NCAA Tournament, Weber, Utah & Oregon State

[Potomac Griz]

Looks like Tinkle's team got in with an at large bid! 7 seed vs 10 seed (also an at-large) VCU. Awesome for Tinkle and Oregon State. First time they've been to the NCAA tournament since 1990 it looks like? Wow... They have to be pretty damn happy with Tinkle

Still waiting to see where Utah ends up and where Weber ends up.
Lunardi has Utah as a 3 seed and Weber as a 15. Hope Weber gets a little love by the committee and ends up with a 14 instead.

1 seeds are Kansas, Oregon, Virginia and North Carolina.

 

[Potomac Griz]

Looks like Weber got a 15 seed. They'll play on Friday against 2 seed Xavier in St. Louis.

Tough draw for sure but Xavier isn't unbeatable. Xavier has a couple 100+ RPI losses and a couple close games to 200+ RPI teams (including at home). I like that match-up better than against a team like Kentucky (who got a 4 seed).

 

[LivingstonNative]

Weber just got a 15 seed against number 2 seed Xavier.

 

[statler & waldorf]

A #15 seed says a lot about the BSC.

 

[Grizzlies1982]

Good luck to the wildcats. Hope they get a win!

 

[Buttegrizzle]

A #15 seed says a lot about the BSC.

It says only a simple guttural utterance, "the BSC sucks".

I hope Weber is smoking hot in their game.

 

[Potomac Griz]

Utah gets a 3 seed (playing in Denver on Thursday). They play 14 seed Fresno State. Great job by Coach K this year again, going 26-8 and earning a 3 seed!

Also...Syracuse is in with a 10 seed...WTF... just thought I'd add that. 68 RPI... Monmouth (in the 50s) and Davidson (in the 50s) not in. Probably a few in the 40s and even a couple in the 30s not in as well that deserved it more than Syracuse. Would have liked to see Jack Gibbs (from Davidson) get a shot in the tournament. He's a hell of a talent. Maybe next year.

 

[LivingstonNative]

Stony Brook gets the number 13 seed against number 4 Kentucky. Does anyone think Stoneybrook is that much better than Weber?
However I like the match up with Weber and Xavier.

 

[statler & waldorf]

It says only...."the BSC sucks"

:thumb:

 

[GrizLA]

Stony Brook gets the number 13 seed against number 4 Kentucky. Does anyone think Stoneybrook is that much better than Weber?
However I like the match up with Weber and Xavier.

Stony Brook recruits out of Brooklyn and the NYC metro area...they might give Xavier a good game but not Kentucky. Kentucky, a 4th seed, beaten today by a 3rd street, and who won their conference is getting an easy game, frankly. As for Oregon State and USC, wow...the Pac 12 must have a lot of influence.

 

[Potomac Griz]

Stony Brook gets the number 13 seed against number 4 Kentucky. Does anyone think Stoneybrook is that much better than Weber?
However I like the match up with Weber and Xavier.

If I were betting money and it was on a neutral court I'd take Weber over Stony Brook. I think it'd be a close game though. Two fairly similar teams. Both are very efficient on offense, have good defenses and both have their two leading scorers being a double/double machine in the post & a dead-eye guard from 3.

Stony Brook gets more love than Weber in the seeding because of their strength of schedule (which also makes their RPI quite a bit better), one more quality win, and fewer "bad" (150+ RPI) losses. Their non conference SOS was 47 while Weber's was 146. The American East is also a better conference (in terms of RPI) than the Big Sky. The American East was #23 while the Big Sky was a pathetic #27 according to "realtimerpi.com".

Hope one of these days the Big Sky can crawl back into the top 20 at least like back in the 2009-2010 and 2005-2006 seasons instead of always being in the 25-28 range we've been stuck in since the conference expanded again.

I also think Stony Brook got a tougher draw than Weber did. I'd much rather (as someone who is rooting for Weber) see Weber play Xavier than Kentucky. Hopefully both pull off the upset

 

[putter]

A #15 seed says a lot about the BSC.

Did you see the ranking of the individual teams? Out of the 68 in the tournament, Weber was ranked 62. :shock:

 

[Potomac Griz]

A #15 seed says a lot about the BSC.

Did you see the ranking of the individual teams? Out of the 68 in the tournament, Weber was ranked 62. :shock:

Not to surprised. It was a rough year for the Big Sky.... again.

I know this horse has been beaten to death over and over but this conference, the lack of effort put into non-conference strength of schedules by many teams, and all that REALLY hurts the top teams every year. Very hard for a team like Weber, Montana, or whoever wins the Big Sky tournament to have a good RPI if half the conference is 250+ in RPI, only 2 teams are in the top half of Division 1, and only 3 teams had a better than 200 (which isn't good) non-conference strength of schedule.

Add in the fact that the Big Sky, even with the pathetic schedule of most of the teams, didn't exactly perform too well in non-conference this year either. The Big Sky had only 4 top 150 wins TOTAL this year in the non-conference.

