The daytime today—Wednesday of the first week of the tournaments—feels like a breath. The first real pause in activity since last Tuesday, when it was just the ACC playing in the daytime. Nice to have these little rhythms back. Conference tournament week accelerates and then slowly hushes on Sunday, then after the Selection Show it becomes a breakneck pace until games tip Tuesday and then, whew, you get a few hours Wednesday to do your laundry before every gas pedal in the world hits the floor on Thursday. It was weird not having these exact rhythms last year, and of course so strange in 2020. Again, nice to have them back.
Now, to start with something stupid:
Of Course the First Four Should Be in Dayton
Dayton loves the First Four, and that’s what you need for the First Four. You need a packed house. You need fans who love college basketball. You need a place that’s thrilled to have it. If you strip away the Dayton piece of the First Four, you’re left with eight mediocre or bad teams playing games for the right to probably lose on Thursday or Friday somewhere far away. Also for a whole lot of money that the athletes themselves won’t really see. Put it in Dayton, and it’s an event. Put it in Dayton, and people care. Put it in Dayton, and as a friend who was a manager at Iowa and went to the Hawkeye game there in ’14 put it to me, it’s a bucket list American sporting experience. I don’t care if I ever see an NCAA Tournament game in person in my life. I think a full-day pass would be fun when I have a family, if my kids like sports, but it’s not something that feels once-in-a-lifetime. There’s an argument to be made to not attend unless you have a team there and it’s a good one, since it means missing the rest of the fun. Attending the First Four, though, feels once-in-a-lifetime.
Anyway, there were some idiots on Twitter last night (I know, I know, it’s on me for being on Twitter) saying the play-in games should be somewhere else. Some were even pointing out how far Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Texas Southern had to travel, as though a game right between the two in Port Lavaca, Texas would be some great event and not an empty-gym sad-fest leaving us all bemoaning the NCAA. I understand the argument that it should be more centrally-located, given things like Indiana having to fly to Portland after last night’s game, but at the same time…these are college kids playing in the NCAA Tournament, and if you don’t want to play in the First Four, there’s a pretty clear way to avoid that. Can the travel suck? Yeah, but that’s part of the tournament. What so many kids in the NIT would give to have taken an overnight flight to Portland last night from Dayton, Ohio.
Also, yes, the First Four should just be for at-larges, it is dumb to make automatic bids play play-in games. It does, though, increase the number of first-round upsets that actually make a splash, by pushing better teams down two spots on the S-Curve. That’s your tradeoff.
No real thoughts on the games last night, beyond some disappointment for Wyoming at how their season’s end went after such a great few months to start the year. Wright State/Bryant should be really fun, because Bryant is wild, but also because of Dayton, and how much Dayton cares. Rutgers/Notre Dame is also a fun one, mostly because it’s so damn intriguing. You never know what you’re going to get with Rutgers. They are a wildly different team from themselves. And Notre Dame’s so…I don’t know. They’re a bad basketball team dressed up as a good basketball team.
The NIT: The Games
Who’s going to care is a legitimate question with the NIT, and as we guessed, Oklahoma looked like they cared. Everyone did, really, or cared enough, though Xavier and Texas A&M and North Texas were all bad versions of themselves. We’ve seen teams turn it on once they win one game (that happened in both ’18 and ’19 with the eventual champions, not sure about the pre-All Things NIT days), so that could happen with all three who had rough nights (we’ll get to Xavier, don’t worry guys). Back to Oklahoma, the Sooners rolling through this thing and finishing as a top-ten KenPom team would say something. Probably something insignificant, but something.
Lot of interesting ones tonight. Wake Forest got a bad draw as a 2-seed, Towson’s better than folks realize. Not unlike playing Oregon. Northern Iowa wasn’t far out of at-large territory and should be competitive close to home. I like Iona a lot to compete at Florida (Pitino’s just such a good in-game coach), and I’m surprised at how the market seems to be addressing that—the spread’s fairly true to KenPom, at least from what I’ve seen, and I was expecting there to be value on Florida. Virginia/Mississippi State’s a solid game (Mississippi State’s better than both Notre Dame and Rutgers), Dayton/Toledo’s a solid game…good stuff tonight. Could definitely see a big upset too, in Provo or Dallas. Not a great probability (oddly chalky year, probably because of the how-much-teams-care factor—not a lot of actual disappointed powers playing in it), but twenty percent or so.
