and if they aren't dogs to go S16 they like 53% or barely faves. regardless of whether they pull their **** together they aren't an elite team and won't be a 1/2 seed

top tier contenders

1. louisville
2. arizona
3. sparty
4. oklahoma state


second tier

5. unc (they jump to #1 if hairston returns. drop if he doesn't)
6. florida
7. ohio state
8. kansas
9. syracuse

maybe contenders if everything starts clicking around tourney time

10. wisconsin
11. wichita state
12. villanova
13. duke
14. oregon
15. kentucky
16. pitt
17. michigan

longshots

18. iowa
19. memphis
20. gonzaga
21. iowa state
22. umass
23. saint louis
24. virginia
25. ucla

didn't put the most thought into this so its prob easy to quibble, but this is roughly how i feel now

nice try dean

imo underrating uk's tournament equity, but you definitely seem right about them not scaling to good competition

could bump UK up a few spots but do you really take them ahead of any of my top 9 teams at this juncture? how much upside do they really have? they get w/e in season progressions come from the freshmen and that's pretty much it. maybe poythress will get it going? hard to see massive upticks coming their way, their warts aren't going away i don't think

face it bro, uconn isn't good and the only upside they have to get better is if like BRIMAH randomly starts beasting and gets freed. bc w/o a weird breakout, it doesn't appear that they have improved v much (if at all) over last season.

UConn has some nice guards. Napier is awesome and could def takeover and get a lucky bounce or 2 and find themselves in the final 4.

well the one thing working in their favor is that they'll have a pretty nice tourney seed from all of the wins they boxed early on. especially if they can box one more quality win vs louisville their RPI will be pretty strong.

i'd lay 10-1 odds on them F4'ing all day though if you're interested in buying equity

the other thing they have working in their favor is bazz can take over a game anytime he wants to which is fairly important in tournaments

or if you don't want to deduce the EV of uconn's equity (which is challenging imo), i'd be happy to do an equity swap of similarly rated teams.

i'd love to do me some oregon vs uconn swaps for instance. i'd even lay slight odds, so it's something like

you win 550 if uconn goes f4 and oregon doesn't, i win 500 if oregon goes f4 and uconn doesn't. and we could add size for going to/winning the ship. just spitballin ideas here.

unc is confusing as ****

Saturday at 11:30 PM EST

OK ST vs. Colorado

Smart v. Dinwiddie

:thumbup:

Gus is impossible to listen to if you're rooting for the favorite. OMG a 4-0 Johnnies run, Cuse rattled!
Raftery is great. Gonna miss him & Bilas/McDonough together.

In Vegas baby! It's too bad this game isn't one week later on the 28th. Falling between Christmas and New Years would be perfect for a trip to Vegas with a chance to watch some hoops.

Eh not really. Basically UNC is very good and I think atp you can sort of write off those losses as youth/variance. Paige seems to be a legit baller and looks like first team ACC if he keeps it up, which is fairly shocking considering his profile coming in and his play last year, which was good but nothing special. It's pretty incredible we've beaten UK/Sparty/Lolville with essentially no three point shooting--as Dean said we're a NC contender, maybe #1 with PJ back, but I still think we're a FF ceiling without him.

Data on the UNC/UK game is interesting. Teams had a mirror image of shot selection, only difference was UNC shot slightly above average on 2pt jump shots and UK shot awful there. Both sucked at 3 pt shooting and getting to the rim, both also sucked royally at FT shooting.

Due to the length of UK, UNC only attempted 10% of their shots at the rim but did really well there % wise, was aids from 3pt land, and ran only slightly above their season average on 2pt jumpers (top 5 average in the country though). Difference was pretty much forcing turnovers and transition offense. Turnovers alone gave UNC like 8 extra possessions. In transition UNC's efg was 78% and 28% of their fg attempts were in transition (that's a high number). In the half court UNC was only 38% efg. Somehow UK didn't get to the rim at a higher rate than UNC even with all those offensive rebounds. I think Indiana in 2012 and UNC this year kind of confirmed that the best way to attack Cal's defense is in transition. Teams that plod and play like Wisky don't fare nearly the same chance vs UK's set defense.

sounds like there were some rim shots for unc that were qualified as 2 point jumpers based on descriptions

you can't always trust the pbp to be spot on imo. skimming thru the espn pbp it looks like they have ~18 (give or take, it was a quick count) rim shots for unc so whoever said it was 10% is likely wrong

agree that attacking UK in transition seems like the way to go. they have such great halfcourt defense and since they normally crash orebs it stands to reason that they are always be at least semi-vulnerable in transition. i almost ended up betting on UNC for meeks outlet passes but then decided that was thin, although UNC being a transition team in general would have made it probably good.

he sounded actively sad when fair hit a dagger near the end. his voice dropped a ton when he called it as good.

The place this data comes from used ncaa.org which is as good as you'll find unless you wanna just rewatch everything yourself, but yeah it's all still subjective to the pbp guy and what he determines as a jumper vs at the rim, but espn is notorious aids for pbp data and giving out incorrect game data. Never trust them

i don't trust anybody wrt pbp data. college record keeping is generally unreliable.

i believe that ncaa.org is prob better a large % of the time but i think whoever had this game did a bad job bc i can remember > 6 UNC rim shots off the top of my head.

are you looking at hoop-math or another place for this info?

Yeah hoop-math

hoop-math is the tits. really gives you a solid sense for every team's identity w/o having to watch them play

Well worth the $15

Not really. Truly elite team with Hairston/Mcdonald, and super vulnerable without

Kennedy Meeks is the real deal btw

to think a year ago he looked like this too:



Now:



Looks skinnier every week