You can forget bringing an a 2016 Freshman at this stage. All the Big 10 caliber players are committed somewhere. And grad transfers? NU hit the jackpot with Swopshire, but odds are the best available will be someone like Joey, a limited player who is looking for playing time away from a program changing directions. NU can't offer a grad transfer the chance to play for a title (a la the guys Pitino brought in at Louisville) next season, those players will go elsewhere for their final year.
So what does NU need next year?
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You can forget bringing an a 2016 Freshman at this stage. All the Big 10 caliber players are committed somewhere. And grad transfers? NU hit the jackpot with Swopshire, but odds are the best available will be someone like Joey, a limited player who is looking for playing time away from a program changing directions. NU can't offer a grad transfer the chance to play for a title (a la the guys Pitino brought in at Louisville) next season, those players will go elsewhere for their final year.
You probably about 90 percent correct on 2016 Freshman, but you never know with all these foreign guys around.
Every conference has a Rutgers a NEB,etc.Even the mighty ACC had BC (0) and WF (2)and even NC State (5). 7 total conference wins between them. And by the way. Having more teams means you get to play the bottom teams less often.
But RPI etc are biased. PAC 12 teams for example got better RPI by playing over rated PAC 12 teams. The result was they got 9-9 sub 20 win teams also had favorable seedings and still got smoked. Just saying, never had an 11 win BIG team not get in and only one 10 win team did not get in. prior to this year. And coming off a year with two final four teams and a team in the championship game, it was a pretty big slight
So? They also put in the eighth choice from the B1G (Ohio State). There were more SEC teams available, so they took several of them. Florida was the only SEC team to reach the quarterfinals, where they were dispatched by traditional power George Washington. Florida actually beat Ohio State, so I guess that gave them eighth-place "bragging" rights.
Of course I do. They're not obligated to put in a school from every major conference.
Can't understand all the consternation about the Vassar situation. When the NCAA announced it was going to allow four-year commitments to scholarships, everybody thought it was a great thing for NU because we're the good guys and why wouldn't we live up to our commitments? Then the first "test case" comes around, we're stuck with a player we didn't want, and everybody's unhappy about having to live up to our commitment. Hey, it's the price of doing business in the brave, new "we really, REALLY care about our athletes" world.
They aren't "overrated" if the rating in question, is rpi, which it is.
And you think the number of teams from a conference that made the final 4 the previous season should have some bearing on whether or not bubble teams from that conference get in the next year? That's absurd.
There are lots of conferences where 10 and 11 win teams don't get in. This year the Big was one of those because that's what it deserved. Aside from the regular season tourney winners, the nit (and the seeds in it), are just a continuation of the ncaa. I.e.: last team out is the overall #1 nit seed. Etc.
So if we were first out of nit I could see some argument, but youre arguing about a team that wasn't even on the nit board as being considered at all.
No, having more teams does NOT mean you get to play the bottom teams less often.
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The B1G got seven teams in the dance. If they qualify that many during a so-called down year, I'll certainly take it.
Just saying that from a conference viewed as strong to one viewed as weak in one season? Again, prior to this year, never a case of an 11 win team not going to NCAA and only one case of a 10 win team not going? And generally 9 win teams would make it (including last year) but this year it suddenly takes 12 wins? Pretty big change.
Generally, the bottom three teams are not great. With 14 teams in conference, there are only 5 teams of 13 teams twice so there is only a 38% chance of playing a given bottom three team twice. With 12, you play 7 of 11 teams twice so your chance of playing a given bottom three team twice was almost 64%. That means it is about 70% more likely that you play a given bottom 3 team twice. When there were only 11 teams, it was even more likely as the chance of playing any team twice was 80% Of course it also means you are likely to play a top three team less often as well.
Well, by that logic you could also end up playing the top three teams less often. And it's not always going to be the same teams that are good or bad from year to year. If you get lucky in your schedule rotation, you could actually end up playing bad teams more often.
You play everyone at least once. But you make hay against the bottom 3 and on average you will play fewer games against them than if there were fewer teams in conference. If you are not in the bottom three, you will play an average of 4 games against them with 14 teams in the league. With 12 teams, you will play the bottom three an average of 5 times a season. You also play the top 3 teams and average of 4 times a season rather than 5. And you play the middle teams about 2 more times as there are more of them than there were.
This year we had 4 games against the bottom three but there will be years when we only play 3 games against those 3 teams. And with an average of one game less against the bottom 3 teams, it is far less likely we will get lucky with the draw. That said, we also got 4 games against #4 and 5 when expectations would have been for 3 so we got lucky there but the probability of wins against them are definitely less than against the bottom three.
So what you're essentially saying is you play both the top and bottom teams fewer times, which means you're less likely to be pounding bottom teams and less likely to be getting pounded by top teams. In other words, it's basically a wash. An alternative would be to break these huge basketball leagues into two divisions so you could play a round robin against your division and a single game against the other division, but that would probably be too sensible a thing to do.
