “Wow, Virginia’s showing some life!” another is, “Duke is not that good!” Both are true. Duke’s on the fringe of National Championship Possibilities. I’m not sure they should be in there. They’re comparable to UCLA in that it makes sense in your head but on paper, it doesn’t really add up.
Neither Is Auburn
I wish I’d staked this claim harder too, but at least I did some staking with it. Auburn was never the best team in the country. They may have had the best résumé (by SOR, they still do!) but they were not the best team. They were, what, a point and a half road favorite in Fayetteville? Come on. Not some landmark upset. Landmark fun, yes, but landmark surprise, no.
Anyway, I think it’s time we started being a little clearer about this. There’s always a chance, yes, there’s always a chance. But overall, there are seven teams it’s reasonable to believe can win a national championship, and there’s either one or three it’s reasonable to believe will win the national championship. The Contenders are Gonzaga, and then maybe Kentucky and Arizona. The Possibilities are Houston, Purdue, Baylor, and Kansas, unless you excluded Kentucky and Arizona from the first group in which case they’re also in this second group. We aren’t saying Auburn cannot win the national championship, or that Duke cannot, or that UCLA or Illinois or the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee cannot. There is technically a possibility for each of these teams, and it’s higher for Auburn and Duke than for just about anyone in the country, but it’s still a fairly miniscule possibility. There’s either one or three teams it’s reasonable to pick, and depending on your answer to that there are either four or six teams that might do it.
I’ve said my piece.
Betting Thoughts
After retreating from the conference basketball betting scene last year, we’ve been giving it a go this year, trying a lot of different methods behind the scenes. Results have been, as often, mixed. We wrote up our 2,000th bet the other day, and it pushed, which was about as fitting as it could’ve been. We’ve had a good three days behind the scenes in testing, but the method has been “intuition” and I don’t know how replicable that is. We still have a teensy cushion there, and we still feel good about our ability to make March profitable with futures, but it’d be nice to translate some of the behind-the-scenes wins from the last three days into wins on the published bets. We really want to keep that average ROI positive. It’s a big point of pride, and as has been said, kind of justifies the whole endeavor.
Pivoting to Football
We’ll come back to basketball, don’t worry, I’m not just ignoring Iowa State’s result last night, as much as I’d like to. As proof of that, I’ll talk through Iowa State football at the end here, grim though it may feel.
Bill Connelly released his offseason SP+ rankings today. They’re available here with an ESPN+ subscription (we ponied up, we still don’t subscribe to The Athletic, make of that what you will). A quick breakdown by conference:
SEC
Georgia and Alabama are second and third, and each has both an offense and defense within the top five. Texas A&M is sixth, and while they don’t have the offensive heft of their counterparts, their defense can hang. Tennessee is ninth, led by what’s expected to be a lightning-like offense, and that shouldn’t be surprising, even if it is.
Keep an eye on Mississippi State in the West. Ranked 12th.
Big Ten
Ohio State’s first in the nation, which isn’t unusual for SP+. SP+ tends to be high on the Buckeyes, and it’s objective but also Ohio State hasn’t won a title in seven years. Michigan’s fourth, indicating continued strength from the Wolverines (and a real possibility of a two-bid Big Ten, though that’s always an underrated possibility in the discourse). Wisconsin’s tenth, and while SP+ is also often high on the Badgers, the Badgers do that thing where they look like the best team in the world one week then can’t get out of their own way the next, and that’s backed up numerically as well, meaning they really can be the tenth-best team by being the second or third-best one week and a fringe top-50 team the next. To hint as to why this is, they grade out as having the second-best defense but the 62nd-best offense. Biggest gap in the top 25, but only because Iowa’s 26th.
General Big Ten outlook, then, is that Ohio State and Michigan are probably fighting to play Wisconsin in Indy, as should always be assumed to be the case with this league. The East, as usual, will be deeper than the West and stronger at the top. The Buckeyes and Wolverines are both driven by their offenses.
ACC
Clemson returns to the top five, led by their top-ranked defense. We’ll see what the Tigers look like after all their turnover at the coordinator levels this offseason, but they still have the guys, they still play in the ACC, and unless NC State really pans out (and brings a heck of a game to Death-ish Valley [we reserve Death Valley for LSU]) they might not be tested until November, when they go to South Bend after a bye week, or conceivably December, and the latter part at that.
Challenging the Tigers will be NC State (15th), Pitt (13th), and maybe Miami (20th) or Florida State (24th). Really, though, it’s all Clemson until we see otherwise. No North Carolina hype from SP+, and Wake Forest is expected to be great on offense but a big regressor overall. Shapes up pretty well for Pitt and Miami, honestly. Get past Tennessee Week 2 and Pitt might be a really valuable national championship future ticket, if only to hedge off of. Miami goes to A&M in September, too, which—man, looking at college football schedules is so fun.
