Better team won. McCamey stunk, again. Gave up way too many easy buckets and made too many boneheaded TOs to beat a top 10 team.

Agreed, although MSU isn't a top 10 team IMO.

McCamey gets OWNED by any team who has physical guards that he can't run over to get space. Travis Walton just flat-out destroyed him today.

Alex Legion--DIE

I don't think they are either but thats the number by the name.

Legion is still a freshmen in my eyes. Kid needs a nice run of games against crap teams to get himself going.

We got pretty much no production from the bench. Brock was effective in the few minutes he got but he got put in bad spots and had to foul a couple times.

All of our starters played more minutes than their biggest minute guy (Walton 32 mins).

Congrats on the Big Ten title. I do think they are top 10 when healthy.

FWIW Delvon Roe improving has helped MSU. He's a freshman that was a 5 star who didn't play at all his senior year of high school that has gotten noticeably better as the year has gone on.

I went to the MSU-Illinois game. I agree with what everyone said.

MSU is the better team
-the deeper bench/pool of talent was really huge in the game
-exceptional at getting out in transition

Officiating was horrendous
-both ways, but it seemed MSU got the benefit a few more times. I'm biased, but where was 'Hometown' Hightower? He seemed to think he was in East Lansing a few times.

The game was so beautiful for the 13 minutes or so were the officials called fouls in the second half. Then, they swallowed the whistles. It's not like MSU stopped fouling Tisdale. My favorite was the inbounds play were Tisdale is coming to the inbounds passer and 2 MSU players are full out blocking like a LG and LT to prevent Tisdale from getting over. Frazier getting thrown to the ground without a call was lollerskates. MSU did a lot of hacking and grabbing and hip-checking on the Illini big men. They really struggled to defend Tisdale and Davis. The Illini, especially Meacham, got away with a lot of grabbing and holding on MSU wings running the baseline and curling around screens up high. The two offenses were much more dominating than even the 74-66 final score would have one believe.

McCamey drew a few fouls (probably should have drawn more with decent officials) but came up short in a big game. McCamey, for awhile, ran really hot in big games. Now, he is back to just being an average performer in those spots.

What happened to Suton? He was not very good.

Kalin Lucas was fantastic.

Looks like Michigan is the 2nd team out right now on bracketology. Meaningggggg, win vs Minnesota and were probably going to be back on the inside of dem bracketzz.

more and more Hightower stuff here

Rank 'em.

Team A

Record: 19-12
RPI: 43
Strength of Schedule: 10
Record vs. RPI top 50: 6-9
Bad losses (outside RPI top 100): 1 (102)
Non-conference quality wins (vs. RPI top 50): 2 (3 & 24)
Quality away wins (vs. RPI top 100): 3 (24, 93, & 39).
% of wins vs. RPI top 100—47%



Team B

Record: 21-10
RPI: 59
Strength of Schedule: 82
Record vs. RPI top 50: 6-8
Bad losses (outside RPI top 100): 1 (102)
Non-conference quality wins (vs. RPI top 50): 0
Quality away wins (vs. RPI top 100): 2 (4 & 19)
% of wins vs. RPI top 100—33%



Team C

Record: 20-9
RPI: 39
Stength of Schedule: 40
Record vs. RPI top 50: 5-7
Bad losses (outside RPI top 100): 0
Non-conference quality wins (vs. RPI top 50): 1 (10)
Quality away wins (vs. RPI top 100): 1 (32)
% of wins vs. RPI top 100—40%

c/a/b

A is UM and B is PSU correct?

just looked it up and i guess i'm wrong.

C looks like us. 30-something RPI, no bad losses, one good road win (Wiscy).

Guessing teams kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. I think A and C are clearly >> B. C has a better record, no bad wins, but A has bigger wins.

A = Michigan
B = Penn State
C = Minnesota

So, if Michigan wins at Minnesota, you can't put Minnesota in ahead of Michigan, right? Not after a sweep. Looking purely at resumes (and factoring in head-to-head), it would seem with a win on Saturday, Michigan > Minnesota > Penn State. But, for some reason, Penn State is assumed to be in while Michigan/Minnesota are on the outside.

