2025-2026 B1G Basketball Thread

[betarhoalphadelta]

It is a dodge. If they have a few decent mid-majors, would the tone of these long posts change one iota? Nope. They could've won at OSU and Wisconsin and this convo would still be basically the same.

I don't know... I think there's a very good point here about trying to schedule a decent mid-major or two. 

One of two things would happen:

• They'd win those games and now they'd actually have some quality wins that would boost their rankings (incl. NET). 
• They'd lose one or more of those games and nobody would be saying "well look at their undefeated regular season" and it would be moot.

Right now they have two Q2 wins. One is a one-possession home win over #54 Akron. The other is a 7 point away win over #127 Wright State. The Akron game is literally the only game they've played against a top-100 NET team. 

There are currently 19 teams in the NET top 75 from non-major conferences. If they'd played any one of them on the road and won, they'd be sporting a Q1 win. 

You don't think we--or the NET rankings--would evaluate them differently if they had a Q1 win?

[bayareabadger]

That's a good point, but again it doesn't always mean that something rare is necessarily "hard", just that it's statistically unlikely.

As I mentioned, if you have a 97% win probability in 31 games, you have LESS than a 50% chance (38%) to go undefeated. But if that team plays three separate seasons all with the same probability, the expected number of undefeated seasons is three times 38%, or 1.14 undefeated seasons. Do it 10 times, and you're expecting between 3 and 4 undefeated seasons.

Individual game odds are going to be much lower than 97%, even if you're a fairly decent MAC school playing the Little Sisters of the Poor, but that doesn't mean that going undefeated is "hard" more than it's statistically unlikely.

Think of it this way. Flipping a coin 10 times in a row and it ending up heads 10 times in a row... That should happen roughly 0.1% of the time, or 1 out of 1000 attempts. But if you fill a large college football stadium with 100,000 fans and you have them each try it, you'd expect to get 100 of them to do it.

Does that mean flipping a coin 10 times in a row and getting heads all 10 times is "hard"? No. Flipping a coin is easy. It takes nearly no skill whatsoever. But we think getting 10 in a row is remarkable because it's rare.

And BTW... I think everyone is getting hung up on this "in the regular season" stuff. Why should we not include a conference tournament? The NCAAT selection committee doesn't release their brackets until all conferences have completed their conference tournaments. So they clearly think teams should be judged on performance after the "regular season" has concluded. And once you include that, Miami is no longer undefeated.

The comparison with the coin is a bit silly. Winning basketball games does take skill. Even against bad teams. If someone was trying to push the coin the wrong way, I’d give the coin a bit of credit.

Suppose the argument is that for teams that accomplish a certain amount, the conference tournament is treated with some fungibility. And the argument is that an undefeated regular season creates enough accomplishment to extend that particular thing.

[SFBadger96]

Badgers did get a gift with that foul call. It was still a steep climb for Illinois, but that was an unfortunate way to basically ice the game.

[bayareabadger]

Jesus, Wisconsin is gonna win this and Brad Underwood is going to lose his goddamn mind.

Edit: Erp…

[bayareabadger]

I kind of Wouldn’t have minded if Wisconsin lost and got more rest, but I guess I do like a nice win?

I mean, that was pretty fucking cool!

[SFBadger96]

Well, I thought the game was iced. Kudos to Illinois for even having the shot at the end. On to Michigan.

[FearlessF]

beat Michigan, again!

[847badgerfan]

One thing we can say about Wisconsin:

NO QUIT!

[bayareabadger]

One thing we can say about Wisconsin:

NO QUIT!

In the middle of the game, I was like, “this is fine. Good effort. The other team is good.”

and by the end, I’m like “I guess? Sure why not.“

[SFBadger96]

I would say I was at the "why not" stage when they pulled to within 4. When they tied it I advanced all the way to LFG!

[betarhoalphadelta]

The comparison with the coin is a bit silly. Winning basketball games does take skill. Even against bad teams. If someone was trying to push the coin the wrong way, I’d give the coin a bit of credit.

Winning basketball games does take skill. And like I said upthread, one can argue that for Miami to win 9 of 9 for those one-possession and OT games, it creates an emotional narrative that they're "clutch" or "they know what to do to win". Well, apparently if we're going to go with the emotional narrative, they forgot that skill against UMass. 