Notre Dame, Pac-12, The Rest
Saving the Big 12 just so I can transition more easily to Iowa State, but the story with the non-Big 12 parts of the country we haven’t covered yet is that Notre Dame (8th), Cincinnati (11th), and Utah (14th) are in decent positions, and no one else is. BYU’s the only other team in the top 25, with USC’s recruiting and returning production so abysmal that they come in at 64th, even with Caleb Williams (who is good but not Justin Fields). Might USC be good eventually? Yes. Probably, I’d even say. But it’s going to take a little time.
With Notre Dame and Cincinnati, it’s worth looking at schedules, since those are all-important for cracking the CFP field if you can’t win a Power Five league. Notre Dame goes to Ohio State and, as mentioned, hosts Clemson, so 11-1 would probably be enough for them this year and 10-2, barring chaos, would not. Cincinnati plays at Arkansas and hosts Indiana, but it’s hard to see either of those being a top-15 win, given Arkansas’s projected as the sixth-best team in the SEC West (even at 28th nationally) and Indiana’s 2020 magic is not expected to return. The AAC schedule isn’t out yet, but Houston’s 35th, for whatever it’s worth. Would imagine it would take an emphatic 13-0 from the Bearcats and a lot of help.
Big 12
Alright, Big 12 time. Oklahoma’s 7th, much to the haters’ chagrin. Behind them comes…nobody, really. Baylor’s 30th. That’s the next Big 12 team. The Big 12’s a mess. Texas went 5-7 last year. Oklahoma State and Iowa State each graduated a ton of guys. Everyone else is similarly in limbo except for Kansas, old reliable, 115th in the nation.
In short, if I were picking a College Football Playoff today, I’d go Ohio State, Georgia, Clemson, Oklahoma, with Alabama and Michigan right there as potential 12-1 or 11-1 options, should things go chalkily, and Utah lurking (Arizona State is rated as the second-best Pac-12 team, 31st overall, and if you were wondering the AAC has a better fourth team than the Pac-12 but not a better fifth team unless I’ve got my realignment timing wrong). You probably could have guessed a lot of this yourself. College football is rather predictable at the top. Sure is fun, though, still.
Iowa State’s 2022 Outlook
Now, Iowa State. It’s worth mentioning what goes into these, which is: Recruiting (decent for Iowa State, within the Big 12 context), Recent History (good for Iowa State, but a small piece), and Returning Production (bad for Iowa State, and a big piece). Iowa State is returning less production next year than everyone in the country but Nevada, Hawaii, and Coastal Carolina, with Hawaii in so much turmoil that the state legislature did an investigation into it all (seriously). The upside of this is that Iowa State shouldn’t have this much turnover again for a while, and it came from something good, being a rare negative effect of the positive phenomenon of a lot of players wanting to use every minute of their eligibility to play in Ames under Matt Campbell. But it will be a down year for the Cyclones.
Iowa State ranks 52nd in SP+, with a +5.8 rating, which either exactly means or roughly means they’re 5.8 points better than an average team, which is evidently Boston College. Here’s how their schedule lines up, with ratings:
- Southeast Missouri State (N/A)
- @ Iowa (+13.1)
- Ohio (-10.1)
- Baylor (+12.6)
- @ Kansas (-12.2)
- Kansas State (+9.9)
- @ Texas (+12.3)
- Oklahoma (+19.2)
- West Virginia (+2.3)
- @ Oklahoma State (+11.4)
- Texas Tech (+6.4)
- @ TCU (+7.3)
Factoring in homefield advantage, which we’ll call three points, you’re looking at the Cyclones as favorites in five games and underdogs in seven, though they’re two or more-score favorites three times and two-score underdogs four times, leaving five games in the one-score range, leading me to call it more 5.5-6.5 than 5-7. Overall, the message is that bowl eligibility is far from guaranteed, and is probably close to a 50% prospect. Pull off the upset in Iowa City, though, as we’ve been saying, and you’ve got a decent shot at starting 6-0. The schedule is backloaded in a big, big way. Maybe that’ll buy Campbell’s staff some time.
Putting the Hard in Hardwood
Sticking with Iowa State but pulling us back to basketball, it has not been easy for the Cyclones, who scored just 63 points in 72 possessions last night at NIT-projected West Virginia. ISU’s now 3-8 in the Big 12, which is good for last place (maybe the Big 12 needs a basketball equivalent of Kansas football).
Before we get into what’s going on, a few points:
First, Iowa State’s still projected to finish 7-11 in league play, which would probably get them the sixth or seventh seed in the Big 12 Tournament. Not an awesome spot to be, but in a deep league, that’s respectable.
