The Big East only put three teams in the NCAA Tournament this year, and it’s not great for the league. Unlike the football power conferences, the Big East relies on NCAA Tournament units for a good portion of its revenue. Those are based on how many tournament games a team plays, so if UConn, Marquette, and Creighton make deep runs, the number could still be healthy. But UConn’s in the toughest region, Marquette’s best player is hurt, and Creighton’s a 3-seed, only narrowly more likely to reach the Sweet 16 than not. More teams is better. Especially for the Big East. This is a bad thing for the conference.
This is not, however, anything bad about the conference.
The Big East missed out on some money. It missed out on some notoriety. It got half the rolls of the dice that you’d expect a conference of its stature to get. But the Big East is still the second-best conference in college basketball at this moment. That part’s still true, and nearly every program in the league can make at least a halfway convincing case that they’ll be better next year than they were this season.
What went wrong? Part of what happened was that UConn was simply too good. UConn went 8–1 against the eventual Big East bubble teams (we’re including Villanova in this, for reasons we’ll get to below). They won the last four of those games by a combined 73 points, roughly 18 per contest. UConn would be an 18-point neutral favorite over Santa Clara. It made Big East bubble teams look, down the stretch, like Santa Clara. That hurts. Meanwhile, the ACC put five teams in the field partly because North Carolina was so beatable. Clemson took down the Tar Heels at home, turning around their season at a crucial moment and staying safe from bubble talk down the stretch. NC State beat UNC in the ACC Tournament championship, earning the league an extra automatic bid. UConn? After that one loss to Seton Hall in December, it dominated.
Creighton and Marquette were each very good as well, much better than the Pac-12’s second-best or the ACC, Big Ten, or Big 12’s respective thirds. They gave opportunities for great wins as a result, but Marquette didn’t lose to a bubble team in the season’s final two months, and Creighton—like UConn—pounded Seton Hall at a critical time.
Part of this, then, was that a lot of the league’s power was consolidated at its top. Yes, the Big East is a great conference, but a lot of that is that it has the best or second-best top three teams in the nation. It was harder for Big East teams to beat their top three than it was in other power leagues, and in a system in which wins are sometimes defined by whether they came against top-30 teams, the Big East’s top-30 wins were harder to acquire.
Another big piece was the oddity of Villanova. In most of its games, Villanova was a very good team. In its games against the Big Five, it stunk. Take away even one of Villanova’s losses to Penn, Saint Joe’s, and Drexel, and the Wildcats likely would have made the field. They simply had too many losses, and too many bad ones at that. Villanova was not close to the bubble yesterday. But they also wouldn’t have been that close had they won just one of those three games. When you’re that close to .500 overall, each game takes on immense weight in the committee’s eyes.
Where this hurt the Big East as a whole was not just that Villanova didn’t make the field. It was that Villanova took other teams down with it. The Wildcats swept Providence. The Wildcats beat Seton Hall by 24 (yet another Seton Hall blowout). In most conferences, the fifth-best team being that good would be an asset. In the Big East, it created a problem. Villanova was good enough to beat others but too flawed to get the job done itself.
Finally, there was the arc of St. John’s season. St. John’s was a mediocre team in November and December, losing to both Michigan and Boston College in games played in New York City. They struggled through January and February, over one stretch going 1–8 against teams not named DePaul. They finished excellently—they’re the 25th-best team in the country right now, per kenpom—but they were not the 25th-best team all year. It took them a long time to get there.
At the end of the day, the Big East got unlucky. It put two teams right on the bubble and two right behind it in a year when the bubble closed to an historically tight place. The committee was not very inconsistent. Virginia isn’t as good as St. John’s, but they accomplished more, by both Strength of Record and Wins Above Bubble. Using Bracket Matrix as our best proxy for what a perfectly consistent (and therefore predictable) committee would do, we see an expected number of bids of 3.72 for the entire Big East. They missed out on 72% of what would likely have been a play-in appearance. There was a little inconsistency, but its impact was only 0.72 teams. It’s possible now that the Big East will get lucky again, that it’ll send three teams to the Final Four and rake in 11% of NCAA Tournament payouts with only 4% of the tournament’s teams. But whether the Big East ends up ok with this March or not, this doesn’t mean the Big East isn’t a great conference right now. It just means the league got unlucky. If anything, the biggest takeaway should be to stop measuring conference strength based on the arbitrary metric that “NCAA Tournament bids” really represents: Number of top-44ish teams.
Can Justin Fields Be Drew Brees?
In what feels like the only other big sports news of the weekend, the Bears officially moved on from Justin Fields, ditching him for most likely a sixth-round pick. It’s a defining moment for Fields. Until Saturday, he was a franchise quarterback, the guy around whom the Bears were being built. Now, he’s a cast-off, on to his second chance.
