NCAA Opening Weekend: Reports of the BIG EAST's Overrated-ness Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
by Voodoo 5 on Mar 21, 2010 8:21 PM EDT
9 comments
The NCAA tournament is almost universally awesome, but there is one thing that I don't like about it. All the national media types who don't watch college basketball all year parachute in for the tournament, then immediately make sweeping proclamations about things based on a handful of games. Such as:
OH MY GOD THE BIG EAST WAS OVERRATED THEY SUCK CONFERENCES X Y AND Z ARE ALL BETTER JUST LOOK AT THESE RESULTS!!!!!
Uhhhhh, yeah. About that. Is anyone calling the Big 12 overrated because Kansas lost and Texas went all the way from ranked #1 in January to out in the first round? What about when Vanderbilt was beaten by Murray State in round one? Does that mean the SEC is overrated? And those two super-awesome Pac-10 teams that knocked off Marquette and Louisville? Well congratulations Pac-10, your two best teams beat the 6th and 7th teams from the BIG EAST. Would you like a medal or something?
Look, there's no defending Georgetown, who stunk out the Dunk so badly on Thursday that hazmat crews are still trying to get rid of the smell. And George Clooney Jay Wright picked a strange time for his "teaching point", killing what little momentum Villanova was bringing into the tournament in the first place. But there are plenty of counterarguments:
-- BIG EAST teams were mostly overseeded. Villanova should have been at least a 3 seed. Georgetown should have been a 4 or a 5. Marquette should have been in an 8/9 game. And Notre Dame.. that was just insane giving them a 6 seed. All of those teams were worthy of being in the tournament, but blame the tournament selection committee for their poor seeding, not the teams or the conference. Then because of those screwups, a lot of other teams just plain got shafted. San Diego State had an RPI of 18 in a perfectly respectable Mountain West conference, and they got an 11 seed. In fact they may not have made it in at all if they didn't win their conference tournament. BYU was a 7 seed and they're ranked in the top 20. Missouri fell all the way to a 10 seed because of one bad loss to Nebraska. The committee did a bad job slotting teams this year and it changed countless matchups in ways we'll never know.
-- Along those same lines, it's not as much about your seed as it is about the matchups. Villanova has no size and St. Mary's just pounded on them with Omar Samhan. Washington overcame Marquette with speed and depth. (Buzz Williams basically went about six deep in that game.) Louisville doesn't defend the perimeter very well and California shot the lights out. Even Kansas had a matchup problem. Bill Self admitted he couldn't press Northern Iowa on Saturday because the Jayhawks didn't want to keep putting them on the free throw line - the Panthers shot over 75% as a team during the season.
-- It's not a best-of-seven, it's a one-game playoff. Upsets are going to happen. Especially in this day and age, with three-point shooting, fewer scholarships, and more experienced mid-major teams with coaches that are better at, you know, coaching than their big-school counterparts. I'm looking at you, Rick Barnes.
-- Everyone is thrown off by how spectacularly successful the BIG EAST was last year, when they had half of the final eight teams. Here are the tournament results for every year since the conference went to 16 teams:
2006 - 8 teams in tournament, 5 in round two, 4 in Sweet 16, 2 in Elite 8
2007 - 6 teams in tournament, 3 in round two, 2 in Sweet 16, 1 in Elite 8
2008 - 7 teams in tournament, 7 in round two, 3 in Sweet 16, 1 in Elite 8
2009 - 7 teams in tournament, 6 in round two, 5 in Sweet 16, 4 in Elite 8
2010 - 8 teams in tournament, 4 in round two, 2 in Sweet 16
FIVE YEAR AVERAGE - 7 teams in tournament, 5 in round two, 3 in Sweet 16.
A little off from the average, but then again, it's been a long time since the Sweet 16 was so diverse. The 16 teams left are from 11 different leagues, which might be the most ever. (I was only able to figure it out to about the mid-90s before I got confused on which teams were in which leagues, and no other year got to 11.) This thing is wide open.
