Joe’s Notes: The Most Desperate Teams in the NCAA Tournament

The first wave of NCAA Tournament games is almost complete. We’re almost a quarter of the way through the opening round. In terms of real upsets, Duquesne over BYU is the only surprise so far. All 1, 2, 3, and 4-seeds remain in the field, and Oregon was either favored or close to it against South Carolina.

It’s an interesting crop of 1, 2, 3, and 4-seeds, partly because there was such separation between them and the 5-line over the last month or so of the season. We had a natural break after 16 this year. We had a top 16 teams and then had everybody else. This early in the tournament, it still makes sense to look at the championship contenders through that lens.

It’s also an interesting group, though, because of how badly so many of them specifically want a Final Four. Not a national championship. Not an Elite Eight or a Sweet Sixteen. A Final Four. Take a look at each of those sixteen teams’ last Final Four appearance:

For eight of these teams—Tennessee, Arizona, Marquette, Iowa State, Creighton, Kentucky, Auburn, and Alabama—reaching the Final Four seems to constitute the sweet spot of success, the apex of that particular utility curve. For all eight of those programs, reaching this Final Four would be a watershed moment. For seven of them, it would be a sign of arrival or return. For Auburn, it would be confirmation of belonging in college basketball’s upper arc. Anything short of that would be a letdown when it happened, regardless of the vanquisher.

Among the other eight, the situation is mixed. Given Kevin McCullar’s injury and the 2022 national championship banner, Kansas would probably be fairly content with a Sweet Sixteen appearance. It’d be more than many expect. Illinois fans are so attuned to their own struggles to get past the first weekend that getting past the first weekend would seem to be a bigger deal than getting past the second. The Illini are just trying to take care of business here. Baylor fans probably understand that this team is not 2021’s, and therefore have something of a linear curve when it comes to the satisfaction each round of advancement provides. The recency of success at UConn, UNC, and Duke also tends towards this linear situation. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It’s that the desperation isn’t as present as it is with the others.

And with that talk of desperation, let’s visit Houston and Purdue.

Purdue, of course, does not like the fact they’ve only ever made two Final Fours. Purdue does not like having never won an NCAA Tournament. Purdue would really like its first non-Helms national championship.

But for Purdue, the 1980 drought has become a thing of its own. Making the Final Four would be a watershed moment for Purdue as a school and a program. It would validate Matt Painter’s approach. It would validate Purdue as a real perennial national contender. Would it be a bigger deal than a national championship? I don’t think so. But it would mean more than a Final Four appearance would for UConn, or for Houston.

And with that, we get to the most desperate team to win this thing.

Because while Purdue is the most desperate team overall, the one who needs NCAA Tournament success the most, Purdue has a landing on its staircase. For Houston, it’s all or nothing. Houston has made a Final Four, and recently. Houston has spent more than half a decade now around the top reaches of this sport. Houston has played into the second weekend of four straight NCAA Tournaments. Houston has yet to break through.

Kelvin Sampson is 68 years old. He’s not going to coach forever, and it’s not entirely out of the question that he could try a four-year stint at another school to multiply his millions before he retires. When he leaves, there’s no natural driving force which will keep Houston a national title threat the way there is for UNC, Duke, or Kansas. Houston has a lot of basketball history. Houston is not a basketball place to the degree of many of its current peers.

So yes, Purdue is the most desperate team around right now. But looking at the championship and the championship alone, Houston needs this more than anyone.

Conference Correlations

Last night, I posted each conference’s NIT record so far. To be explicit: I do not think this is a useful measure of conference strength. But as I’ve said in one other place now, it was interesting to see Conference USA go on its run last year, dominating the NIT and the CBI and sending Florida Atlantic to the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four. It’s been interesting to see Mountain West teams mostly struggle over the last few years in March.

It would make a lot of sense if over or underperformance against the postseason spread was correlated by conference. With both Bayesian and elo-based ratings systems, the last two thirds of the season yield data almost exclusively confined to intraconference games. Systems like kenpom start with a good idea of what every team will be, then get a better idea over November and December, and then mostly hand off points between conference foes as January and February progress. Conferences can still pass one another in the kenpom rankings—Pomeroy’s system is sophisticated enough that it’s not totally a zero-sum situation—but by the time the tournaments start there is an abundance of intraconference data and a scarcity of interconference data. I wonder if that can lead to whole conferences being slightly overvalued or undervalued.

Wins and losses is a bad way to measure this. Record against the spread is better, because it’s about who was over or underestimated, not who was good and who was bad. Even when looking at the latter, raw NCAAT win percentage is a terrible stat. It doesn’t account for the luck of the draw, and it doesn’t account for the teams in each conference not playing in the NCAA Tournament. ATS record is the best way to keep tabs on this.

Similarly, being overvalued or undervalued does not mean a conference is then necessarily good or necessarily bad. If the Big East was overvalued this year, as those early NIT returns would suggest (1–4 straight-up, but I believe narrowly 0–5 ATS, because I think Xavier was only a 1.5-point underdog), it doesn’t mean the Big East is bad. It just means the Big East is maybe closer to the SEC than previously believed to be the case. (Also, no no no, we will not use NIT ATS record as the best metric here. We just don’t have much NCAAT data yet, and the CUSA thing was interesting because the sample extended across four different tournaments.)

In short:

We do have a great idea of which conferences are good and which conferences are bad. The postseason won’t necessarily change that.

We should get some sense of which conferences are overvalued and which are undervalued through their combined postseason ATS record. What will probably have happened here is that undervalued conferences saw more improvement than worsening from their teams during the conference season, on aggregate, while overvalued conferences saw the opposite.

If patterns continue year over year, there is a real possibility of something significant happening involving their measurements.

Etc.

We’re still waiting for the highest drama with today’s games, and it will surely come (possibly right now with Nevada and Dayton), because if you pit similarly matched teams against one another in a single-elimination setting that is inevitably what goes down. A few more thoughts, while we wait:

• The Shohei Ohtani situation is nuts. I think we’re all in agreement on that. What we don’t know (and may well never know) is what exactly happened. The initial story—that Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, incurred massive gambling debts and that Ohtani paid them off for him—was believable. Sketchy, suspicious in places (it’s hard to believe that Mizuhara didn’t know betting with a bookie was illegal), but perfectly believable on the big points. The fact the story then changed is where it gets really weird. It seems likeliest that either 1) the initial story was true, 2) the initial story was false and Mizuhara is taking the fall for Ohtani, or 3) Mizuhara or the bookie in question or somehow some third figure stole a lot of money from Shohei Ohtani. I wonder if Ohtani would have been suspended pending investigation in any scenario here. I wonder if he still could be.
• The two ways tonight could go wrong for Iowa State (for those new here, I’m an Iowa State guy) are that either South Dakota State could shoot over the Cyclone traps and hang in there or that Iowa State’s own offense could collapse. Those are the two routes to disaster. Thankfully, there are many more routes to taking care of business. Should be a great atmosphere for those in Omaha. Very good storyline to have Otzelberger coaching against his old team. You do not want good storylines when you are a favorite.