Iowa State tips in just over two hours, as I sit down to write this, and it may be the last game of a rollercoaster season. The Cyclones are favored by a handful against Pitt down in Greensboro, but as anyone who’s watched Cyclone spreads this year knows well, underdogs win quite often when only getting a handful.
There’s a school of thought which evaluates a program’s success in a given season based on whether or not the team makes it to a specific round of the NCAA Tournament. I hate that school of thought, I think it’s silly and stupid and discounts far too many consequential things, but the school of thought exists, and I’ll concede it has some merit. If the goal is to win a national championship, then the tournament played to determine the national champion obviously matters, even if it isn’t all that representative of the season as a whole (I should write more on this sometime, but college football’s postseason is the only one that meshes seamlessly with what it means to be good in the regular season, and I’m afraid that is going to change). Should coaches sacrifice how good their team is for the sake of maximizing their chances to win the tournament? It depends on the program. Which brings us to Iowa State.
Coming into the season, the general thought in my Iowa State circles was that making the NCAA Tournament this year would constitute success. There were other goals and benchmarks as well, such as not finishing last in a brutal Big 12, but the primary goal was to make the tournament. That’s a different goal than succeeding within the tournament. The first—making it—requires being the best team you can be. Making the NCAA Tournament out of a high-major conference is highly correlated to how good you are. The second—succeeding within it—requires either having a high ceiling plus luck, or having a high floor. Last year, Iowa State got a lot of luck, playing an LSU team who’d just fired their coach, a Wisconsin team who was among the most overseeded teams in the field by ability alone (they deserved the seed based on résumé, they just weren’t very good), and the also–overachieving Miami team who beat them. They went the high ceiling/luck route in addition to being good enough to make the field. This year, playing from a better seed line, the consistency and the high floor is more important. For this round. Next round, if Xavier wins the game currently being played? Next round, the Cyclones might want inconsistency again.
This waffling back and forth between wanting a high floor and wanting a high ceiling gets back to the point I sometimes try to make about the NCAA Tournament’s flaw. A good team always wins it, but that isn’t always the best team. The objectives move around wildly depending on how good, exactly, you are, and while the goal is to build a juggernaut that has both a high ceiling and the highest floor, that’s extremely difficult to pull off. It leaves programs like Iowa State’s right now in this weird boat where certain people will call a Sweet Sixteen a success and a loss today a failure even though the difference between those two will likely be decided by a few bounces of the ball. It’s kind of dumb. This team overachieved, it gave us some great moments and memories, it broke our hearts a little down the stretch, and it ultimately rallied to not only cement itself into the tournament but get a solid seed, the program’s best seed since 2019, and one they haven’t bested since 2017. This team will finish as either the best team since that ’19 crew or the best since 2000, using KenPom as our evaluator. It’s been an awesome, awesome year. Would I like Iowa State to win today? Of course. I’d like Iowa State to win the whole damn thing. But a win or a loss today doesn’t change how successful this season was or is. A deep run? Yeah, that would add to the accomplishment. But it wouldn’t wholly define the year.
I don’t think I’ve written a set of notes since Caleb Grill was dismissed from the team—we got into full NIT season and I haven’t had a moment to write these out—but I’m very sad about it. Grill was my favorite player on this team to watch, and I think he raised this team’s ceiling to the level of legitimately being capable of beating anyone in the country. He lowered its floor too, of course, and his performance had been worse during the weeks before his dismissal—either due to his back, his mental health, regression, or a combination of the three—but it was sad to see him go. He was so fun to watch when things were going well, and though I don’t know the specifics around his dismissal, I wish him the absolute best.
The key against Pitt might not actually be stopping them on the perimeter. That’s important, but equally important is going to be taking advantage of Pitt’s defense. Iowa State doesn’t have a great offense, but it can outscore Pitt, especially if it beats the hell out of the Panthers on getting second-chance shots. Few games are easy this time of year, and this is not one that is, but the Cyclones have a solid matchup here.
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We’re not going to go through every detail of every sporting matter we’ve missed over the last few weeks—though if there’s something you’d like our opinion on, please do ask, we love to talk about your questions—but let’s go through some scattered thoughts, with a more comprehensive catchup ambitiously planned for Monday:
Tyrese Hunter Got Booed
As I’ve written a few other times, I still really like Tyrese Hunter, which made me happy to see him handle getting booed yesterday so well (Texas is playing in one of the Des Moines pods). He was a great sport about it, which in turn makes me more comfortable with the booing. It seems like everyone, at this point, is having fun. The bridge may be burnt, but if everyone on either side’s ok with that? I can live with it.
That said, I don’t like Tyrese Hunter enough to want him to win any more games this year. For one thing, I don’t want Iowa State to have to play Texas if things do go well for State. For another, I don’t like Texas all that much as a team this year. I probably would, but there’s some animosity there.
Jon Scheyer Succeeded
We wrote a while back about how Jon Scheyer might be a problem at Duke. And? He still conceivably could be, if the program makes no progress from here. But Duke turned out to be the best team in the ACC, and they’ve put themselves in a good position for this tournament. Credit to Scheyer for staving off that narrative.
