Villanova is the most natural answer to the question of who is the most likely third overall seed, which is where they find their home in this week’s bracketology. Their lone loss came in overtime to a likely tournament team in Virginia Tech. They beat Texas on the road. They’re a heavy favorite to win the Big East, but they’re quarantined right now, not having played since before Christmas and not set to play again until next Friday. It sounds like the conference will try to make up all the missed games, but that may require playing thrice weekly, and outbreaks elsewhere could put later matchups in jeopardy. Which is all to say, there’s reason to question how things will go from here for Jay Wright’s team.
But then again, there are reasons to question for everybody. Villanova is not the only team susceptible to suffering one or more outbreaks the rest of the way. Hopefully, cases start dropping as the vaccination rate rises (for reasons far more important than basketball), but for the time being, this is the norm, and it’s hard to gauge which teams are at greater risk than others. For now, we continue with business as usual. But we brace ourselves for some complicated résumé-parsing down the line.
Moving Up: Colorado
It was a quiet week in terms of movement through the seed list. We could give this space to Texas, who emphatically announced themselves as the placeholder fourth one-seed, but in this section, we normally just measure who climbed the most seed lines, and this week, that’s the Buffs. Ralphie’s boys went down to L.A. and came back up with a split, beating USC by ten on Thursday before playing UCLA within a score on Saturday. That’s a good little trip.
Colorado’s just 1-2 in Pac-12 play (they lost at Arizona on Monday), but the USC win is a notch in their belt we weren’t assured they’d get, and coming by the margin it did raised expectations for Tad Boyle’s crew going forward. The league isn’t wide open, and among non-Oregon teams, UCLA’s in a better spot, with no trip to Eugene scheduled (as of now) and Saturday’s win already in the books, but Colorado’s a sneaky contender out there, and at the moment is shaping up to give a top-two seed a tough time in the tournament’s first weekend.
Moving Down: UNC
Last year’s ghosts may still be haunting Chapel Hill.
The Tar Heels dropped to within sight of the bubble this week, losing at Georgia Tech before narrowly escaping Notre Dame at home. The ACC lacks a strong top line, but there are four teams definitely better than UNC at the moment (Duke, Virginia, Clemson, Louisville), and the pack around them (Florida State, Syracuse, Virginia Tech, NC State) isn’t far off. Roy Williams’s tournament future is not safe.
Moving In: Alabama, Seton Hall, Drake, Oklahoma, Belmont (auto-bid)
Speaking of unsafe, Tennessee’s stroll to an SEC crown turned out more treacherous than thought, as the Vols opened their new year getting stunned at home by Alabama. It wasn’t a win the Tide needed to make the field, but it sure helps, changing their trajectory immensely heading into a high-risk, high-reward five-game stretch (Florida, at Auburn, at Kentucky, Arkansas, at LSU). Going strictly by shooting percentage, this is the worst team Nate Oats has ever had from beyond the arc. If that starts to change, Tennessee might really have itself a race.
In the Big East, it was Seton Hall’s demolition of Xavier on Wednesday that flipped the script for the Pirates, who’d been in the thick of NIT-land pretty much all year. Even with Myles Powell gone, the team’s one of the most experienced in Division-I, and so far they’re making rather strong work of their league’s soft underbelly.
Oklahoma got a nice win, taking down West Virginia at home. We expect this kind of thing from the Oklahoma schools this year, but mostly in an aggregate sense, meaning we expect them to pick up two or three or four wins out of the ten they’ll play against Big 12 heavyweights, but for the most part, we don’t expect one on any given night. Getting that win on a given night, then, will always buoy the Sooners (and the Pokes, when it happens for them).
In the Ohio Valley, Belmont swaps in for Murray State after comfortably winning the first leg of the home-and-home. But that’s not the biggest news in mid-majordom. Because in the Missouri Valley…there’s Drake.
