what is the best story of the month, friends?
Quick, what's the best story that nobody's talking about?
If you guessed "early dominance of the mid-majors" in college basketball, you would be absolutely correct.
Why is this so important? Quite simply, it changes the face of college basketball as we know it.
The formula for success in the tournament has always been rather formulaic: three teams from big conferences with rich traditions, and one surprise team from a big conference that doesn't have as rich of a tradition.
After last year's success by George Mason, we found the formula somewhat wanting, but we shouldn't have been all that surprised, because the signs from Gonzaga had been written on the wall for years. Still, going into this year's Top 25 poll, we found that very few mid-majors were in the Top 25- specifically, two: Nevada and Creighton.
Fast forward to two weeks later.
Now we've had two monumental "upsets," with Gonzaga beating #2 UNC by eight at Madison Square Garden, and Oral Roberts beating #3 Kansas at home. But this hasn't been the only incidence of mid-major dominance; Missouri State took out #7 Wisconsin; Butler beat #21 Tennessee, Old Dominion beat #8 Georgetown, Wichita State won at #6 LSU, and even Vermont took out then #14 Boston College.
(Maybe somebody should page Billy and Jim up at CBS about how good the mid-majors are. No, that would mean they would have to lower themselves to going to Wichita, Omaha, and Springfield. Say what you will about Dick Vitale, but at least he has some idea of what's going on in college basketball before, say, February 15. I seriously think that Packer opens up the paper on Valentine's Day, looks at the AP poll, and decides who his 64 teams are on the spot.)
So we could criticize teams for not being in certain conferences, which is sort of silly because those conferences wouldn't take them anyway, or we could recognize that because power conference teams don't have senior-laden teams like they used to (see UNC-1993, Duke- late 1990s, etc.) the door is wide open for mid-majors who have slightly less gifted players to build teams that are more solid for the college game over time.
To put it another way- the fact that NBA teams are so willing to take young players doesn't hurt Creighton or Nevada as much as it hurts Kentucky or Duke. This was patently obvious last year, when really young Michigan State and UNC teams lost to more experienced (if less talented) George Mason.
We use George Mason as the benchmark for convenience, since it's so obvious now that the selection committee was virtually flawless with their selection procedure last year. We could have easily chosen St. Joseph's, Kent State, or even Southern Illinois as proof positive that the system works, and that the formula is changing.
What does this mean for the future? It means two things: one, that more mid-majors should be selected to the tournament every year. If these teams are going to have five solid starters, they're going to be forces in a setup that rewards experience and a system better than any other setup on the planet, except for maybe the World Series. The fact of the matter is that basketball is different from football; you don't need 40 solid players to win, you need five or six max. This has held true to some extent in the NBA, but is most notable in college basketball. Why is it so notable? Most of the players that go to the NBA draft early are forwards and centers, not guards, so the height advantage that power conference teams used to have is neutralized by the fact that NBA teams hire those big guys immediately to have them develop at a higher level. That's why LaMarcus Aldridge isn't at Texas; that's why Tyrus Thomas isn't at LSU. And that's why next year Kevin Durant won't be at Texas, Greg Oden won't be at Ohio State, and Joakim Noah won't be at Florida.
Second, mid-major teams will be ranked at the start of the year in the Top 25. One of the main problems for mid-majors is that, like college football, they start way off the board and simply can't get "high enough, quick enough" to make any sort of impression on the tournament selection committee, so they get penalized with seeds that range from 7 through 12 because they can't get past 20 in the polls. Gonzaga has circumvented this process by scheduling a brutal pre-conference schedule, which causes them to get a high seed in the tournament (albeit perhaps not as high as they should get) because they've been tabbed as a default major-conference team.
The point of this is that teams in mid-major conferences should be looked at more frequently as "power" conference teams. One of the primary reasons for keeping down the mid-majors has been the argument that these teams simply aren't "national title contenders." Well, for one thing, most at-large teams from big conferences aren't title contenders either (see, for example, Seton Hall, Oklahoma, or any other number of teams from last year) and they shouldn't have any special rights to the NCAA tournament. Those are the "knife-edge" cases that will always be up for grabs. The underlying current is that in the next five years, one (or more) of these teams will be a title contender, and that's something that's more difficult to reconcile. Is Wichita State a title contender this year? Well, if they win out or lose only two to four games, you'd have to say yes. They've already won two tough road games and were an Sweet 16 team last year as a #7 seed. Nevada has Nick Fazekas; Butler won the Preseason NIT. They're contenders, and they're here to stay. We can either pretend they don't exist, or rethink their role in college hoops. I vote for the latter.