Tony Bennett Is a Great Coach
I don’t know if Pat Forde, who writes for the ghost of Sports Illustrated, is dumb or proud or great at generating clickbait, but he wrote a column yesterday after Virginia’s collapse against Furman, and from what I could piece together between the glitching ads, he said that Virginia’s 2019 title was a fluke, which is a hilarious thing to say when the stronger argument after 2019 was that the 2018 loss to UMBC was a fluke.
Virginia is not spectacularly equipped for March, and this Virginia team really fell apart over the last month and a half, which was odd. But Virginia was the best team in the nation in 2019, bar none. It was the best team pretty much all year, and that was a year with a great Gonzaga and the Zion Williamson edition of Duke. Thank goodness they survived that tournament so Forde could be roundly made fun of, but it was insulting to whoever still reads Sports Illustrated to put that out there. Good God.
What Is Up with the Mountain West?
As a KenPom stan, and a stan of numbers in general, I’m rattled by the recent tournament failures of the Mountain West conference. It’s inexplicable. Is something happening where Mountain West teams are inflating their ratings in the conference season? If it isn’t that, this is some atrocious luck.
Godspeed to San Diego State, who is still a Mountain West school even though they’ve long kind of been a tier about the Utah State/Boise State ranks.
No Realignment Yet
Speaking of San Diego State, nothing has happened lately with conference realignment except for a whole lot of noise.
The noise has been that the Pac-12 media deal still isn’t done, missing expected conclusion date after expected conclusion date, and that various leaders from the Pac-12 have pushed back against the narrative of bolting for the Big 12, but they aren’t being particularly convincing. There’s an expectation still that they’ll add San Diego State and SMU, but they haven’t done it, the Pac-10 schools don’t seem excited about doing it, and it seems the only way it happens is the narrow but feasible scenario in which adding SDSU and SMU gives Arizona and others enough money over the next five or six years to justify taking a visibility hit and biding their time. I still think someone is going to bolt this year, and that when someone does, others will follow, but I’m a Big 12 guy, so maybe I’m misunderstanding something. One reminder? There is often no smoke when conference realignment really happens at the Power Five level. The big moves are the quietest.
Brock Purdy’s Surgery Went Well
Brock Purdy had his elbow surgery last week, and it was successful. They were able to do the repair—the one where they put it together and add an internal brace, rather than going full Tommy John and replacing it—so the prognosis is to miss six months. It doesn’t sound like he’ll be ready to go Week 1, but he could be in the 49ers’ quarterback mix again this season, and it’s possible they’ll name him the starter and just wait for him to be healthy enough to go. Lot of time left, but we’re in a good spot.
The Aaron Rodgers Situation
Aaron Rodgers is going to be a Jet, and the Packers are maximizing the value they get in return for him, having the Jets cornered in part because the Jets already pulled the trigger on Allen Lazard. It’s a game of chicken, and somebody is going to win. We’re a long way from anything else being a possibility.
I don’t have a lot of emotion about the situation yet, but I think the Packers are making the right move to move on. It was not looking like Green Bay could win a Super Bowl this year with Rodgers, and when that went off the table, it became time to try to win the next one as soon as possible. Right now, that means giving Jordan Love his chance and finding out what the Packers have. I’d imagine his option will be picked up and we’ll see him for two years before another decision is made.
Nick Madrigal Is Mine
Cubs’ spring training is not going well, Seiya Suzuki won’t be ready by Opening Day with his oblique injury and the roster is still mediocre while people are asking for a playoff berth. There are bright spots here and there—Justin Steele’s healthy enough after being scratched with ominous arm fatigue the same day Suzuki went down; and Hayden Wesneski is looking like the fifth starter, which brings downside but also the first of a lot of necessary upside if these unrealistic expectations are to be met—but the situation is still that we are waiting for 2024 or 2025 and wondering if Cubs ownership is ok with doing the same, or if they would axe Jed Hoyer right before the fruit starts to bloom.
I will say: Some have started the Nick Madrigal hype again, seeing him play fine defense at third base and realizing that what I wrote in December is true, and that this is a former highly touted prospect coming out of a tough slew of injuries. If Madrigal is healthy, he will be good. We don’t do that many “takes” here, but that one is mine, and you can join but that doesn’t make it not mine.
The World Baseball Classic Is Great
Edwin Díaz is out for the season after injuring his knee celebrating a World Baseball Classic victory, and the World Baseball Classic is still a good thing. I haven’t been able to watch as much as I’d like, but it’s broken through the college basketball noise in a way the NBA and NHL haven’t, and that says a lot. Part of this is because I’m a baseball fan more than an NBA or NHL fan, so my media is curated towards baseball, but still: This is a great event with great stories pushing the game on the global stage. Sometimes, players get hurt. It could’ve happened any other number of ways.
Housekeeping
As I said above, we’ll try to have a more comprehensive set of notes out on Monday, meaning I’ll look back through the notes app on my phone over the last month and see if I jotted anything down I forgot to address, and then we’ll return to looking through our news feeds each day in each sporting bucket we try to cover. We’ll also try to have thoughts on each day of NCAA Tournament action up on Saturday and Sunday, so check the homepage for those.
