bierce Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Our next opponent, Mississippi Valley State, is 364th in 364 teams in Pomeroy, and it just lost tonight to a so-so Missouri team 111-39. Seriously, CDC, why schedule this kind of crap? 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
horns96 Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Does blame sit solely with CDC? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GoHorns1 Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 (edited) 34 minutes ago, horns96 said: Does blame sit solely with CDC? Nope, HC has some say probably Edited November 15 by GoHorns1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Assistant Regional Manager Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Why did Missouri schedule them? And Iowa State? And BYU? And Kansas State? And Utah? And LSU? Welcome to college basketball, where beating a horrible team by 70 sometimes helps your NET ranking more than beating a good team by 2. It’s a broken system and until they fix NET teams will continue to do this. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Assistant Regional Manager Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 13 minutes ago, GoHorns1 said: Nope, HC has some say probably HC has a large say in non-football sports. UConn and the conference slate aren’t too far off. Feels like every year you see less and less on-campus non conference matchups featuring two big name programs. They are always at neutral sites or in tournaments for some reason. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rucker Norris Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Could be worse! I go to Utah State and we beat a D2 liberal arts school last night 117-53! It was 65-25 at halftime... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted November 15 Author Share Posted November 15 (edited) 10 hours ago, Assistant Regional Manager said: Why did Missouri schedule them? And Iowa State? And BYU? And Kansas State? And Utah? And LSU? Welcome to college basketball, where beating a horrible team by 70 sometimes helps your NET ranking more than beating a good team by 2. It’s a broken system and until they fix NET teams will continue to do this. No, it doesn't work like that. NET rankings are now calculated in a fashion very similar to Pomeroy by comparing output per possession against expected output per possession against that particular opponent. There will be minor deviations between their formulas for calculating how strong a particular opponent is, but the gist of it is that no team gains in the ranking unless it beats the other team more emphatically than a similarly ranked team would beat it. So what Texas gains in the rankings even if it beats MVSU by 70 tomorrow won't be worth the waste of a game. Missouri, a mid 60s team, rose to 55 by winning by 72. ISU dropped from 6 to 10 by winning by only 39. Now the level of MVSU is established by combining those numbers, a team in the mid 20s would need to win by 60 or more to avoid a negative effect. https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2022-12-05/college-basketballs-net-rankings-explained And this puts pressure on the coaches to play at max efficiency instead of working with players who need pt either individually or in combinations. You can't really afford to jiggle line-ups in these games. You are better off playing against good to decent competition to get your troops ready for the real teams it will face later in the season. While the committee looks at each teams' quad record when selecting and seeding the field, it largely ignores q4 wins. q1 losses are bad, but they won't entirely disqualify a team from the tournament. Indiana State, Mississippi State, Northwestern, and Florida Atlantic each had a q4 loss but received an at large bid. FAU had two such losses, but they were in a home loss to a 175ish team and a road loss to a 250ish team. Texas was closely scrutinized by a lot of people late in the season because it was still under .500 in q1-3 games. A couple more q3 wins instead of wins over the worst in the q4 would have ended that discussion in a hurry, and we would not have been in the position of needing that road win over Tech to make us feel safe about our chances. I have no problem with scheduling a laugher or two, but we have way too many such games this season. We play 3 of the worst 7 teams in the country, 6 of the worst 22, and 7 teams ranked 300+ in Pomeroy. That cheats the fans or meaningful competition to enjoy,and it cheats the players and the coaches of meaningful competition to use to improve the team. And throw in an occasional true road game. There are plenty of decent teams in the state that would love to schedule 2 for 1s against us, like SFA, Sam Houston State, UT-Arlington, UTEP, etc. We don't get much in the way of extra exposure by playing Texas State in San Marcos, but why not do that once a decade? Playing Rice annually makes sense. It will have some lulls but is usually 200-230 range, and we can even schedule games in Houston against it. And now we have a bunch of former conference opponents we could schedule home and home against. There is so much more we can do with our non-conference schedule than a couple of neutral site games against tournament bound teams. Alabama has played at least 2 road or semi-road games in non-conference in each of the last 3 seasons with a couple of semi-home and a ton of neutral site games on top of those. We needn't go that all out in scheduling non-conference, but we should do a lot better. Edited November 15 by bierce 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarkInAustin Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Allowiing for the need of NIL transient built teams to jell with what amounts to pre-conference scrimmages, Bierce's point that these could be played against better patsies than the ones on our schedule is well taken. My recollection is that our recent former coach whose name we will not write had a long history of scheduling the very worst teams that he could in the pre-season. I don't think that is a carry-over problem, however. CDC and RT can get us back to where the tune-up opponents are again teams such as Rice, Arlington, and UTEP. Opponents that are eminently beatable but that can fog glass with their breath should strengthen Texas. We do have NMxSt in that category this season. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TarrantCoHorn Posted November 15 Share Posted November 15 Chris Beard's scheduling tradition lives on 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted November 15 Author Share Posted November 15 Sorry for the mistake, but I already edited my long post to include a link for the NCAA explanation of NET rankings, and I can't edit again. But I want to correct my error. Indiana State did not make the tournament last year, but that was probably because it had a 1-4 record in q1, and was 0-2 against teams in the NET top 45, losing by a combined 34 points. I was calling them a fraud all through February and March. Played well in the NIT though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobInHouston Posted Friday at 06:33 PM Share Posted Friday at 06:33 PM We've seen it now both ways. RB took on a game or two big-time, a strong tournament, and looked for potential mid-level D-I champs -- this is the Kansas approach, although Kansas usually goes a little higher on the quality. Beard scraped the bottom of the barrel and used it as team prep. Shaka showed the flaws of the RB approach by losing way more than RB did. Beard's problem was that if his team didn't perk up in the B12, he didn't have anything in the n-c that showed they were decent. This is the issue for RT if he sticks with this model. They lost to Ohio State, and if they end up striking out with UConn and NC State, they'll have to prove tournament quality in the SEC. That shouldn't be difficult in theory, but FWIW, right now KenPom has Texas losing its first five in the SEC (at A&M, Tennessee, Auburn, at OU, at Florida). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Friday at 07:24 PM Author Share Posted Friday at 07:24 PM 49 minutes ago, BobInHouston said: We've seen it now both ways. RB took on a game or two big-time, a strong tournament, and looked for potential mid-level D-I champs -- this is the Kansas approach, although Kansas usually goes a little higher on the quality. Beard scraped the bottom of the barrel and used it as team prep. Shaka showed the flaws of the RB approach by losing way more than RB did. Beard's problem was that if his team didn't perk up in the B12, he didn't have anything in the n-c that showed they were decent. This is the issue for RT if he sticks with this model. They lost to Ohio State, and if they end up striking out with UConn and NC State, they'll have to prove tournament quality in the SEC. That shouldn't be difficult in theory, but FWIW, right now KenPom has Texas losing its first five in the SEC (at A&M, Tennessee, Auburn, at OU, at Florida). Followed by winning 8 of the next 9, but every game in both stretches except one is projected to be no more than a 2 possession game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobInHouston Posted Friday at 07:26 PM Share Posted Friday at 07:26 PM Just now, bierce said: Followed by winning 8 of the next 9, but every game in both stretches except one is projected to be no more than a 2 possession game. Yes, but after 0-5, for sale signs will fill RT's yard. No patience, here and most other places. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Friday at 08:11 PM Author Share Posted Friday at 08:11 PM (edited) 46 minutes ago, BobInHouston said: Yes, but after 0-5, for sale signs will fill RT's yard. No patience, here and most other places. We won't be 0-5 over a 5 game stretch of games projected to be decided by 4 points or less anymore than we will win all 7 subsequent games we are projected to win by 5 points or less. But yeah, RT is not given the benefit of the doubt. If he was, then donors would have picked up the tab for Toppin. BTW, UTRGV might be a team to watch in the Southland Conference over the next couple of years. Kahil Fennell is a fairly young coach who played and coached in obscurity before helping UT Permian Basin turn around from nowhere to win the Lone Star Conference about 8 years back, and he started rising in the ranks as an assistant--going to Portland State, Louisville, and BYU before getting hired this spring to coach UTRGV. UTRGV has given both Nebraska and Creighton tough games up there and is currently up 7 and shooting ft n the final minute against Charleston Southern in something called the "Greenbrier Tip-Off River Division" being played in West Virginia. I don't expect great things right away, but I think Fennell did a really good job of luring players to Odessa, wasn't to blame for Mack getting fired mid-season in Louisville and the collapse that happened that season and the next. Pope certainly liked him. 86-76 final. Will play tomorrow against the winner of the VMI/Tennessee Tech game. Tennessee Tech is coached by John Pelphrey, a former Arkansas coach, and it gave Georgia a game in the season opener, but Mekhi Cameron hasn't played since, and TT is worse off for it. Edited Friday at 08:19 PM by bierce 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Horn79 Posted Friday at 08:50 PM Share Posted Friday at 08:50 PM Mississippi Valley State does have one win on the season against...checks notes...Mississippi University for Women! No, that's not a joke. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Friday at 09:05 PM Author Share Posted Friday at 09:05 PM (edited) 15 minutes ago, Horn79 said: Mississippi Valley State does have one win on the season against...checks notes...Mississippi University for Women! No, that's not a joke. A Division III team that lost to Nicholls by 49. Edited Friday at 09:06 PM by bierce Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Tuesday at 03:02 AM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 03:02 AM A follow up on my comment about UTRGV. It is down 2 to Wisky in Madison with 1:14 to go, and Wisky shooting its 30 something free throw to make it a 4 point game. That is the #19 Badgers. UTRGV just hit a three to make it a one point game in the final minute. Kahil Fennell is a witch of a coach. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Tuesday at 03:04 AM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 03:04 AM UTRGV got a stop and has the ball down one with a chance to take the last shot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bierce Posted Tuesday at 03:11 AM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 03:11 AM (edited) Drive, but contested shot goes off the front of the rim. Wisky rebounds and will survive. Badgers make a pair, and UTRGV long range bomb misses. Nice try, Vaqueros, in a game Pomeroy said you would lose by 21. This is the sort of loss that gains a team 30 spots in NET rankings. UTRGV has gone to Nebraska, Creighton, and Wisconsin and been in the game in the last 5 minutes in every one of them. Wisky had to shoot 85% from the line (27/32) to win this game. Edited Tuesday at 03:15 AM by bierce 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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