If you guessed "early dominance of the mid-majors" in college basketball, you would be absolutely correct.
Why is this so important? Quite simply, it changes the face of college basketball as we know it.
The formula for success in the tournament has always been rather formulaic: three teams from big conferences with rich traditions, and one surprise team from a big conference that doesn't have as rich of a tradition.
After last year's success by George Mason, we found the formula somewhat wanting, but we shouldn't have been all that surprised, because the signs from Gonzaga had been written on the wall for years. Still, going into this year's Top 25 poll, we found that very few mid-majors were in the Top 25- specifically, two: Nevada and Creighton.
Fast forward to two weeks later.
Now we've had two monumental "upsets," with Gonzaga beating #2 UNC by eight at Madison Square Garden, and Oral Roberts beating #3 Kansas at home. But this hasn't been the only incidence of mid-major dominance; Missouri State took out #7 Wisconsin; Butler beat #21 Tennessee, Old Dominion beat #8 Georgetown, Wichita State won at #6 LSU, and even Vermont took out then #14 Boston College.
(Maybe somebody should page Billy and Jim up at CBS about how good the mid-majors are. No, that would mean they would have to lower themselves to going to Wichita, Omaha, and Springfield. Say what you will about Dick Vitale, but at least he has some idea of what's going on in college basketball before, say, February 15. I seriously think that Packer opens up the paper on Valentine's Day, looks at the AP poll, and decides who his 64 teams are on the spot.)
So we could criticize teams for not being in certain conferences, which is sort of silly because those conferences wouldn't take them anyway, or we could recognize that because power conference teams don't have senior-laden teams like they used to (see UNC-1993, Duke- late 1990s, etc.) the door is wide open for mid-majors who have slightly less gifted players to build teams that are more solid for the college game over time.
To put it another way- the fact that NBA teams are so willing to take young players doesn't hurt Creighton or Nevada as much as it hurts Kentucky or Duke. This was patently obvious last year, when really young Michigan State and UNC teams lost to more experienced (if less talented) George Mason.
We use George Mason as the benchmark for convenience, since it's so obvious now that the selection committee was virtually flawless with their selection procedure last year. We could have easily chosen St. Joseph's, Kent State, or even Southern Illinois as proof positive that the system works, and that the formula is changing.
What does this mean for the future? It means two things: one, that more mid-majors should be selected to the tournament every year. If these teams are going to have five solid starters, they're going to be forces in a setup that rewards experience and a system better than any other setup on the planet, except for maybe the World Series. The fact of the matter is that basketball is different from football; you don't need 40 solid players to win, you need five or six max. This has held true to some extent in the NBA, but is most notable in college basketball. Why is it so notable? Most of the players that go to the NBA draft early are forwards and centers, not guards, so the height advantage that power conference teams used to have is neutralized by the fact that NBA teams hire those big guys immediately to have them develop at a higher level. That's why LaMarcus Aldridge isn't at Texas; that's why Tyrus Thomas isn't at LSU. And that's why next year Kevin Durant won't be at Texas, Greg Oden won't be at Ohio State, and Joakim Noah won't be at Florida.
Second, mid-major teams will be ranked at the start of the year in the Top 25. One of the main problems for mid-majors is that, like college football, they start way off the board and simply can't get "high enough, quick enough" to make any sort of impression on the tournament selection committee, so they get penalized with seeds that range from 7 through 12 because they can't get past 20 in the polls. Gonzaga has circumvented this process by scheduling a brutal pre-conference schedule, which causes them to get a high seed in the tournament (albeit perhaps not as high as they should get) because they've been tabbed as a default major-conference team.
The point of this is that teams in mid-major conferences should be looked at more frequently as "power" conference teams. One of the primary reasons for keeping down the mid-majors has been the argument that these teams simply aren't "national title contenders." Well, for one thing, most at-large teams from big conferences aren't title contenders either (see, for example, Seton Hall, Oklahoma, or any other number of teams from last year) and they shouldn't have any special rights to the NCAA tournament. Those are the "knife-edge" cases that will always be up for grabs. The underlying current is that in the next five years, one (or more) of these teams will be a title contender, and that's something that's more difficult to reconcile. Is Wichita State a title contender this year? Well, if they win out or lose only two to four games, you'd have to say yes. They've already won two tough road games and were an Sweet 16 team last year as a #7 seed. Nevada has Nick Fazekas; Butler won the Preseason NIT. They're contenders, and they're here to stay. We can either pretend they don't exist, or rethink their role in college hoops. I vote for the latter.
posted by mike at 1:39 PM
3 Comments:
For the record, I beat Pat Forde to the punch...