So if they're that skilled at winning basketball games, where'd it go against UMass? 

I find it a lot easier to believe that close games come down to a balance of skill / grit / coaching / and plain dumb luck. Plain dumb luck might explain the difference between Miami being 29-2 in the regular season and 31-0. But against their schedule, we're not having this conversation if they're 29-2 because their resume is crap, and their NET after the regular season wouldn't have been 54, it probably would have been 75. But two lucky bounces that get them to 31-0 and we are. 

But they didn't get that lucky bounce against UMass. And the NCAAT selection committee doesn't base your resume only on the regular season. 

[MaximumSam]

Winning basketball games does take skill. And like I said upthread, one can argue that for Miami to win 9 of 9 for those one-possession and OT games, it creates an emotional narrative that they're "clutch" or "they know what to do to win". Well, apparently if we're going to go with the emotional narrative, they forgot that skill against UMass.

So if they're that skilled at winning basketball games, where'd it go against UMass?

I find it a lot easier to believe that close games come down to a balance of skill / grit / coaching / and plain dumb luck. Plain dumb luck might explain the difference between Miami being 29-2 in the regular season and 31-0. But against their schedule, we're not having this conversation if they're 29-2 because their resume is crap, and their NET after the regular season wouldn't have been 54, it probably would have been 75. But two lucky bounces that get them to 31-0 and we are.

But they didn't get that lucky bounce against UMass. And the NCAAT selection committee doesn't base your resume only on the regular season.

But like...who cares? Obviously, luck has a big part of all sports outcomes. Sports are mostly just random number generators that we feel strongly about. All sports outcomes in the history of the world had a luck component to them. 

The issue for me is that if you basically throw out the results in favor of...other stuff, you are saying the other stuff is what matters the most. But what matters the most is winning and losing, not NETS or QUADS or WABS or LUCK.

[Brutus Buckeye]

Why would anyone expect Sam to be on the other side of this argument? He went to Miami. Of course he wants them to go to the NCAA tournament. 

[bayareabadger]

I don't know... I think there's a very good point here about trying to schedule a decent mid-major or two.

One of two things would happen:

• They'd win those games and now they'd actually have some quality wins that would boost their rankings (incl. NET).
• They'd lose one or more of those games and nobody would be saying "well look at their undefeated regular season" and it would be moot.

Right now they have two Q2 wins. One is a one-possession home win over #54 Akron. The other is a 7 point away win over #127 Wright State. The Akron game is literally the only game they've played against a top-100 NET team.

There are currently 19 teams in the NET top 75 from non-major conferences. If they'd played any one of them on the road and won, they'd be sporting a Q1 win.

You don't think we--or the NET rankings--would evaluate them differently if they had a Q1 win?

I was in part speaking to the particular speaker, who I don't think would give such a team an inch. But it's an interesting conversation starter.

I don't know if they tried. I'd assume they did some. The incentives are probably a bit weird, as you want to be the road team, but if you're the home team, you're just playing a tough team with less upside. Again, they're not dial-a-games. 

The second tricky part is, as you said, there are 19 teams (18 not counting themselves?). A chunk of those will be hard to predict. Right now, we're at 11 of those teams being repeats, and one of those would've been hard to predict because of a coaching change. So you need to call those 10 teams, one needs to want to have a low-upside home game, in part because Miami being as high as it is also an upset. 

And the funny thing is all of this works backwards and implies you could build toward 31-1 with intent. Dumping resources into chasing fringy Q1 or Q2 chances for their own sake for a MAC team is an exercise in absurdity. The only way it could really matter involves winning every MAC game, and as far as I can tell, that hadn't been done since a 12-0 team in 1958. You don't plan to be undefeated. It's barely a figment in one's imagination, so you don't get twisted up trying to engineer that right game. In fact, you usually hunt for games you should lose, but alas. I'd agree they should've found a better mid-major to play, but the only reason to do so is because playing better games no one watches is cool, not for any resume reason.

(I think the Net would be different, but not notably. I think some people would evaluate them differently, but for the most part, I think people would stick with what they already think. The problem with dribs and drabs on the resume is you don't change things just by getting one)