2025-2026 B1G Basketball Thread

[FearlessF]

Chances he misses a single game?

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/48223799/alabama-aden-holloway-arrested-felony-marijuana-charge

a felony???

did he sell a kilo to a jr high kid?
gotta be something more than a dime bag in his pocket

[betarhoalphadelta]

Lets say a MEAC team scheduled 3 non-DI games (like Miami did) then went 28-1 in 29 Q4 games with a loss in their league tournament opener. 

I was thinking about this... It's the sort of thing that's unlikely to ever happen...

I'm wondering if 2026 Miami might be a sort of minimum realistic NET resume of 31-1 teams... 

Essentially they had two problems...

• They were good enough that nobody above them really wanted to schedule them OOC. 
• They were in a bad enough conference that their "quality" wins didn't raise their profile enough. 

It's a double-edged sword of not playing anyone because nobody wanting to play them, and then have their profile dinged because they beat everyone (except in the conference tourney obv) that was on their schedule but it was filled with "nobodies". 

The best MEAC team was Howard, that finished at #203. That's a level of team that will have this profile:

• They're bad enough that no "big boy" team is going to fear scheduling them as a bodybag game, AND
• They're going to be incentivized to schedule bodybag games because they need the payday, AND
• They know that their most likely route to a NCAA Tournament bid is winning their conference tournament, so they have no incentive to schedule poorly OOC just to rack up wins when instead they can get paid.

As such, any team like that is almost assuredly going to have at least one road game, possibly multiple. Howard, for example, played @Duke and @Northwestern, and also had a home game vs Mizzou as part of a 2-for-1 scheduling deal. 


So I get the hypothetical question of where the line is, but I just don't see a MEAC or similar team ever actually doing something like that. It's sorta moot. 

[bayareabadger]

I'm asking what YOUR line would be.  Not what the Bracketologists would predict or what you think the committee *WOULD* do, I'm asking what you think the committee *SHOULD* do. 

Lets say a MEAC team scheduled 3 non-DI games (like Miami did) then went 28-1 in 29 Q4 games with a loss in their league tournament opener.  Would YOU let that team in? 

I'm trying to figure out if quality means anything. 

Man, imagine a MEAC team with no Q1 games. That’ll be the day.

[bayareabadger]

Winter back is gonna help the rebounding for sure.

Having Janicki will be huge for the defense. His absence has been notable at times.

Im hoping that’s not a smoke screen. 

[ELA]

I'm asking what YOUR line would be.  Not what the Bracketologists would predict or what you think the committee *WOULD* do, I'm asking what you think the committee *SHOULD* do. 

Lets say a MEAC team scheduled 3 non-DI games (like Miami did) then went 28-1 in 29 Q4 games with a loss in their league tournament opener.  Would YOU let that team in? 

I'm trying to figure out if quality means anything. 

If they still had a decent SOR, then I'd let them in.  Miami's resume metrics clearly put them in.  SOR is the most important metric for inclusion

[MaximumSam]

I don't mind AT ALL seeing Auburn get clubbed but you really aren't in a position to call Auburn a baby seal.  You've spent 6 pages defending beating Trinity Christian, Indiana University East, and Milligan.  Those actually are analogous to baby seals.  I think this is beyond your comprehension so enjoy your bliss. 

Hey look, yet another shot at my intelligence! Time for a shot!

[medinabuckeye1]

If they still had a decent SOR, then I'd let them in.  Miami's resume metrics clearly put them in.  SOR is the most important metric for inclusion

https://youtu.be/Uu72WS8cxhw

Are you saying that there is NO quality requirement at all?

If SOR for a team that wasn't undefeated and didn't play ANYONE above Q4 was decent then SOR is broken (it is).  

[medinabuckeye1]

I was thinking about this... It's the sort of thing that's unlikely to ever happen...

My point is twofold:

• I'm trying to figure out if people care AT ALL about quality.  Thus it is a hypothetical and I'm not overly concerned with the realism of it.  
• As stated upthread, the committee has pretty clearly indicated that quality isn't very important and I'm concerned that this will encourage a lot more clubbing of a lot more baby seals.  

Essentially they had two problems...

• They were good enough that nobody above them really wanted to schedule them OOC.
• They were in a bad enough conference that their "quality" wins didn't raise their profile enough.

They had three additional problems:

• Their loss was dreadful.  From this thread I'm not sure that anyone besides me cares but their loss was to the #201 team and thus a Q4 loss.  NONE of the legitimate bubble teams had Q4 loss.  
• Their OOC was dreadful even by MAC standards and even excluding the issue raised about power conference teams not wanting to schedule them.  I had earlier said two because I didn't look all that closely and missed one but they actually played three non-DI games.  Thus their record per NET is "28-1" because the three non-DI games don't even count. 
• Their league schedule was weak by MAC standards.  The only other MAC team in the top 129 of the NET was Akron and Miami got them at home (3 point win).

Akron on the road would have been a Q1 game.  

[ELA]

https://youtu.be/Uu72WS8cxhw

Are you saying that there is NO quality requirement at all?

