I don’t know about your circles, but mine did not appreciate watching Virginia play in an NCAA Tournament game last night. They preferred not to watch Virginia, and yet there Virginia was, doing the worst version of what Virginia does. Some thoughts:
Virginia was not a very good team by the time this year ended. They started well enough, but that Wisconsin game was the first time we saw it, and we’d go on to see it again and again and again. Seven times this year, in a sample of only 34 games, Virginia failed to score 50 points. That’s over 20% of their games. They went 1–6 in such contests.
The trend accelerated as the year went on. In the season’s final nine games, Virginia pulled off the feat five separate times. The last happened last night. A limp and lifeless 67–42 showing in one of the NCAA Tournament’s two opening games.
But while Virginia wasn’t a good team at the end of the year, they had some good stretches early and in its middle. They beat Florida and Texas A&M in nonconference play. They won eight straight ACC games at one point, four over NCAAT or NIT-worthy teams. They finished third in the ACC, and while the ACC is no juggernaut, that finish left them ahead of Clemson, Wake Forest, and Pitt, all top-45 teams.
Where are we going with this?
Virginia deserved to be in the NCAA Tournament. They assembled the necessary résumé. Virginia was 40th in Wins Above Bubble, better than Michigan State, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Clemson, Boise State, Texas, and FAU. They were even better than 40th by ESPN’s Strength of Record metric. The cut line fell this year between the 42nd and the 43rd team. Our two best measures of the quality of each team’s wins and losses said Virginia was in at-large territory. Virginia deserved to be in the NCAA Tournament, if the wins and the losses are what should count.
There’s an incongruity between what happened to Virginia and what happened to Florida State this year in football, and with the reaction mostly angry towards both, that means there’s an incongruity in the reaction as well. In football, the line was that every game should matter, that it matters how deserving a team is, and that considering how a team should be expected to perform in the postseason is not how a postseason should work. In basketball, the line is that what should matter is how a team finished the year, how good they are right now, and that what we were forced to witness because of this committee decision was an abomination upon all mankind. There’s no coherence to these trains of thought. They are opposed. If people were being objective, those who supported Florida State’s inclusion in football would oppose Virginia’s in basketball, and vice versa.
You could, I suppose, make a case that football and basketball are different in this case because of the nature of their postseasons. You could say that going undefeated makes it different. It is different, to be fair. But the debate is still good vs. deserving, and the loudest voices in both these arguments are arguing directly with themselves.
Why are they doing this? One theory is that it’s about “the little guy,” which is a funny thing to call Florida State, so let’s clarify and say the theory’s about opposing the big guy. It wasn’t Florida State people were trying to defend. It was Alabama they were trying to oppose. There’s probably some truth to this. It’s also probably also overestimated by the broader media. We all spend too much time on Twitter. A popular thing to do on Twitter is to make up an angle that paints someone as a victim and then decry the actions of the perceived oppressor. Often, there is no logic to this, but damn, does it sell. Anyway, media struggles to conceptualize how small a slice Twitter opinion is relative to public opinion as a whole. There are fewer mid-major liberators among the general public than there are inside our phones.
Another theory is that it’s about offense. Virginia’s defense was good enough to be in the tournament, questions about “deserving” aside. Virginia’s defense was good enough to be a 2-seed! It was their offense that was the problem, and we like to watch offense when we watch basketball. A scoreless basketball game lacks the tension of smashmouth football, the artistry of a pitcher’s duel, or the odds-defying nature of a shutout in hockey. A scoreless basketball game is just ugly.
Should the committee consider offense? Sure, if that’s what people want! Make it clear, be consistent with it, and that can be the criteria. As long as everyone’s graded with the same rubric, the system is fair. But that’s not what people want. It’s not even what people want to say they want.
What people want to say they want is this: It should be about wins and losses. Every game should count.
When drilled on the setup, most people tend towards wanting the most deserving teams in every postseason out there, with margin of victory and defeat not considered. That’s the most popular concept for college sports postseasons, conceptually. In reality? In reality, what people actually want is something malleable and consensus-based. Which is…which is what we have.
Which brings us to the other thing people want.
People want to get real mad at a mostly faceless committee.
And that’s ok!
You can get mad about sports. You don’t have to be reasonable about sports. Sports is a great place to get mad and be unreasonable. Have fun with it. Go nuts.
But don’t treat lying to yourself as some sacred cause.
Did Virginia deserve to be in the NCAA Tournament? Yes. They deserved to be there.
College basketball fans just wish they didn’t.
Is Nebraska Rising?
Nebraska’s hiring Troy Dannen, read the news this morning, as the former Tulane athletic director’s five months at Washington came to an abrupt end. With Fred Hoiberg back on his feet in Lincoln and the Husker fanbase high right now on Matt Rhule, there’s a sense that if Dannen can become The Guy, things will be aligned at Nebraska in what most high-major athletic departments would define as the big three chairs.
