It was an inauspicious week for the Connecticut Huskies. Dan Hurley’s team won three times, but of their opponents, only Marquette makes an appearance in even our model’s current NIT Bracketology, and they’re currently the last at-large team in the field. The wins weren’t entirely impressive either. None came by more than twelve points, and last night’s escape from DePaul was, indeed, an escape, requiring 24 DePaul turnovers, six of which came on the Blue Demons’ final seven possessions.
And yet this week’s biggest riser in our field is, counterintuitively, UConn.
While the Huskies didn’t blow anyone out of the water, they did win three times on the road against Big East opponents, and their storm away from Marquette (after trailing by as many as 18) was more impressive to models like KenPom than its eleven-point margin might indicate. It was a slow game, lasting just 60 possessions (this is slightly below Virginia’s average pace, for reference), meaning the margin was wider efficiency-wise than the same margin over the Division-I average of 69 possessions.
That the wins came on the road should also not be overlooked. On UConn’s team sheet in March, all three will land in the first two quadrants, with at least the Marquette one almost assured to land in Quadrant I. And even this doesn’t tell the full story, because while UConn was running away from the bottom half of the Big East, USC was on a tear through the state of Arizona, inflating the importance of UConn’s other Quadrant I win, a December 3rd bloodbath over USC.
UConn doesn’t play pretty. They’re ferocious defensively, and their offense is not predicated so much on making shots as on maximizing their shots per possession through offensive rebounding. But their résumé, to date, is beautiful—two Quadrant I wins, two or three Quadrant II wins, one overtime Quadrant I loss (Creighton, a likely top-four seed), no other blemishes—and it only figures to get better, with the Huskies far enough ahead of the pack in the Big East that KenPom currently has them favored against any team not named Villanova or Creighton, even if the game’s away from Storrs.
Don’t get too excited, if excitement is something that accompanies a UConn return to prominence for you. They’re only a projected five-seed in our model’s updated bracket this morning. But that’s a long way from the bubble, where we had them previously, and it’s a place from which Hurley’s team could make some noise in March. The four-seed in their pod? Their old friends from December: USC.
Moving Up: UConn, Alabama
UConn was our biggest mover this week (that stayed within the field—we’ll get to Florida), but since we already spent so many pixels on them, let’s talk about Alabama’s own good seven days. Like UConn, Alabama isn’t safely in the field, but they’re on their way, climbing to the five-line themselves with a neat little dispatching of Florida and a thriller of a win on the road against Auburn. The Auburn win wasn’t all that impressive practically speaking—Bama’s marginally lower in the KenPom rankings than they were entering the game—but it was a losable game, and they won it, and they were the first leg of Florida’s demise, feeding off the Gators to climb the rungs themselves. They’ve got some bruises (that Western Kentucky loss looks worse and worse), but they’re a solid team, and they’re playing like it, and they’re expected to do more of the same (though they’ve got tough ones each of these next two Tuesday nights).
Moving Down: Rutgers
For as good as the Big Ten pack is, few teams within it are safe, and Rutgers, which previously looked rather comfortable, is suddenly on the edge of bubble territory, checking in this morning as a nine-seed.
The Scarlet Knights, like UConn, did nothing at which one would bat an eye. They lost at Michigan State. They lost at home to Ohio State. But the margins—23 and 11, and they only managed to score 45 against Sparty in a game that wasn’t particularly slow—were troubling, and in a league as tough as the Big Ten, a change in our model’s perception of how good you are translates to our model assuming you will lose a lot more games than it previously did. Rutgers isn’t in trouble yet. But that “yet” is a real “yet.”
Moving In: Richmond, Maryland, Michigan State, Providence, Northeastern (auto-bid)
Rutgers’s loss was Michigan State’s win, both literally speaking and in the realm of this model. The Spartans slide ever-so-tightly back across the line.
Elsewhere in the Big Ten, Maryland’s stunner in Champaign pulls their chin back up above the bar, while a couple hours south, Richmond avoided losing for a week, holding their ground while the tide pulled some others out.
Providence is an interesting case, losing twice yet climbing in from being an NIT two-seed. Like these others, the Friars benefited from mistakes elsewhere, but even in losing, they helped themselves. If you can play Creighton within a basket (and hold one of the best offenses in the country to 67 points) and hang with Xavier in Cincinnati, you’re probably a decent team. That’s our model’s perception of Providence, and while the wins didn’t come this week, the thought is more strongly that they will.
Finally, Northeastern was our lone auto-bid entrant, sweeping Hofstra in a home-and-home to grab control of the CAA.
Moving Out: Florida, VCU, Oklahoma, NC State, Hofstra (auto-bid)
It was a rough week to be Florida. Kentucky’s not bad, but…well, they aren’t good.
The Gators got stomped in Gainesville by an NIT bubble team, and now finds itself staring down its own NIT bid. Obviously, the team’s been through a lot these last few weeks with Keyontae Johnson’s health scare, and even just on paper that’s taken away their best player. It’s pretty understandable to lose games when that’s going on. But it was still a stunning result, and coupled with failing to compete with Alabama, it resulted in a plunge from a projected six-seed to a projected two-seed in the NIT.
VCU also suffered indignity under its own roof, losing by fifteen to Rhode Island on Saturday. The remaining schedule projects well for their résumé, but the Rams (these ones, not URI) are aimed for the wrong side of the bubble, albeit narrowly so.
For Oklahoma, it was nothing embarrassing: losses at Baylor and Kansas are expected from just about everyone, and the Kansas one was rather close. But solid steps elsewhere in the Big 12 make it hard to see where more good wins will come for the Sooners, especially with that Alabama visit at the end of the month suddenly looking scarier.
And then there’s NC State, who became the one to finally lose to that injury-depleted Miami team. It seemed like it was going to happen eventually, but it was still a bad loss for the Wolf Pack, and worse because it came in Raleigh. Their missed chance at Clemson last Tuesday is now a lot more frustrating.
Housekeeping
We aren’t positive on this (it depends on a few other factors), but now that college football’s over we may be moving to a Monday/Friday cadence with our updates, beginning this Friday. We’ll see, but keep an eye out for new brackets in three days rather than seven. Also, thanks to some logistical maneuvering, we were able to amp our simulation count up from 1,000 to 10,000 this week, which should eliminate any false flags where teams close together wound up in the wrong order due to random sampling phenomena. We don’t know if these were happening—we’d like to run a test to find out, though that too takes time—but we’re more confident that they aren’t happening now than we were.