Weber beat #39 South Dakota State at home.
Sac State beat #98 Arizona State on the road.
Montana beat #102 Boise State at home.
Idaho beat #124 CSU-Bakersfield at home.

That's really bad... but when the large majority of the Big Sky doesn't even make an effort to have a good schedule that type of thing is going to happen a lot and drag the RPI of the top teams down.

 

[ISUguy]

A #15 seed says a lot about the BSC.

Did you see the ranking of the individual teams? Out of the 68 in the tournament, Weber was ranked 62. :shock:

Not to surprised. It was a rough year for the Big Sky.... again.

I know this horse has been beaten to death over and over but this conference, the lack of effort put into non-conference strength of schedules by many teams, and all that REALLY hurts the top teams every year. Very hard for a team like Weber, Montana, or whoever wins the Big Sky tournament to have a good RPI if half the conference is 250+ in RPI, only 2 teams are in the top half of Division 1, and only 3 teams had a better than 200 (which isn't good) non-conference strength of schedule.

Add in the fact that the Big Sky, even with the pathetic schedule of most of the teams, didn't exactly perform too well in non-conference this year either. The Big Sky had only 4 top 150 wins TOTAL this year in the non-conference.

Weber beat #39 South Dakota State at home.
Sac State beat #98 Arizona State on the road.
Montana beat #102 Boise State at home.
Idaho beat #124 CSU-Bakersfield at home.

That's really bad... but when the large majority of the Big Sky doesn't even make an effort to have a good schedule that type of thing is going to happen a lot and drag the RPI of the top teams down.

The Big Sky's problem is not non-conference scheduling. It's non-conference winning. KenPom shows that 7 of the 12 Big Sky schools' non-conference schedules were ranked in the top half of the nation, and 6 of those were ranked in the top third. And Idaho and UNC (183 and 178, respectively) weren't far out of the top half.

The problem, of course, is that the Big Sky teams aren't winning many of those games. Big Sky teams were 33-63 against D-1 non-conference opponents this year. Of the conference's 33 D-1 wins, two came against P-5 league teams (both against the PAC-12).

I guess if you're looking for some good news, you could point to the fact that Big Sky teams were fairly competitive against their western neighbors: 7-5 against the Mountain West, 6-7 against West Coast Conference teams, 3-4 against the Big West and 7-7 against the WAC. Not surprisingly, the PAC-12 dominated Big Sky teams (2-9).

If you wanted to make a blanket statement, you could say that, with the exception of the PAC-12 this season, western college basketball pretty much sucked.

 

[SkyRider]

If you wanted to make a blanket statement, you could say that, with the exception of the PAC-12 this season, western college basketball pretty much sucked.

Sad, but true. Fresno State of the MWC is 57th of 68. Even Gonzaga, who most knew was having a down year, is 44th.

[tweet]https://twitter.com/marchmadness/status/709150474797236224[/tweet]

Or else it screams east coast bias.

 

[SWeberCat02]

If you wanted to make a blanket statement, you could say that, with the exception of the PAC-12 this season, western college basketball pretty much sucked.

I agree. But I wonder if this is a single season trend, or are the major conferences just getting better and further separating themselves from the non-major conferences? 9 conferences got 45 bids (avg of 5/conference), 23 conferences only got auto bids. In the West, 5 of the 6 conferences got auto bids only, while the Pac-12 got 7.

 

[ISUguy]

If you wanted to make a blanket statement, you could say that, with the exception of the PAC-12 this season, western college basketball pretty much sucked.

I agree. But I wonder if this is a single season trend, or are the major conferences just getting better and further separating themselves from the non-major conferences? 9 conferences got 45 bids (avg of 5/conference), 23 conferences only got auto bids. In the West, 5 of the 6 conferences got auto bids only, while the Pac-12 got 7.

I think it's a combination of things. The mid-majors tend to go in cycles. Remember 2011, when Butler and VCU both made the Final Four? Of course, once a mid-major establishes itself, they tend to move up to a power conference if they get the opportunity, like Butler did.

In my mind, the biggest challenges facing mid-major conferences are: 1) Too much TV, which greatly over-exposes the P-5 and eliminates fan loyalty to regional teams; 2) Too many D-1 teams (351 now -- when Idaho State went to the Elite 8 in 1977, there were about 180), which increases competition for players, coaches and television eyes/dollars; 3) the rise of travelling teams and summer league basketball, which almost eliminates "sleepers" and exposes good players to more opportunity to be recruited by higher caliber teams.

On the later point, I often think of Steve Hayes, the 7-footer who led ISU over UCLA in the NCAA tournament in 1977. He grew up in Aberdeen, Idaho, a little town west of Pocatello. Today, there is no way in hell Steve Hayes goes to Idaho State. He'd be on a prime Salt Lake City travelling team, playing in summer tournaments all over the West Coast, and he'd wind up at a place like Oregon State or Gonzaga, at a minimum.

 

[WILDCATFAN]

GO GRIZ, BEAT THE PACK