How many losses is too many losses?
This is a question that seems to pop up every year around this time, as Bubble Watch starts to rear its pretty head (look out for my first edition 10 days from now!), and only a month and a half remains until Selection Sunday.
A handful of teams “in consideration” for the tournament—I’m mainly talking about the troublesome ‘O’ schools of Oregon, Oklahoma, and Ohio State—have the requisite number of good wins or metrics to be considered “in the conversation” for an at-large bid. I mean, the Buckeyes are 36th in the NET and rank 40th or better in every predictive metric. That’s the kind of team sheet that gets selected for a bid.
Of course, that ignores the fact that Ohio State is now 11-11 overall, which is a pretty big issue. Oklahoma, which I had in my last bracket a few days ago, is now 12-10 following a home loss to Oklahoma State, and Oregon isn’t far behind at 13-10. All three teams have something on their at-large résumé worth pointing out as “tournament-worthy,” but when does the bad of the overall record of wins and losses overrule the good?
Overall record hasn’t meant much for my selection up to this point (I had 12-9 Oklahoma in my last bracket, after all), but as we whittle down to the end of the season, it’s time to keep an eye on that number. As far as I can recall, the worst overall record in modern times that I can remember being rewarded with an at-large bid, ignoring the wonkiness of the past two seasons in which COVID cancellations were frequent, is four games above .500—19-15, specifically, for both 2016-17 Vanderbilt and 2017-18 Alabama. 2018-19 Alabama (18-15) and Texas (16-16) are the closest I’ve seen to breaking that trend, where each had the résumé wins and metrics of a tournament team but lacked the overall win total necessary for selection, resulting in a #1 and #2 seed in the NIT, respectively.
This is all one big way of saying that, if we’re following normalized committee selection trends, we can pretty safely remove teams that are less than four games above .500 from consideration, barring extremely extenuating circumstances. That’s why Oklahoma has dropped from last four in to all the way off the page with just one loss—and why I think the doom clock is ticking very loudly for Ohio State despite what the metrics say about the Buckeyes.
“How many losses is too many losses” is also a good question to ask the mid-majors hoping for at-large bids (ahem, Charleston), but that may be a topic for another day…
Enjoy the bracket projection for today, Friday, Feb. 3, and ask your questions if you have them!
THE BRACKET
THE TRUE SEED LIST, BUBBLE, AND BIDS BY CONFERENCE
