Don’t overreact to the outcome of one game.
This is just good advice for life, given how passionate college basketball fans can be—which is a good thing, mind you. But it’s especially pertinent advice for bracketology. There’s a natural tendency, either in the thrill of victory or agony of defeat that transpires in the time immediately following, to see a team notch a morale-boosting win or a soul-wrenching loss, and then take to the keyboard to write about how said team will either fly up the seed list in no time or just as quickly tumble down it.
But you gotta remember, folks: It’s one game. One out of 24 or so that each team has played up to this point. It’s a single data point, a drop in the bucket.
I bring this up now, as this past Saturday may have been the craziest single-day slate of games we’ve seen so far this season. UNC over Duke at the buzzer, Alabama clutching out a road win in the Iron Bowl, Illinois and Michigan State in an OT epic, Kentucky-Tennessee in another classic… Man, we were spoiled!
But in the fallout of all the chaos that ensued, upon completing my assessment of the damage done, the most that any team in my seed list moved from Friday’s update was six spots. That’s one, maybe two seed lines, depending on which end of the seed line the team was located previously. (In this case, BYU dropped from a 5 seed at #20 overall, to a 7 seed at #26 overall.)
Case in point—one game is not enough to shake the foundations of a season’s worth of work. Not even knocking off a 1 seed like Duke, at least not in your own building. Had North Carolina won in Durham instead, I’d feel more confident that the Tar Heels would have cracked the 4 line, a movement that I fully expected to see when I started my analysis. But alas, a home victory merely moves UNC from the bottom of the 5 line to top of the 5 line, as their résumé numbers just barely indicate a 4 seed (15.3 average), while their quality numbers are still very far from the mark (28.7 average). And a solid-but-not-super-inspiring record of 7-4 in Quad 1/2 games isn’t helping their case. They’re darn close, and they can still quite easily breach the top-4 lines with continued success. But one win, even over a top-3 team in the land, just barely didn’t move the needle enough.
The same is true on the other end; Vanderbilt took a real head-scratcher of a loss at home to Oklahoma, a team far off the tournament radar, continuing a belief that a lot of people seem to have that Vandy isn’t quite as good as they let on. And that notion may very well have some merit. But how soon we forget that Commodores began the season 16-0, a head-start that gives them quite a bit of buffer room for strange losses like we saw on Saturday. In my eyes, Vandy falls from a mid-3 seed to a mid-4 seed and not any further, given the still-strong state of their profile. Not a single metric, not in résumé nor in quality, would naturally place the ‘Dores any lower than a 4 seed. And given that Vandy’s also managed to go 11-4 in Quads 1 and 2 and 8-2 in games played outside of Nashville, I’m inclined to agree. You can certainly knock them for being 0-3 in Quad 1A, a number that becomes more problematic the longer it persists, but that one number is not enough to tarnish all the good I’m seeing on Vanderbilt’s team sheet.
See what I mean? One loss doesn’t kill ya! Look at Gonzaga; just before the previous update, the Zags took about as damaging a loss as you could take at this point in the season, falling at NET #204 Portland. And said damaging loss dropped Gonzaga… one seed line. So copy-paste the same argument for all the teams that only rose slightly (Kentucky, St. John’s, Villanova, etc.) or fell slightly (Illinois, Tennessee, UCF, etc.) from the last bracket. We’ve just got too much data already on the ledger for one new data point to make things go wildly askew.
And thus, I reiterate: Don’t overreact to the outcome of one game. (Unless that game is the Super Bowl, then overreact accordingly. Congrats, Seahawks!)
On to the bracket! Like always, my conference automatic bids are chosen by who ranks highest in my résumé metric BRCT as of yesterday afternoon, save for the unfortunate ongoing Utah Valley/WAC situation… though California Baptist may just pass UVU naturally at this rate. Also worth noting—Miami (OH) is above the at-large cut line for the first time! With résumé metrics superior to both California and Oklahoma State, as well as quality metrics that aren’t actually all that far behind those two, I’m finally comfortable giving the 24-0 RedHawks the tiniest little bit of cushion… a cushion that would quickly evaporate if Miami were to go out and lose their first game of the year. That’s life!
Soapbox out of the way, go ahead and check out the latest Bauertology bracket and seed list projection. And I’ll see you on Wednesday… Something “bubbly” is currently in the works.