In the last 20 years, only two quarterbacks have started a Super Bowl after being cast aside. Plenty of unlikely QB’s have played in the game: Kurt Warner. Matt Hasselbeck. Brock Purdy. More. But all three of those guys followed a linear ascent to their first career Super Bowl appearance, Rex Grossman and Colin Kaepernick were top-40 picks, and even Warner’s comeback Super Bowl came after first winning two NFL MVP’s. The only two quarterbacks in the last 20+ years to have been given the keys to a franchise, had those keys taken from them without first achieving success, and gone on to start a Super Bowl are Drew Brees and Nick Foles.
Foles is an oddity, a poorer comparison for Fields than Brees. Foles started ten games as a backup in 2013, put up gaudy numbers in what was then an innovative Chip Kelly offense, and returned to life as a backup before being given a brief chance to start for the Rams. It was with the Rams that he was “given the keys,” but that’s a questionable framing. The Rams gained draft capital in the Foles/Bradford trade.
Brees is the one that tracks. The 32nd overall pick, a Big Ten star, questioned because of a size and skillset that didn’t track with the quarterbacks of his time. Ultimately dispatched to make room for a new prospect at the position, Brees moved on to the Saints, and history became what it became.
There is a key difference here, which is that Brees joined the Saints through free agency on a decently large contract, becoming their starting quarterback, whereas Fields is being sent to Pittsburgh to back up Russell Wilson. But the point of this exercise is not to say that Brees and Fields are perfect comparisons. It’s to say that if you’re looking for a comparable path to Fields’s that eventually did reach the mountaintop, the closest recent one is that of Drew Brees. That’s more or less the only source for optimism. It’s not that Fields isn’t necessarily good enough. It’s that backup quarterback and game-managing quarterback are different positions than franchise quarterback, and that the way the NFL works, it’s rare for anyone to be cast out of the franchise QB role early in their career and go on to achieve great success. Even Jared Goff’s still trying to pull it off.
The Rest
A few other scattered things:
- I didn’t watch the Bristol race yesterday, but I understand it was a good one, partly because there were tire issues? NASCAR’s been struggling at short tracks with the latest car. Evidently tire management can help keep these races from becoming a parade. Reduce the number of tires! Just don’t tell your fans it’s also eco-friendly.
- Our bracketology model turned in a shockingly good performance yesterday. Over at Bracket Matrix, our model’s been one of the least accurate NCAA Tournament bracketologies out there the last three years by the time Selection Sunday arrives. We’ve justified this by saying that our bracketology is predictive and that our bracketology is solid when it comes to the NIT, and both those things are true. But we don’t want to be one of the least accurate. To avoid this, we added that subjectivity to our seed list, wiggling some teams around where we didn’t trust our model. But in the end, the subjective seed list and the objective bracketology performed similarly, and both performed well. Both were above average the way Bracket Matrix scores it. I don’t know if that’ll be indicative of future success or not, but it was reassuring that we’re not wasting our time with this model. Plenty of offseason adjustments ahead, provided we make the time.
- I posted last night about how the new NIT format shook out, what to make of all the opt-outs, and why we’re expecting this NIT to be the best in years. If you are looking for thoughts…I had thoughts.
- We’ll have our bracket picks posted tomorrow, plus some sort of preview for both the NIT and the NCAA Tournament. We’ll have probabilities for both those tournaments posted tonight—just straight simulations from our model’s lukewarm kenpom approach.
- Please enter the NIT Bracket Challenge if you haven’t already. It helps us a lot to keep growing those numbers, and we think you’ll have a good time.
- Drake is the worst 10-seed on kenpom and Washington State is the worst 7-seed. Iowa State has a scary path to the Sweet Sixteen, but all Sweet Sixteen paths are scary. This one is one of the best around. After the Sweet Sixteen it might get brutal, but the other way to look at that is to say that Illinois and UConn face the toughest 6-seed and 4-seed in the field, which means Iowa State might not have to play them at all. We’ll talk more tomorrow about advantageous and disadvantageous paths, but as a spoiler: Iowa State is virtually tied with Arizona as the fifth-best team on kenpom, and Iowa State is also virtually tied with Arizona as the fifth-likeliest national champion, per our simulations. The path is probably neither good nor bad. What a fun night Saturday was, especially for those who made the trip to Kansas City. No Big 12 regular season championship yet for the Cyclones (not since 2001), but another Big 12 Tournament championship and a 2–1 series win over Houston are pretty great accomplishments for a team included in our NIT season previews last October. Otz forever.
