Sometimes post-season invitations are not based on who is most deserving.
Miss. St. vs Pitt in a play-in game? Vandy beat both of them. And beat UK twice in 2 weeks. And swept Florida. Hung 70 on Arky in one half... etc etc...
They also lost 14 games. IMO, this should be about to whom you have lost just as much as who have to beaten. They lost to a lot of teams. My math says the average bubble team would have only lost 12 against that schedule.
"That" schedule = 6th toughest in the nation.
According to what metric? Almost all the rankings of it I see are around 30. That isn't very different form a lot of the other bubble teams.
This is what I did when I say 12 losses and to be fair to Vandy its really more like 12.5. Bubble teams should be ranked in the mid to high 40's because that's where the last at large bid is on the committees ranking of teams. A team on that Level is about 11 points better than the average NCAA division 1 team. You can take that and compare it to a predictive rating for the teams on Vandy's schedule, add or subtract about 3 from that difference for home field and read it off of a normal distribution with the mean at 0 and a standard deviation of about .09 and you get the winning chance of a typical bubble team in that game. Then add those chances up and you get the expected number of wins that the typical bubble team would have against Vandy's schedule.
If that makes sense to you try it. You'll see that difference we can up with form a typical computer power ranking between two teams with HFA added onn will be about the vegas line when they play That thing we read off the bell curve will be between the two money lines. It works. If you compare that sum of chances for bubble teams and look at a wins based rating system you'll find that it often compares to that and wins based rankings to a pretty good job of predicting at-larges. I'm not saying this without basis. Believe me, Vandy came up short on their win total with respect to what they should have by more than a game.
We don't have to rank teams just of their win/loss record. We can look at a how good we think they are as in who would be favored to beat who. Would Vandy be favored against the rest of the bubble? This is even worse for Vandy. I'd say a Vegas oddsmaker looks at Vanderbilt as about the 70th best team in the country. That isn't near the 45 ranking you'd expect. In fact, it is right about where Kent State and Toledo would be.
Now the thing that helps them, as you point out, is the committee overinflates the quality win count with respect to just simply looking at the value of that win loss record. I know that. I'm aware of that. But in my opinion it is unnecessary Voodoo designed to intentionally help high-majors. Your quality wins are already included with exactly how much weight they should have when we do that math on the win-loss record. But if you just start counting quality wins without the rest of that context then obviously a team that played more quality opponents will usually have more. I think it is done intentionally to screw teams that are not from high-major conferences. Consequently, if their only argument is their quality win count while even with those wins they still got too many losses in other games to have the record you'd expect while having a power ranking in the 70s then I don't feel bad for them at all.
Last Edited: 3/13/2023 8:00:42 PM by Victory