Do you just enjoy dispariging us? Seriously?
Guess what? We won 20 games in the regular for the first time ever. EVER. Carmody never did that. NEVER. In fact, no one ever did that. Just let that sink in.
And we are going to have seasons in the not so distant future that break this record for regular season wins. Over and over again. And then maybe MysticCat will stop disparaging all the great work that Chris Collins has done But I wouldn't count on that.
My simple answer to the "What does NU need?" question would be "development". It seems that EVERY
player on our current roster needs to take one large step forward in growth (Lindsey=2 steps). What can
Law, McIntosh,Lindsey, Pardon, Falzon do from now until Jan.2017 to get 10 B1G conference wins??? Have
some guys (Lindsey, McIntosh,Skelly) reached their "ceilings"? Can Law & Pardon(~6'7") build their bodies to
truly impact conference games? Do we really feel any of our incoming Frosh have abilities to push for big minutes?
player on our current roster needs to take one large step forward in growth (Lindsey=2 steps). What can
Law, McIntosh,Lindsey, Pardon, Falzon do from now until Jan.2017 to get 10 B1G conference wins??? Have
some guys (Lindsey, McIntosh,Skelly) reached their "ceilings"? Can Law & Pardon(~6'7") build their bodies to
truly impact conference games? Do we really feel any of our incoming Frosh have abilities to push for big minutes?
It's not disparaging; the ongoing conversation is about comparable teams from comparable conferences and comparable records and why some go to the postseason (like Florida, and where, etc) and why some do not.
If it's over your head maybe it's best you just sit this one out.
Close but not quite a wash. Sort of depends on how good your team is. For a top team, it may help, for a bottom team, it will hurt and for a middling team it can go either way but will probably hurt.. For NU and other middling team assume a 90 % chance of winning against a bottom team, a 95% chance of losing to a top team. But we are likely less than 50% against middle teams so we replace a probable win and a probable loss with a couple less than 50% games. THis year for example, we were 100% vs the bottom and 0% against the top. In the middle, we were about 40% but thee of our wins were against the bottom of the middle. So overall, it likely cost us at least one win.
Well...FWIW, part of our problem is that we didn't play the top teams in the B1G very much and when we did we didn't beat anybody. We were 0-6 against the Top 5 teams (Indiana, MSU, Maryland, Purdue, and Iowa) and of those we only played Maryland twice. Meanwhile, we were 6-0 against the Bottom 4 teams in the conference (Rutgers, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois.) And we were 2-5 against the Middle 5 teams (which includes us as well as Sconnie, Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State), which is under a 30% winning percentage.
So, again, if you want to see why we didn't make the NIT, it's easy to see that it's because we didn't beat even decent teams all that often. Towards Styre's point, if we had scheduled more 75-150 RPI teams instead of 200+ teams, we might have given a selection committee more reason to consider us.
And I am saying that with the same number of wins, the way that they were looking at the BIG, it would not have mattered. If we had beaten another team or two in the middle, it would have also meant losing the same number of games to the lower group. So for a good wins, would have had bad losses to offset them. As far as the OOC games, name a BIG team that was helped by their non conference schedule.
I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here. You seem hung up on some sort of idea that we didn't make the NIT because the B1G was disrespected, but that makes little sense to me.
I just can't find any evidence of the B1G being disrespected as being a reason why we didn't make the NIT. All the evidence I'm looking at suggests that we beat very few decent and above teams . All playing better OOC competition would have done is give us more opportunities to beat decent and above teams. We didn't do it much at all in the B1G, so we might have given ourselves a chance at an NIT birth by playing some better teams in the OOC. We know how it turned out by playing a bad OOC schedule.
The problem with your model is it's going to be different every year because the teams and schedules are not static. The bad team you're playing this year might be a good one next year. You could end up playing mostly weaker or mostly stronger teams for a number of years. You can probably figure teams such as MSU and Indiana are going to be good most years, but the quality of the others can vary wildly. I suspect Illinois might be a lot better than they were this year, and Minnesota certainly can't be much worse. About the only team guaranteed to be bad next year is Rutgers as they'd need a super recruiting class, which doesn't seem to be on the horizon.
Press break and rebounding. Maybe some clutch play too. We were 2-3 big ten games going the other way to have a chance at it. Michigan, Ohio State, Iowa pressed us to death maybe Maryland too. We couldn't rebound against the towers at Purdue.
I think adding length with Law and Lindsey at the 2 will help with the press break. I love McIntosh, but I don't like how he tries to break the press. Not sure if it was the length of the defense bothering him, or the way it was coached, or what happened. I don't think that was Demps strong suit either. Don't know what Ash or Brown could bring to the table in the press break either .