Drake is 13-0. Against Division-I opposition, they’re 11-0. They’ve played exactly zero teams in KenPom’s top 150 (though not for lack of trying—they did schedule Kansas State), but they’ve covered the spread every time out and their closest result, to date, is a seven-point margin over Indiana State in Terre Haute. They host Loyola this weekend with the MVC lead on the line. Not your average bubble games.
Moving Out: Arizona, SMU, Maryland, Mississippi, Murray State (auto-bid)
We covered Arizona last week (self-imposed postseason ban we just told our model about this morning), and we covered Murray State above. For the rest:
SMU played fine in Philadelphia, beating Temple, but they didn’t put up much of a fight against Houston at home. They’re right on the line. But they’re on the wrong side of it.
Credit again to Maryland for beating Wisconsin in Madison, but the Terps could’ve used another win by now, and the opportunities they’ve missed have often come by wide margins: Clemson by 16, Rutgers by 14, Michigan by 11. Couple in that two of those losses (Rutgers, Michigan) were at home, and it’s feeling a bit like 2018 in College Park. Opportunity abounds—Iowa comes to town on Thursday, and the Turtles go to Champaign this weekend—but so does the prospect of more demolition.
The worst week of all, though, belongs to Mississippi. On the receiving end of the appetizer to Alabama’s rise, the Rebels took a nearly-twenty-point destruction in Tuscaloosa and brought the experience home, losing on Saturday to a Wichita State team that’s been dealing with a lot of tumult. It was a bad enough week in Oxford that the team leapfrogged the NIT in their descent, which means it might be a while before we see them up here again, if we see them at all.
Closing Notes: Drake vs. Loyola
No, this isn’t a preview of this weekend’s massive two-game set (It’s a big weekend for Des Moines in college basketball, ok?). This is model talk.
If you’ve looked at the bracketology, you’ve seen that Drake’s a projected 11-seed and Loyola’s a projected 12-seed, with Loyola the projected automatic bid. This doesn’t make sense. Loyola’s got the stronger schedule. They’ve only lost twice. If they win the league (and tournament), they should wind up ahead of Drake.
The reasons our model’s projecting this pair in this manner are twofold, and they give a bit of an insight into how our model does what it does:
First, how our model sees games themselves playing out: Because the Loyola/Drake two-game set is in Des Moines, our model, trusting KenPom, sees Drake as the narrowest of favorites in each of the games, making it more likely that Drake will pick up two wins than it is that Loyola will pick up two, despite the most likely outcome being a split. This isn’t a lot (it’s not enough to make Drake the MVC Tournament winner in the plurality of simulations, which is why Loyola’s still the favorite there), but it’s enough to help push the Bulldogs’ median seeding ahead of that of the Ramblers.
Second, how our model sees the selection process playing out: While Loyola played the more difficult nonconference schedule by quality, Drake played the more difficult one by quantity. Loyola’s managed just six Division-I nonconference games so far. Drake has managed nine. Loyola lost two of theirs, and while they came at Wisconsin and on a neutral court against Richmond, those are still losses. Drake’s got the better Strength of Record right now, and if the two tie in MVC play (which is the median projection), Drake should finish with a better SOR, which—like NET and KPI—is strongly correlated with final overall seeding. We aren’t positive yet how KPI views the teams, but our model’s best guess, similarly, has it narrowly favoring the Bulldogs, at least right now. And NET, as we learned yesterday, has Drake out front, but we generally expect NET to work itself out somewhere close to KenPom, which implies Loyola, in the majority of simulations, is passing Drake in that one.
In short, they’re close, and Loyola’s the better team, but the majority of the time, we’d expect Drake to finish with the better overall résumé in the eyes of the committee. Loyola has a great loss and a fine loss, but their best win, to date (at home against North Texas) is comparable to Drake’s (on the road over K-State), and strength of schedule can only help a team so much (generally, only as much as it shows up in systems like NET, KPI, and SOR). The two might oscillate back and forth a good amount over the weeks to come. One might push the other down this weekend with a sweep. As of this moment, Drake’s on top in one way, and Loyola’s on top in the other. But we’ve got a long way to go.