So there you have it. I'd say the BIG EAST looks just about as good as it normally does. And if you still disagree, then why don't you go ask why the ACC had six teams start the tournament and now they only have Duke left. Hmmmmmm?
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Its crazy that ND got that 6 seed.
Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would have even picked them to win the game, no matter what seed they were. I watched both the USF/ND games and ND didn’t exactly look great either time.
They got way too much credit for their Big East tournament run.
All they did was keep the score down and pull out some close wins. Putting them as a 6 seed basically means the committee thought they were a top-25 team. Utterly ridiculous.
Voodoo Five - The Toughest Blog in America
Missing the point
I think the point most people are making when they hate on the Big East is the constant media overload of hype on how tough it is… and then they go into the tourney and stink up the joint. Your points are solid on the Big 12 and SEC losing some teams early (though I notice you left out the Big Ten, since they’re doing okay), but nobody has driven the point home over and over again that those conferences are the end-all, be-all.
[insert prophetic yet obnoxiously haughty and annoying quote here]
Overseeded = Overrated
Listen, we make the same argument year-in and year-out about Notre Dame’s football program. Why did they have such a long consecutive bowl losing streak before finally beating Hawaii after a 6-6 season? Was it because their teams sucked every year? Nope, it was because they were overrated and tossed into matchups that were too big for them.
That’s exactly what happened to the Big East. You point out yourself that they were overseeded, putting them into tougher matchups than they normally would have been faced with. And they did what every overseeded conference does — played below seed. The question is why they were overseeded? It’s because they were overrated!
My conference, the Big Ten, largely played to seed. We won all our first-round matchups when we were the higher seed, and 3 of 4 in the second round (one win a 5 over a 4, one a 4 over a 5, with only Wisconsin’s loss as a negative). And I’d say the closeness of the games in both 4/5 matchups showed that the teams were fairly seeded.
The selection committee bought into the Big East’s hype machine, overseeded the teams, and the results were upsets. That’s what happens when you’re overrated.
http://unrepentantindividual.com/ http://thelibertypapers.org/
Big East
I mostly agree with VoodooFive, especially about the seedings, but it’s hard to argue that the Big East would have done BETTER with lower seeds. I’m not sure what the committee was smoking when they gave Notre Dame a 6, but what sticks out, aside from the horrible seeding decisions, is that the BCS conferences are always overrated and the mids would probably always have done better if they weren’t perennially seeded too low.
Outside of 1, 2, and maybe the 3 seeds
in the first round, it’s becoming fairly clear that the seeds aren’t as important as the matchups. It doesn’t make sense when you look strictly at the seeds, but if the Irish were, say, a 9 or 10 seed, maybe the 7 or 8 seed they play is a team they match up with better than they did with Old Dominion. By being overseeded, they may have been handed a harder matchup just by luck of the draw.
Voodoo Five - The Toughest Blog in America
Wow this is a fantastic piece of writing
It makes you wonder if there is an underlying want to over-seed bigger name/lesser quality teams in the interest of producing more upsets that certainly increase ratings, both at game-time and next weekend. If my Cuse-WVU Championship game comes to fruition then I’m sure people will still be calling it the Big Least. Of course your comment about talking heads parachuting in probably doubles for 80% of fans talking like they know anything this time of year.
"It's good to have a little cushion. But it's not going to be easy."
by Andy Hellicksonstine on Mar 24, 2010 11:29 AM EDT reply actions
I don't think it's sinister
I think it’s quite difficult for the selection committee to correctly assess the strength of a mid-major team because usually elite teams won’t schedule them. Would Kansas ever play Northern Iowa in the regular season? What about Villanova and St. Mary’s? Doubtful. The selection committee has to try and guess how good they really are based on the non-conference teams they do play (the Bracket Buster games have helped this a lot) and their usual dominance of their weaker leagues.
But all that aside, even if it was a pool of major-conference teams, there’s no excuse for Notre Dame being a 6 seed. All the way up until they appeared on the very last matchup of the bracket, I was assuming the BIG EAST only got seven teams in because I couldn’t figure out where the Irish would fit in the remaining slots.
Voodoo Five - The Toughest Blog in America
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