The NIT: Travis Steele, Kenny Payne
Ok, Kenny Payne and Louisville aren’t in the NIT, but Louisville’s reportedly hiring him, felt like it bore mentioning, felt this the best place to do it. It’s hard to know what to expect from these kinds of hires, but he’s spent a lot of time in the college game as an assistant, making him more like Hubert Davis than Juwan Howard or Mike Woodson. He isn’t a successor like Davis was, but it’s not all that different, really. Davis took over a program that was down, and did…fine in his first year. Fine is probably the median expectation from Payne, too, if he’s indeed the guy. Louisville has plenty of wind right now if you can figure out how to work the sails, and in the ACC these days, you can make some hay with effective inconsistent mediocrity, just like UNC’s done. Wake Forest and Syracuse and Virginia Tech all have older rosters. Virginia and Miami and Georgia Tech and Florida State are all a little out in the wilderness. Notre Dame’s a huge unknown for next year—Blake Wesley and transfer shooters, we’d guess. Pitt’s in turmoil, Clemson’s hard to see being great, NC State’s in a bad spot. It’s really only Boston College surging right now, and they’re still Boston College, which is mean but meaningful. So for next year’s ACC, if Louisville can bring in enough effective transfers, they could be the 50th-best team in the country and get an 8-seed so long as they avoid bad losses and play a great game once or twice. Duke’s even transitioning. The league is fairly open, not just for the taking but for one of those top-four spots in the standings which, as we’re seeing in tonight’s play-in game selections, might hold some weight.
Xavier’s in a weirder place. Had they won that three-overtime game at Providence, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, I don’t think. They’d be in the tournament with an 11-seed, they’d probably lose, and we’d think as little about them as we’re thinking about Seton Hall. Just another decent Big East school. Instead, Travis Steele is gone, and the good ol’ days feel far in the past.
It is wild that Steele never made a tournament at Xavier, partially because his teams were always solid. Never worse than 66th in KenPom, provided they don’t drop much further this year (they’re currently 63rd). Consistent, in a lot of ways, Steele never managed to get the program back to where it had sat for the three decades before he took over (Xavier made the second round of the NCAA Tournament 16 times between 1990 and 2018). He was only one real step below it, but it was a meaningful step.
That history is promising. It’s promising to have been such a consistently good program for so long. It’s helpful, too, to be in the Big East. Playing in a power conference substantially raises a program’s floor. But you have to wonder, looking at Xavier, what was behind that run of such consistent success, and whether the things that fueled it are still things true of Xavier and the environment in which they operate. Xavier’s last three coaches before Steele are all alive and not currently head coaches, and it’s conceivable they’d bring one of them—Chris Mack—back. But would it still work? Immediate reaction is to tell them to grab Lamont Paris. He can clearly work the portal, and they might be able to make something of that.
Our Futures Portfolio
We’re playing a lot of futures again, and we’re specifically playing a lot of massive longshots. Whereas last year, our big plays were high-confidence moves in Gonzaga to reach the Elite Eight and responsible underdogs like USC and Wisconsin and Loyola and Houston, this year we’re shooting from the hip, taking teams like Texas at 100-to-1 to win it all and Chattanooga at 150-to-1 to make the Elite Eight.
Why is this happening? There are two possible explanations.
It’s possible these teams are undervalued relative to current KenPom ratings. With a pick like ours on San Francisco to win it all at 250-to-1, that seems possible. San Francisco’s 21st in KenPom and would be a single-digit underdog against everyone who sits ahead of them except for maybe Gonzaga.
It’s also possible it’s because we’re running our simulations hot. We’re letting teams’ ratings change as the simulations go on, based on results, and it’s hard to do this correctly without a rather complex algorithm we do not have the experiential resources to code. We’re hoping we’re doing it right, and we’re doing the best we can, but rather than simulating how many possessions each game has and looking at all the Bayesian connections and adjusting both offensive and defensive efficiencies, we’re just looking at how the margin in our simulations differs from the expected margin and adjusting the rating accordingly. In our scrubs, nothing jumps out as too wild, but this would naturally lead to a higher emphasis on teams that currently rate out worse, since they have more to gain in these ratings systems, and if our adjustments are overly aggressive…they might bite us. We’re confident enough in our method to be doing it, but that’s the backstory.