Please, NO RPI USAGE

Battle the RPI at every chance

It gives computer rankings a bad name

Well for one Saturday hasn't happened yet. Whoever wins on Saturday picks up another top-50 RPI win as well. I would probably agree that Michigan beating us @ the Barn would situate them above us pretty clearly, but our bigger game is tomorrow vs Wisconsin where we go for the sweep. We can easily go 2-0 or 0-2 this week.

I'm pretty confident that if Michigan wins they are in, if they lose they are out. The one caveat is they probably have to win in the first round. This isn't so much because they need a boost (if the season ended after Minn they'd be in), but a loss to NW/IU/IU would cause them to drop. Difference without a distinction really as they need to win.

PSU has a much better record but a much weaker schedule. Just in the non-conf, they lost twice, Michigan lost 3x. But Michigan lost to Duke, UCLA, and at Maryland, PSU lost to URI and Temple, without a real quality win (I guess they beat GaTech on the road but they're not good at all). This is all just non-conference.

The thing is, I think people are mostly looking at PSU's overall and conference records, on the basis of which they are clearly better, but doing so ignores the big difference in SOS in the non-conference, and it's not clear why as a logical matter one would ignore that.

I think PSU is clearly better because they won at MSU and at Illinois

look at the flaws in the rpi slideshows

please forward these along to anyone that cares about having good objective comparisons

It doesn't matter what you think about the RPI. The fact is, the tournament committee uses it and puts a lot of weight in it.

I understand that, but it's our duty as college bball fans to educate the talking heads on tv, so that they pressure the committee to use better numbers.

oh yeah, congrats to MSU!
they had not won the Big Ten since '01.
As good as MSU has been in the big tourney, they've underperformed during the conference most years.
Still shocking that a team wins the conference losing home games to NW and PSU.

From what I heard, a team's RPI rating doesn't matter so much, as its record against RPI top 50 and top 100. The RPI does an ok job of telling you who the top 50/100 teams are, although the order of them will be pretty messed up.

Not looking at all those slides, but general thoughts. I am sure the RPI is flawed in many ways (for example, the 25/50/25 ratio can't be an ideal breakdown for record/opp rec/opp opp rec). Also, don't know how they calculate SOS, but if they just take a mean, it can be a problem because, if you are the 40th best team say, there's not really that big a difference between playing #200 or #300 in terms of your chances of winning, so you probably want something that will diminish the value as the teams you play get farther away from you in rank.

But generally something like RPI should probably be the main component. That is, something which essentially looks at your record and who you beat, taking into account where it occured. Other stuff, like just road record, top 50, or conference are just slices, important ones, but ultimately arbitrary choices that can better be used by being integrated into a holistic formula. But you've gotta have a good formula, and I doubt the RPI is ideal.

Agree on all points. I'm a huge MSU fan and ticketholder for a dozen years. Never before have I seen one official be as consistently awful as Hightower. Sunday was the worst, although I think for the first time this season, MSU came out on the good end of his incompetence. How Showtime keeps his job is beyond me. And every time Dick Vitale calls a game he does I have to hear about what a great official he is.

Suton is an enigma. Some days he's awful, some days he's average and rarely he's slightly above average. I would say Sunday he was average. He's not a strong defender, but serviceable. He's a decent position rebounder. He doesn't have a huge offensive skil set, but good enough to get the job done against below average bigs. I will say he was HUGE in the last 13 minutes against Wisconsin and was probably the only way we winthat game.

Kalin Lucas has been fantastic all season. I gotta believe he'll be the POTY. If he stays 4 years he'll be a unanimous AA IMO. He reminds me of Chris Paul a bit, minus thebig upper body. But man that little guy can finish in traffic. I saw a list for the Cousy award and out of 10 or so finalists, he wasn't on the list. I thought this was laughable, especially given that Pargo and Flynn made the list. Flynn making the list cracks me up...Dude is a turnover machine.