Second, this doesn’t undo all the great stuff from earlier this year. Those wins over Xavier and Iowa hold up, and the ones over Memphis and Creighton are good filler. Beating Texas Tech and Texas at home looks good, as does beating Oklahoma State on the road. A cold stretch undoes nothing that’s been done.
Third, none of these losses are bad. Iowa State has just one loss that’s Quadrant 2 or worse on the team sheet—the home defeat to TCU. These guys are 5-7 against Q1. That’s as many Q1 wins as Arizona, Kentucky, Villanova, Duke, Illinois…even Texas Tech. The Cyclones have a great résumé. They may only be a decent team, but they have a great résumé. They’re currently aimed at an 8 or 9-seed. Great place to be at this stage in the rebuild.
Still, though, it stinks to lose three games in a row, and it especially stinks to look so bad in the last two (and far from great in the first).
Part of this is the consequence of being a defense-first team. When defense-first teams lose, they look terrible. Purdue, an offense-first team, lost to Rutgers earlier this year and played atrocious basketball. Because it was a 70-68 game, though, you could come away thinking something along the lines of, “Hey, Rutgers sprung a great upset there at home.” Texas Tech, a defense-first team, lost to Kansas State a month ago, and the score was 62-51, and the takeaway was that the Red Raiders were a debacle that night. Sometimes good defense looks like bad basketball. Bad offense always looks like bad basketball.
That said, Iowa State’s offense is bad. The second-worst, by KenPom, of any projected NCAA Tournament at-large bid recipient (San Diego State’s is worse, in a bizarrely extreme instance of football and basketball synchronicity). It needs Tyrese Hunter to play well to function, and while sometimes Izaiah Brockington can bail it out (his performance is more or less independent from everyone else’s), that’s not a safety valve as much as a Plan-B-for-a-reason. Hunter’s just a freshman. He’s an awesome freshman. Evan Miyakawa has him ranked as the 44th-best defensive player in the whole freaking country. But the weight of the offense is too much for him to shoulder, and while George Conditt’s been a breath of life lately (and Jaden Walker turned in some solid minutes last night) and Aljaž Kunc and Caleb Grill are awesome options from three, all those guys are peripheral options. The three most voluminous field goal attempters are Brockington (inefficient but pretty darn good given how much he’s asked to do), Hunter (not a scorer at this stage in his career), and Gabe Kalscheur (God bless him but the man cannot make buckets).
How, looking at all of this, do you fix it? Three answers:
1. Play six straight games against bubble-at-best teams. Technically, this is seven, and Iowa State dropped the ball on the first, but wins fix things. 51-47 wins fix things. They don’t actually fix things, of course, but they flip the narrative, and Iowa State gets closer to a tournament lock, and we stop worrying too much about the disasters as long as the NCAA Tournament loss is respectable, which it probably will be if these guys are an 8-seed.
2. Play better defense. Focus on the strength. Skin Kansas State alive on Saturday, and make it so painful that it doesn’t matter if you only score 41 again.
3. Speed things up? I don’t know. But if the idea here is that Kalscheur can’t score, Brockington needs more open looks and those are likelier to come if he doesn’t have to create them, you have two great shooters you can sub in on the wings (one with length), and Hunter is a solid distributor but not good enough to consistently create things out of nothing, trying to run the break more might help. It’s not a good idea to take away Kalscheur’s minutes, since he’s a great defender himself, but at some point he needs to stop being asked to create, least efficient option that he is. I wouldn’t mind starting Kunc ahead of Tristan Enaruna, or even ahead of Robert Jones, to keep a shooter always on the floor. Basically, you need options for scoring beyond just Brockington or Kalscheur creating off the dribble, since one of those guys is suffering from the pressure of having to do too much and the other is suffering from the pressure of having to do anything offensive at all.
Overall, it’s worth remembering where we were coming out of Thanksgiving, when we realized this team might be something decent, or even where we were coming off that win at Creighton, when we realized this team really could make the tournament. Iowa State’s a bubble team that’s played itself off the bubble. It’s got a massive flaw. But it’s competitive, and it’s exceeding expectations by miles and miles.
Tonight’s Action
Baylor goes to Kansas State tonight, trying to get right. Houston’s got possibly its toughest remaining game before the tournament, playing at SMU. Closer to the bubble, Oklahoma hosts Texas Tech and Mississippi State hosts Tennessee, each looking for a big win that’s also attainable. Of interest to Iowa State in the seeding jostling, Loyola’s got a losable game at Bradley and San Diego State probably will crush San Jose State, but San Francisco’s showed us anything’s possible. Best viewing, from my vantage point, goes Houston/SMU at 7:00 PM EST on ESPN2, Texas Tech/Oklahoma at 9:00 on ESPNU, and then at least the opener of that SDSU/SJSU game on CBSSN in the 11:00 hour.
Enjoy.