This is a big thing for our bracketology model, in the eventual sense. Eventually, we want to bring back our model’s percentages, and to do that accurately, I think we’ll need to be running simulations hot. Team quality just changes too much over the course of the regular season, especially below the top-most levels. So, hopefully we’re getting it right, but if not, we’ll have plenty of time spent studying this offseason to figure out what we should have done differently.
More futures coming today, I would think. Unless there’s something very surprising when I look at the lines after this post goes up.
MLB Wheeling, MLB Dealing
Since Monday evening, when we last did this, I think the big news is as follows:
- The A’s traded Matt Chapman to the Blue Jays.
- Atlanta extended Matt Olson, re-signed Eddie Rosario, and signed Collin McHugh.
- The Cubs signed Seiya Suzuki and Chris Martin.
- The Phillies signed Kyle Schwarber.
- The Yankees re-signed Anthony Rizzo.
- The Brewers signed Andrew McCutchen.
- The Royals and Reds did a weird little Mike Minor-for-Amir Garrett swap, then the Royals brought back Zack Greinke.
- The Tigers signed Andrew Chafin.
Quick reactions are:
Atlanta kind of got away with one this last season, and they don’t seem to be resting on it. Their turnaround was outrageous and likely not replicable, so they needed to strengthen that roster. They’ve done it in a big way right as the Mets have retooled aggressively themselves, leaving us with a two-horse race in the NL East that’s among the most powerful in baseball.
The Phillies got more bopper-centric, but they’re still playing from behind in their own division, at least on paper. A lot can change, but they’re in a Wild Card fight right now that, with the expanded playoffs, is more attainable but of comparable value (medium).
The Blue Jays are possibly the best team in baseball on paper, something that isn’t quite backed up by the FanGraphs playoff odds (those are out, God bless them) but when you consider that three of the four likeliest World Series winners are in the AL…they’re probably not much worse than the Dodgers overall.
The Cubs…I like it.
The thing about Suzuki, and this is something Cubs should know well from the Fukudome experience, is that his projections are more uncertain than those of a guy who’s played his whole career in the United States, or even someone coming out of the Dominican Republic. He’s just a rarer case, so he’s harder to project. The bad thing about this is that he could kind of crash and burn. The good thing about this is that he could be even better than his strong projection. Regardless, the plan appears to be to have him in the outfield aside Brennan Davis when Davis’s time comes, and to have him in the heart of a lineup this year that still has upside. The overall best take on where the Cubs stand is that they project to be a pretty bad team, but that with nobody that good in their division and those aforementioned expanded playoffs a thing, if they start hot the team could invest more, and there’s a chance they invest more even in this current free agent period. The Brewers are heavily reliant on a small number of players, as are the Mets. The Cardinals and Phillies are kind of trying to skate through as .500-quality teams, hoping for good breaks. The Giants and Padres are solid, the Dodgers are great, Atlanta’s good, if everything works out for everyone else the Cubs would be wise to sell again and keep amassing chips for 2023 or ’24. But if Frank Schwindel rakes again and Kyle Hendricks and Ian Happ bounce back and the bullpen’s good and one of the Brewers’ starters loses his command…they’re not that far away from being a roster that’s competitive within the NL Central. Not all hope for this year is lost.
Since I mentioned the bullpen: Chris Martin is a good pickup. Has been effective for four straight years now. Few sure bets with relievers, but he’s about as good a bet as you’d hope for.
The Minor Leagues Are Back
In unambiguously good news, MLB is bringing back the names of the minor leagues. No more AAA West and AAA East. It’s the Pacific Coast League and the International League again, and so on down into lower levels. A small thing, and some alterations from what it used to be, but it restores some of the soul to the game, and we need that.
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The best NIT game tonight is…I don’t know, to be honest. I’ll probably watch Towson/Wake Forest on ESPN+ at 7:00 PM EDT but have Dayton/Toledo and Mississippi State/Virginia (also 7:00 PM EDT, but ESPN+ and ESPN2, respectively) ready for channel-flipping. The nice thing about the 9:10 PM EDT start (on truTV) of Notre Dame/Rutgers is that all three of these should be done by the time that tips, giving you a real finish and then the full pageantry. Also, if you love the First Four, or if the NIT games are duds, Wright State and Bryant tip at 6:40 PM EDT, also on truTV.
