Penn State is on the bubble. Our updated bracketology has them expected to land as an 11-seed, a few teams above the cut line. Joe Lunardi’s “as things stand” bracket has them as the fifth team out of the field. The Nittany Lions finish our model’s median simulation 12-14 overall, with wins over Wisconsin, Purdue, Rutgers, Virginia Tech (on the road), and VCU; and no loss worse than a road defeat at the hands of Michigan State.
That simulation, though, comes from a model that assumes the Big Ten will reschedule games such that Penn State visits Nebraska and Michigan visits Penn State at some point. Depending which of those games happen, and where they happen, and whether other games happen, Penn State could jump up or down a game or two. Which could be very, very meaningful for Penn State (and others like them), but in a more impactful way for optics than for their actual résumé.
A team at .500 or below has never made the NCAA tournament. In a normal season, this wouldn’t be much of an issue for this Penn State team. They’d have five more nonconference games, in which even a 4-1 mark, rather attainable through buy games and a decent early-season tournament, would put them above the .500 cut line. They’d be the same team. They’d have a similar résumé to the one they, in our median simulation, will have. Their record would be historically bad by at-large territory, but it wouldn’t be as glaring as a sub-.500 overall record. The Big Ten’s never been deeper. Conference schedules are longer than they used to be. It’s harder to get away with playing cupcakes.
Our model doesn’t know that the optics matter, for two reasons. The first is that we don’t know how much this particular optic will matter. The committee might say, “Look, Penn State’s a good team. They’ve done everything a bubble team could be reasonably asked to do. They’re good enough and their résumé’s good enough. They’re in the field.” The second is that if we told the model that the committee would treat a team differently based on how many times the public health environment allowed them to play Lehigh and Lafayette and Robert Morris and Eastern Kentucky and, I don’t know, UConn to help the strength of schedule; and robots then took over the world, the model would likely justify giving us a torturous death for having inflicted upon it the pain of exposure to such irrationality from the humans.
The bottom line is: If a 12-14 Penn State team with that specific résumé was kept out in favor of a worse-at-basketball Drake team with four losses and no good wins, it’d be objectively dumb (the worse team with the worse résumé but the better record would be in, the other might not make the NIT because of—again—dumbness). But it’d make a lot of people happy. We’d program our model to expect dumbness. We probably should program our model to expect dumbness. But without any way of knowing how much dumbness to expect in this particular year, we’re erring on the side of treating the committee like a rational body of objective minds evaluating meaningful criteria. Call me an idealist.
Anyway, the Big Ten needs to sneakily arrange the schedule such that its bubble teams, like Penn State, get to play more Nebraska and Northwestern and less Michigan and Illinois. They can’t call attention to this, because that might be counterproductive, but they need to grab opportunities like the one this week affords and say, “Penn State will be playing Nebraska on Sunday and Monday in State College. Nebraska is in town. That game needs to be made up and we can’t let an opportunity pass by.”
It is, one could argue, the right thing to do.
Our morning movement, which has built over the last two days:
Moving Up: LSU
Will Wade is immortal.
LSU beat up Mississippi State in Starkville on Wednesday and jumped three seed lines, from the First Four to the 9-line. Mississippi State isn’t great, but road wins are, and the change in LSU’s projection helps their SEC Tournament stock (and how likely they are to beat Tennessee tomorrow, which combines with the tournament’s various options for good wins to make it more likely than not that LSU gets an additional first-quadrant win in some fashion). That helps their outlook.
Moving Down: UCLA
I like to imagine that Martin Jarmond saw how much attention Duke and Kentucky and Michigan State are getting and called Mick Cronin up:
Jarmond: Mick.
Mick Cronin: Who is this?
Jarmond: It’s your boss.
Mick Cronin: The Leprechaun King from Darby O’Gill and the Little People?
Jarmond: No your earthly boss.
Mick Cronin: Who is this?
Jarmond: Look I need you to lose to Washington State in Pullman this Thursday.
*hangs up*
What actually happened, of course, is that UCLA really misses Chris Smith, which stinks (I do, for the record, like Mick Cronin, so if Mick Cronin stans exist, please come at me but only in a way that increases this blog’s pageviews and general brand strength). But still…
UCLA’s on the bubble.
Moving In: Oregon
As with LSU beating Mississippi State: Arizona State isn’t expected to make the NIT, but winning in Tempe nonetheless helps. The Ducks are back above the cut line.
Moving Out: UConn
But at the same time, road losses aren’t always excusable, and UConn’s defeat at Providence Wednesday afternoon was enough to dip them down below the water. Worse still—and this doesn’t affect our model, but hey, optics—it happened in the light of day. For all to see.