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=2680012
Things John has called:
Texas losing to A&M. K-State was a surprise though.
USC losing 1 of it's last 4 games... although I admit that I did not think it would be to UCLA and thought they were a shoe in for a BCS title the way they've played recently.
Florida winning the SEC.
If Florida gets to the title game, I would go 4 for 4. By the way, I think that should happen, and I think voting to avoid a rematch is perfectly valid. The BCS will be changed yet again after this year.
Also, I've delved deeper into this conference ranking thing and I just want to say the following: don't be hatin' on the PAC-10. There are 4 power conferences this year. (Sorry ACC and Big 12.) In the six computer ranking systems used for the BCS, three have the Pac 10, SEC, Big East, and Big 10 in that order. One has SEC, Pac 10, Big East, Big 10; one has Big East (woot!), SEC, Pac 10, Big 10 (more on this later...); one has Big 10, SEC, Big East, Pac 10. Observations:
1) The last one is an aberration...
2) The second to last is a non-biased matrix system, which simply rewards the best record regardless of schedule strength... I covered this last time and the Big East came out on top, so no surprise there.
3) What about the first 4? Is the Pac 10 that good. First off, half of that is USC's non-conference schedule. Take out USC and all of a sudden, they'd drop to 3. But, the Pac 10 has only 2 schools below .500 this year... a woeful Stanford and a tougher than advertised Washington. Also, Kudos to the Pac 10 for scheduling the toughest out of conference schedule around. You'll see their team's schedule littered with Arkansas, Hawaii, Boise State, Oklahoma a couple of times, Notre Dame, and a few others I'm sure I'm leaving off... now these games skew the computer rakings regardless of whether the Pac 10 wins or losing them in their favor, so using "logic and reason", I'm putting the top heavy yet tough Pac 10 at #2, behind the SEC, which is brutal - you're right about that Urban Meyer. (BTW, people who complain about the Big East's non-conference schedule should complain about the teams that won't schedule them...)
4) Big 10 - overrated? In retrospect... yes. I know you think Wisconsin BCS worthy, Mike, and you think the 2 team max rule is stupid, but Wisconsin's only top #25 opponent is Michigan... it was a tougher game than advertised but if people are going to rag on Rutgers, WV, and Louisville's schedule, then you have to rag on Wisconsin's just as bad. And the drop after Wisconsin... Penn State is 4 and Purdue is 5... South Florida and Cincinnati - their Big East counterparts in the conference standings - are just as good.
I know, it's the wuss' way out, but I'll give the Big East and Big 10 a tie for 3rd and props to the Pac 10, just ahead at 2nd. I personally think there's is little differentiation between these three and the SEC is ahead the pack... but not by as much as Urban Meyer would have you think.
Finally, Lee Corso has been raggin' on the Big East all year... let's see what he has to say after the Big East finishes 5-0 in bowl games this year... and yes, that is my final prediction of the college football season.
P.S. A short moment of silence for the MAC... formerly known as the mini Big-10. Their constant stream of NFL worthy quarterback's has dried and they were an awful league this year. But I will give them credit... I never remember anyone from that league bellyaching about the BCS status of the Big East. Mountain West and WAC... how do you like them apples?
Apparently the RPI agrees with you... granted 6-10 games is hardly a decent statistical sample, but very very interesting... (as of Dec. 5)
1. Butler
2. Wichita St
3. Arkansas
4. Xavier
5. Pittsburgh
P.S. Louisville is a jump shooter away from being back in the Big East mix. That's really surprising for a Rick Pitino team, but Palacios seems to have a spring in his step again, Character looks like the player LSU's Big Baby whoever should be if he wasn't 370 pounds, and Padgett should be more effective when not playing in constant pain - especially when Character is a double-double waiting to happen to take pressure off him. Terrance Williams shouldn't be allowed to shoot anything but layups, but he's such a good athlete. Unfortunate to lose McGee to a knee injury. They're just missing a lights out shooter. I'm not saying they'll definitely make the tournament or contend this year... Character is raw, Padgett is far from %100 and seemingly still trying to force the issue at poor times. Palacios should present matchup problems with his athleticism, size, and shooting ability - but his ball handling is a little shaky and he can't really take over a game yet. Kind of reminds Romain Sato (Xavier grad) with a low post game. But the Big East is brutal again, so making the tournament is a tossup... they sure can't afford to lose too many more non-conference games.
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