I'm hoping Rappolas and Benson have Big Ten ready bodies to rebound. Them and Pardon will be huge x-factors on the glass. Getting Law back at the 2-3 will help. Playing Falzon at his natural spot at the 3 will be a big help too. Pardon, Rap, Falzon, Law, McIntosh should be good enough on the glass... I hope.
I think adding length with Law and Lindsey at the 2 will help with the press break. I love McIntosh, but I don't like how he tries to break the press. Not sure if it was the length of the defense bothering him, or the way it was coached, or what happened. I don't think that was Demps strong suit either. Don't know what Ash or Brown could bring to the table in the press break either .
I'm hoping Rappolas and Benson have Big Ten ready bodies to rebound. Them and Pardon will be huge x-factors on the glass. Getting Law back at the 2-3 will help. Playing Falzon at his natural spot at the 3 will be a big help too. Pardon, Rap, Falzon, Law, McIntosh should be good enough on the glass... I hope.
Make him return to the team. Things will probably take care of themselves. If not, I agree completely with Idaho.
When was Falzon a natural 3? Another case of trying to put a player somewhere else to magically solve his problems? He is a stretch 4 that needs more bulk and strength to round his play. He will struggle mightily to defend many 3s in B1G caliber play for 30 min. He also removes the ball handling potential of a lineup when at the 3.
Over my head? ROFL
Keep trolling, pal. It will come back to bite you soon enough, just as it did with DocCatsFan and other similar posters on this board,
In any other year, 8 wins in the BIG and 20 overall was a lock for the NIT. Regardless of who was played or victories against. 11 wins in conference regular season and and 23 overall again was a lock for the NCAA and 10 wins during the regular season and 20 overall was almost a lock for NCAA as only one team with that record had ever not gotten in in the history of 64 teams or more in the NCAA. But this year, Mich needed two wins in the BTT including one against the number one team to even get a play in game, OSU with an 11-7 BIG record and 23 wins was relegated to NIT and NU didn't get a sniff. Throw in the seedings on IU and PU as 5s and MSU AS a 2 and you see an overall disrespect of the BIG this year, That meant that record like NU, always a lock for the NIT did not get in and it is unlikely that regardless of who the victories were against that we were getting to the NIT. Again, it was the poor esteem that the BIG seemed to be held in this year much more than any OOC scheduling.
One of the ways they used was strength of schedule but much of that is based on how they viewed the BIG. And the whole BIG suffered because of that
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Two questions:
1) Do you think that NU's resume was deserving of an NIT bid?
2) Do you think there is anything at all that NU could have done to improve its chances this year, short of the obvious "win more games?"
Answer to 1 is yes. 8 wins in the big 20 overall and we played solidly to our level with no really bad losses (with all the trouble with PSU over the years and them being only one spot below us was only a marginally bad loss) In any other year prior to this, it would have been enough. But the way the BIG was being looked at this year, it would have likely taken not one but two more wins to even get to NIT. (OSU had three more BIG wins and only got a 4 seed) win against PSU and a 9-9 BIG record likely would not have done it and even a win against MICH in the BTT might not have done it. So the answer to 2 is no, nothing other than more wins and likely two of them.
I disagree, but I can see the argument. This, however...
So you think, going forward, we should continue to schedule garbage opponents and need 12+ conference wins to have a shot at the NCAAs? Or just hope that the B1G will be so good that 8-10 or 9-9 will do it? You don't think it would help in any way to game the RPI system in our favor?
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8 wins in the Big Ten and 20 overall this year means less than it did the previous years because the conference was weak this year and the 12 wins in non-conf were not against resume building teams. Same for OSU. Why do you fail to see that?
RPI, which is just a formula, does not have a bias against the BIG.
I said for this year, nothing other than more wins in the BIG would have made any difference. And this year it did not matter the BIG team or their OOC schedule, it took 12 BIG wins to get into the dance as evidenced by the fact that OSU with an 11-7 record did not get in (and only got a 4 seed in the NIT) and until Mich got their 12 win, they were not getting a sniff. This year, the OOC schedule was appropriate but that does not mean it cannot be "toughened up" going forward. But much of that OOC toughness is beyond our control. Opponents in preseason tourneys, ACC matchups etc are sort of locked in by others. Next year, they are already looking stronger. But in general, in the BIG, unless they are taking 9-9 teams, hard to find cases where OOC scheduling really helped (or hurt). And if they are taking 9-9 teams, it is because the BIG is viewed much more favorably than this year. Again, prior to this year there had only been one case where a 10-8 team had not gotten in. So in general, BIG strength matters but OOC not so much. Face it, our fate in selection and the record required depends on how the BIG is viewed (and our record in it) a whole lot more than our OOC schedule. OOC schedule is to prepare us for the BIG schedule
I do not recall a case of an 8-10 BIG team getting to the NCAA no matter how hard the OOC schedule.
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