Of course, it’s easier said than done.
Rhule went 5–7 in his first year, a fine mark for a debut but a reminder of where things have fallen. Hoiberg’s had a special season, but it’s taken five years to get there, and doing it again is even harder than it used to be before transferring was so common (ironic, given how Hoiberg once rebuilt Iowa State). Dannen? The thing he receives the most credit for, historically, is the work he did to build Tulane’s football program into one of the top Group of Five teams in the country the last few years. It’s a great thing to have done, but will it translate to an entirely different situation at Nebraska?
Before Dannen was at Tulane, he spent seven years at his own alma mater, Northern Iowa. He was not the guy who hired Ben Jacobson to coach the basketball team. He didn’t hire Mark Farley to coach football. But running an athletic department is more than hiring well, and as it went with Tulane, perceptions of UNI were rather high in the mid-major space at the time of Dannen’s departure. The places he’s left, he’s left in a good place.
Something we’ve come to believe on this site is that the best sign of a healthy athletic department is how they compete across the board, in all sports. Running a successful field hockey program is different from running a successful football program, but there are similarities across the two. Especially at a school like Nebraska, where fans are fond of all Husker athletics, the goal is to be more like Texas and less like Kansas. How’s that going?
Well, at the end of last academic year, Nebraska finished 29th nationally in the Directors Cup. They were wedged around that mark with Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Minnesota, together the fourth through seventh-best athletic departments in the Big Ten.
Where Nebraska wants to be, and where Nebraska probably should be, given how dedicated Nebraska people are to Nebraska sports, is the edge of the top ten. It might be a stretch to ask Nebraska to compete with Georgia in football, and it’s definitely a stretch to ask Nebraska to compete with Stanford and Texas across all sports, but there’s no reason Nebraska shouldn’t be a comparable athletic department to Alabama or even USC. The support is there in a way it isn’t for college sports in Los Angeles. That makes up for other disadvantages.
This is a roundabout way of saying the following thing:
The best indicator of Troy Dannen’s early performance in Nebraska is not going to be how the football program is playing, or how far the basketball teams advance in March, or whether the volleyball team wins another national championship soon. It’s going to be whether the baseball team is hosting super regionals. It’s going to be whether the tennis teams are competing for national titles. It’s going to be whether the golf programs are ever winning the Big Ten.
Football isn’t a normal college sport. It’s not the best indicator in the short term of how well an athletic director is doing his or her job. In the long term, though, a good athletic director can usually contribute to a good football program. It’s what we’re finally seeing down at Texas under Chris Del Conte after years of football fits and starts. To find out whether Dannen can or can’t, don’t watch for Rhule’s record in three years. Check whether the softball team’s made it back to the College World Series. Good work shows up quicker in the lower-money sports. It filters up from there.
Etc.
Thoughts on…let’s say four more things:
1. There was a funny media thing today where Tom Izzo made some comments about the NCAA Tournament selection process, they were widely misrepresented, and certain media members found themselves defending the misrepresented comments out of loyalty to Tom Izzo. This, practically a few hours after Seth Davis cited how much he likes Tony Bennett in the context of his defense of Bennett’s performance.
College basketball is a small enough world (because it isn’t popular enough to be a bigger world) that there’s a tight ecosystem between prominent national college basketball media and coaches. It’s gossipy, a lot of media power depends on access granted by coaches, and there’s thusly a very silly phenomenon where many members of the media won’t say anything bad about any sitting coach, but will turn on them in an instant if it looks like the ship is sinking. The college basketball coaching ranks are full of a lot of shady characters. College basketball media defends them ardently.
So no, these media people shouldn’t feel the need to defend Tom Izzo because they’re intimidated by him. Tom Izzo’s a grown man. He can handle criticism. But also, Tom Izzo didn’t really seem to say they should take automatic bids away from mid-majors.
2. Tony Bennett’s doing a bad job. I like him too! Don’t know him personally, but he seems great. He is doing a bad, bad job. He’s struggled to adapt to the new world of talent building, and while his defense continues to thrive, the offensive side of the ball is broken at UVA. It’s easy to make too much out of one game when that game comes in the NCAA Tournament. This isn’t about last night, though. It’s about Virginia finishing the season behind rebuilding Butler in kenpom. Hire an offensive coordinator, Tony. I think this team had the talent to be ok.
3. Our NIT bets did well yesterday and our NCAA Tournament bets did poorly. Be warned, before we publish our latest in a little bit here.
4. I do still think Montana State and Colorado are the picks tonight, and that’s because they’re the favorites and I don’t see red flags. More NCAAT stuff tomorrow morning.
