WHY IS EZUMA NOT PLAYING MORE???

So strange. His shot looks bad from the release. Did he lift too many weights? He is a tremendous young man who still plays with passion. He may just have the yips but his shot looks awful.

My .02? Yes he should still be starting because we have nobody else (unless you think Towns or Olumide are ready).

*insert my broken record complaint of begging for a 3 and D wing player with some length*

Can not start Tommy for BRod. That's 3 guys under 6'1 on the floor. If Tommy is starting it would have to be in place of Miles. You just can't win that way in HS let alone here. At that point you are giving up so much in defense and rebounding that you're basically conceding giving up 80+ every night. Only way to overcome that is to just outscore folks with amazing 3pt shooting (like 42-45% +).

Does any of that sound like the m.o. of this team? Quite the opposite. We win by playing solid defense and slowing it down to save our short rotation, keeping opponent in the 60s.Then winning the FT/TO/Reb battle in spite of our shooting.

Sitting BRod at this point is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Our season will go as far as Mark Sears against quality opponents and BRod shooting will take us. My gut says that's Friday night in Cleveland.

I agree with all that. The NIT is no longer plausible. It's get the auto-bid, get BVP and JC a couple extra games in the CBI or call it a season IMO.

Yeah that's why I added that third option. If it comes down to it, the only reason to accept a CBI invite would be if the seniors really wanted it. Otherwise I agree we might just call it a day.

My guess is that you never saw the Magic Show at Barberton back in the 70s.

I'd consider starting Tommy simply because he has to be guarded on the perimeter. That gives Sears room to operate and the sooner Sears is into the game the better. Maybe we can avoid the slow starts we have been seeing with that change? Tommy is already playing BRods minutes so let's get going from the jump with our best 5. With Carter and BRod on the floor at the same time there is very little risk of bringing that double to Sears.

It's not ideal to have Miles guarding the 3 but if we can't put it in the hole it won't matter.

I tried explaining it. I think that a 26-7 MAC would be in the NIT in nearly all years and circumstances. We were 24-9 in 2013 and lost in the MAC final and knew we were all but certain of a NIT bid. But this MAC is not your usual MAC and a 26-7 record isn't going to be any better strength of record wise than than that team's 24-9. It may be very slightly worse. But on top of that when people get down to studying us the are going to deem us as not as good as a team with that caliber of SOR would normally be. I mean you would expect a team with a SOR ranking in the 60s to be regarded as also the 60-70th best team by Vegas oddsmakers and betters and by computer power rankings on average. Some better, some worse, but that's basically going to be the average by definition. We aren't that. We are probably regarded just over 100 in that measure at this point. Even though we have somehow played literally zero close games all year, our average margin of victory against the bad teams on our schedule is still, strangely, not what you would expect of a top 60 or 70 team because we also almost never totally crushed those teams. We have not taken a close loss either. It is just a totally bizarre year for us in that regard. None of our game are close but hardly any are total blowouts. We even failed to completely destroy Concordia. Nearly all Ohio teams have destroyed their yearly non-D1 opponent. This team with only 6 losses so far won by 20 points.

Plus these committees tend to, IMO, way, way overemphasize "quality wins". I don't see the point in this because it is already included with exactly the importance that they should be given as part of SOR. Well, I do see the point. If you start counting quality wins it very, very obviously gives a team with more chances to get them a built in advantage. We had two chances at Q1 wins and failed pretty badly both times.

I am not going to say that we won't get in the NIT. I would not be totally shocked by it. Our chances would be slightly better still if we lost in the final instead pf the semi-final. But at this point I'm am definitely betting against it.

I think it is wrong to look at those 2 in the 60s as outliers. In a system that looks at at a teams resume of wins and losses, that's where we are in all of them consistently. They aren't outliers. As little as I think of the RPI, neither of those that you listed is an outlier at all in their of domain of computer analysis. There are numerous systems like that out there. Others you listed are some of the most well known because they are power rankings and we look at them when thinking about spreads (well NET and Massey's primary system is slightly mixed in that there is a small part of SOR kind of analysis averaged in. Sagarin was like that recently but it looks to me like it no longer is. He no longer lists that Sagarin-ELO analysis with 3 predictive type algorithms but I digress. KemPom is a pure predictor and Torvik's primary ranking is as well.)

But those W's and L's and to whom they came against are a huge, huge part of what the committee looks at. I'd argue that it far outweighs the predictive type of thinking when looking at the teams. Who in terms of their NET ranking and other systems did you defeat to to whom did you lose. So even if you use the NET to come up with a ranking of teams like that and debate it then the ranking in your mind that you come up with by doing that will look more like SOR. I hope that makes some sort of sense

Slow feet on D? Tank attacking a jeep on D? Bad hands grabbing passes? Running over players (own team as well as opposing team players) up and down the court? Just maybe some of those.....

I'll keep rambling on if you are interested in this stuff. Obviously, Feel free to ignore this post if you aren't the analytical type.

This is a list of 59 systems on Massey's site.

https://masseyratings.com/cb/compare.htm

We were ranked 89 on average as of last Monday. So we have a win and a loss not counted yet. It should be updated again tomorrow. I'd say about half are predictive type systems. The rest are resume based or a mixture. I don't think any do that overweighting of quality wins on top of that stuff like the committee does.

Anyway, after the first few years of the BCS, all six system that were included were required to be the resume based, W/L analysis, SOR type of system. Anderson-Hester was a crappy simple formulaic system similar to the RPI. Massey and Sagarin in the BCS were just that resume W/L part that is or was a small part of their primary system that I was taking about above. A couple of them, I think, never existed for basketball. The one of the 6 in the BCS that still exists in a similar for for basketball was Colley. We were 59 in Colley on Monday which is what is in Massey's composite today. Today, going to Colley's site we are 70 so when Massey updates tomorrow that's about what it will say as our new Colley rank in the composite.

Anyway, as I was saying. don't get too hung up on SOR as an outlier with respect to all of the predictors because its probably closer in the end to the process that the committee will go through. That isn't to say that how we will be thought of in predictive/power rank terms is not an issue for us. It totally is and that line of thinking will go into it too. Also, since the committee overweighs just counting up Q1 type of wins over and above a SOR sort of analysis of wins and losses that's definitely an issue as well. All of that combined is why I feel an NIT berth is pretty unlikely if we take a 7th loss in the MAC tournament.

The NIT used to make no bones about this. They used to give home games to teams that would sell the most tickets. But since the NCAA bought the NIT teams are actually seeded and this sort of nepotism and worrying about home tickets and TV exposure over quality and resume seems to be a much, much lesser issue. I don't know that it is non-existent but it isn't running the show.

I remember talking to my Marshall grad buddy when D'Andre Kane played for them and they finished the year on Lunardi's "Next Four Out" list. He assumed that being likely one of the first eight teams not in the NCAA made them a lock for the NIT. I told him not to bank on it. Once they filled the field with every high-major in the top 90 or 100 or so for TV and tickets and all of the low-major #1 seeds that failed to win their conference tournament, a few of which are nowhere near the top 100, there wasn't much room for #60ish type mid-majors. Sure enough they left Marshall out. I believe we beat them in the first round of the CBI or CIT.