I look forward to Indiana with NC next week.
Few is a master at scheduling for the Zag’s particular conference situation. Knowing that a) they play in a conference that typically borders on Div. 2 from a conference perspective, b) the conference champ is an AQ, and c) on the event of of the Little Sisters of the Poor WCC teams happens to upset them and steal the AQ from Gonzaga, Few typically schedules a fairly tough non-con schedule, knowing that they will lose a few games due to playing real competition, and that the tourney selection team will show a recency bias and seed them high because they lost so early in the season, but ripped through their conference playing in a weak-a$$ conference. They have talent on their teams, and are generally a top 25 team, but are typically over seeded year after year. Put them in a real conference like the ACC, the B1G, or even the SEC and see how they perform.
Including the tournament, they're 29-12 in the last 5 years against Big 10, ACC, Big 12, SEC, and Pac 12.
Gonzaga is very good team. Are they the clear #1 team year in and year out like their final AP shows? I don‘t think so.
Haven't watched them much, but from what little I have watched, I think Purdue is the best team I've seen from the BIG. Lotta good teams in the conference.
Sounds like a problem with KenPom. Seriously though, things like KenPom and Torvik are tools — just one piece of the puzzle. I really don’t pay much attention to them until tournament time unlike many on here who run to check them out after each Illini game. And it is interesting that people on here have been quick to point out the “randomness” (not right word hence the quotation marks, but having a brain freeze) of a lose and you’re out tournament in the Boeheim/BIG sucks discussion (not saying you are one of those), but downgrade Gonzaga when they lose in tourney sooner than seed says it should. And they do have two recent runner up finishes.
I agree with this. The other thing that I don't if anyone has looked at, but match-ups in the NCAA tournament makes a huge difference. I know you have to beat everyone anyway to get 5th the finals, but I feel like we always get put in a crappy bracket/ matchuos in the tournament.
Looks like old Belo! Good game.
It's not a problem. It's just the reality. Analytical tools are always at the mercy of the data quality they are fed. The less relevant the data they get, the larger the uncertainty in their output. Gonzaga is an example where the amount of high quality matchup data is fairly low so the uncertainty bars are fairly large.
As I said in previous post, I agree that Gonzaga is often over ranked, but comparing Illini’s 3-year conference record to Gonzaga’s record past 5 years against P5 schools is beyond comparing apples to oranges. Look at the their records against ranked teams. For ease, I used ESPN schedule/results. I believe the ranking they show is at the time of the game and not year-end ranking. For NCAA tournament games since ESPN shows seed rather than ranking, I considered any game after opening round a ranked team since I didn’t want to go through and check every teams ranking. Since these were at worse top 32 teams remaining and one could argue a tourney game has added significance, I thought this was OK.
Put on some solid weght.
In Quad 1-A Games since 2017, Gonzaga, in a sample of 35 games, is first in adjusted efficiency and second in wins above bubble. https://barttorvik.com/trank.php?ye...vquad=0&quad=1&venue=All&type=All&mingames=5#
