March Madness Q&A: How one victory changed Louisville's NCAA Tournament outlook
For all subscribers, answering the most important questions about Louisville's NCAA Tournament profile as the most exciting month in sports begins.
March is here! March is here!
Welcome to a special Monday edition of The Floyd Street Tribune. For the next few weeks, I’ll be sending out a detailed review of Louisville’s NCAA Tournament resume and what fans should know for the upcoming week. This won’t change the regularly scheduled Thursday morning newsletter for paid subscribers or the Thursday morning newsletter previews for free email signups, but I want to give as many readers as possible a clear-eyed view of where their team stands.
When I started at The Courier-Journal in late 2013, I became frustrated at how little information was out there explaining how the NCAA Tournament selection process worked and specifically how it applied to Louisville. That’s why I started “The Resume,” a weekly series examining this specific topic, and I hope for the next few weeks you’ll enjoy a clearer view of why NCAA Tournament-related events unfold the way they do.
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Let’s dive into Louisville’s resume and what you should be watching over the next week.
Does news of Malik Williams reinjuring his foot impact Louisville’s evaluation by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee?
The bad news of Williams’s injury, beyond how awful it is for a great player and person, is that it will impact how Louisville is viewed by the committee. Members discuss injuries and other factors and how they’ve impacted teams over the course of a season. These conversations can go for hours with certain teams — assume that will be the case even more so during this COVID-19 season.
The good news is Louisville went 11-4 without Williams and had already (likely) done enough to claim an NCAA Tournament berth.
What information does the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee consider?
The selection process has thankfully improved over the years, especially in using better metrics to look at teams. Below is literally what Selection Committee members see on their computers when evaluating Louisville. The acronyms at the top of the sheet, for those who don’t know, all stand for college basketball metrics used to assess teams — their quality of wins and their efficiency compared to other teams.
For reference: The Kevin Pauga Index, ESPN’s Basketball Power Index and Jeff Sagarin Ratings are all attempts to improve upon the old RPI formula previously used by the NCAA. Strength of Record is ESPN’s “measure of team accomplishment based on how difficult a team's W-L record is to achieve.” Ken Pomeroy’s analytics site ranks teams in terms of efficiency based on box score data adjusted for game tempo. Selection Committee members can also use other sites — Bart Torvik, Warren Nolan, etc. — to inform their opinions, but that info is not included on the teamsheets.
The most important metric for the NCAA Tournament selection process is the NET, a formula intended to rank teams using all kinds of efficiency and results-oriented data. The “Quadrant” system, which assigns value to individual games, is entirely based on the NET ratings and uses a sliding scale to emphasize, for instance, the importance and perceived heightened difficulty of road and neutral-site games.
The teamsheet you see above breaks down a team’s resume into specific categories to help Selection Committee members get a full view of each squad. By design, you’ll notice the date of results is de-emphasized — the Selection Committee doesn’t, nor is it supposed to, care if a team is on a five-game winning streak in February. You hear the phrase “full body of work” all the time in college basketball and especially around the NCAA Tournament: The committee wants to evaluate what a team has done all season.
The factors most important to the Selection Committee tend to be a team’s quality of wins and its record against other NCAA Tournament teams the committee includes in the 68-team field. Using BracketMatrix.com’s collection of every serious bracket projection on the internet, Louisville is 4-4 against other projected NCAA Tournament teams with two games left to play against two others (and more in the ACC Tournament).
Why is one Duke win worth so much more than the other?
Much to the chagrin of some difficulty-of-road-game skeptics, the game at Duke is deemed more challenging than the game at home vs. Duke. Some teams (the top 30 in the NET rankings) are good enough that any game against them is a Quadrant 1 contest. But for teams ranked 31st through 75th in the NET ratings, the Quadrant system becomes more nuanced. Play one of them at home and you have a Quadrant 2 game; play one of them at their place and it’s a Quadrant 1 game.
If the ACC Tournament started today, what would Louisville’s path look like?
This could be a big movement week for the ACC Tournament. If the field was announced today, before any Monday night games tipped, this is what it would look like:
Louisville’s path would include a Thursday game against Clemson, Pitt or Wake Forest. If the Cards won that game, they’d play the winner of Florida State and either Duke or Syracuse. A rematch with Clemson, which I tend to think would go better for Louisville, would present another Quadrant 1 game opportunity for the ol’ resume. A rematch with FSU, which I tend to think would not go better for Louisville, would also be a Quadrant 1 game. Matchups at the ACC Tournament will be considered neutral-site games.
What is Louisville’s best win? Worst loss?
For a long time, the win at Pittsburgh from December stood as the best Louisville victory. The recent win at Duke now clearly takes that mantle. Two games this week, however, present opportunities for Louisville that surpass the Duke road win if the Cards win: A road game at Virginia Tech, which is 45th in the NET vs. Duke’s 59th, and a home game against NET No. 17 Virginia.
The worst loss, and by some margin, came at Miami. You probably knew that’d be the case at the time, and little has changed. The injury-ravaged Canes once hovered around the NET’s top 135, which would’ve made Louisville’s loss a Quadrant 2 game and at least lessened the blow of losing to them. But Miami doesn’t appear to have any shot of returning to the top 135 after the latest five-game losing streak, making the January loss a seemingly permanent Quadrant 3 defeat for Louisville. No bueno.
What Louisville fans should root for
Winning is obviously priority No. 1. Beat Virginia and Virginia Tech and vastly improve the seeding outlook. Two wins this week and a potential win over Clemson in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals would have Louisville in serious competition for something like a No. 5, 6 or 7 seed, I would think. (Seeding is never done in a vacuum, so Louisville would also need other teams currently in that territory to struggle to allow the Cards to climb.)
Otherwise, Louisville fans need to root for everyone their team has played to keep winning and improving their NET rating.
What Louisville fans should root against
Again, definitely losing games, though losing two Quadrant 1 matchups this week and even an ACC Tournament game against a team like Clemson likely wouldn’t change Louisville’s trajectory as an NCAA Tournament at-large team. Those results would mostly just hurt Louisville’s seeding. A three-game losing streak in that scenario would probably get Louisville something like a 10 or 11 seed.
Also, Louisville fans don’t want similar teams to play great. That list, based on NET ratings, includes teams like Connecticut, Missouri, Oregon and Xavier, among others. Boo them. Boo those teams.
How would the old system, using RPI, be different for Louisville?
For the most curious among us, Louisville’s RPI would rank 26th using the old NCAA Tournament selection process data, according to WarrenNolan.com. That’s 20 spots better than the NET ratings. Louisville’s strength of schedule, however, would only slightly improve to 43rd from 45th. Apply the RPI data to the Quadrant system, and Louisville would be 0-3 in Quadrant 1 games and 10-2 in Quadrant 2 and 3 games. That kind of profile might cause some stress sweating on Selection Sunday, even with the top-30 rating.
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