If SOR for a team that wasn't undefeated and didn't play ANYONE above Q4 was decent then SOR is broken (it is). 

It's not.  SOR is your whole schedule.  That's how hard it is to go 31-1 against nearly any schedule.  It's behind 21-13 Kentucky, 23-10 Louisville.  It looks at how many teams could have that record, with that schedule.  And that's correctly what selection is based on.  Is Miami great?  No.  We don't need anymore KenPom numbers.  We all get it.  That's why Miami had the resume of a 7 seed, and got an 11 seed.  The system works.  They overperformed their metrics, so they get in, then the get slotted based on how they SHOULD have done.  I don't get the issue, it worked.

If you really want Auburn, that's fine.  But then complain about NC State, Texas or SMU.  Those are the teams with worse resume metrics

[medinabuckeye1]

So, this is actually pretty interesting, and could be more so without the extra commentary and over-emphasis on what transpired this year.

UW fans were discussing this at one point in the offseason. Greg Gard likes to schedule hard games, but in a big conference, you  can put your win volume at risk (a few years back UW had the Q1/2 wins, one Q3 loss, but at 17-14 with poor predictives, got left out). So you probably can't schedule all good teams, go 13-20 and say "it's a super tough 13-20, lemme in."

But if you schedule just to chase win volume, there are, in fact, two sorts of punishments. The first is that teams with solid win numbers are often left out. OSU was out with 20 wins a few years back. South Carolina missed with 24 about 10 years ago. That usually reflects schedules and such. The second is that most good teams schedule some good teams, and when they win, they're rewarded with good seeds. If you bodybag your way to 11-0 and then end up 20-11, you're gonna be much lower seeded than a team that tried.

It's a funny one because you can't know exactly what you should've done until after. Like, Auburn didn't expect to be right on the bubble, so they're likely not building their team that way. Similarly, a team like Miami, Ohio is such a historical accident, there's not much intention in a soft schedule (as we've seen, they didn't even intend to have what they did).

To a degree, for a team that could reasonably compete for an at-large should schedule enough tough games to push the ceiling, but not so many they might really kneecap themselves in the larger conference schedule era. The only thing that works against this is sometimes a desperate coach will fill the non-con with cupcakes to say "hey, I know we didn't make the dance, but I was 19-11, so please don't fire me." Low-bid league stuff is in it's own odd place because you're hunting as many buy games as make sense, looking for anyone who will pay you for a neutral game and then trying to make sure you have a somewhat functional home slate economically (and if you can sneak in a cool mid-major on mid-major for yourself if you can get it).

One interesting space going forward is going to be if behaviors around Christmas games ever change. For a while, no one has wanted to play those, so bigger teams tend to get really desperate teams to fill them. Maybe that changes, although maybe the bigger teams would be fine with the status quo.

All of this interests me but I want to hit on a couple of points specifically.  

You said "If you bodybag your well to 11-0 and then end up 20-11, you're gonna be much lower seeded than a team that tried."  Well . . . You are definitely going to be lower seeded than a team that tried AND succeeded but what about a team that tried and failed?  

My point is this.  Lets say Wisconsin and Ohio State had identical teams (an impossibility I know but just hypothetically).  Then lets say that, being identical, they both had the exact same 9-11 league record (per your example).  Then lets say that one of them (again per your example) "bodybag(ed their) way to 11-0" OOC thus to end up 20-9 while the other one played and lost three REALLY tough OOC games (say #1 and #2 seeds).  So now they are both 9-11 in conference but:

• One clubbed baby seals OOC and is 20-11 overall
• The other got clubbed by Duke, Arizona, and Houston OOC and is 17-14 overall.  

I really don't like the message that gets sent if we include the 20-11 team that didn't try and exclude the 17-14 team that did.  First of all the two teams are equal so they should either be both in or both out and secondly if we exclude a team for playing quality games the message is clear:  Don't schedule quality games.  


FWIW: 
I think Bill Snyder was a phenomenal coach and I honestly don't blame him for scheduling the way he did.  He responded to a situation in which most AP Voters were basically Max in this thread.  They were either unwilling (too lazy) or unable (too stupid) to look a quality so they just looked at W's and L's and stopped there.  

[MaximumSam]

FWIW:
I think Bill Snyder was a phenomenal coach and I honestly don't blame him for scheduling the way he did.  He responded to a situation in which most AP Voters were basically Max in this thread.  They were either unwilling (too lazy) or unable (too stupid) to look a quality so they just looked at W's and L's and stopped there. 

Shot! Is that two shots? Not sure I'll make it through the night. 

[betarhoalphadelta]

My point is twofold:

• I'm trying to figure out if people care AT ALL about quality.  Thus it is a hypothetical and I'm not overly concerned with the realism of it. 
• As stated upthread, the committee has pretty clearly indicated that quality isn't very important and I'm concerned that this will encourage a lot more clubbing of a lot more baby seals. 

I think you're jumping to conclusions. The committee wasn't faced with a MEAC level team doing this. In NET, Miami was not exactly good at 64, but it's not like it's some team sitting at 120.

You saying that the committee doesn't care about quality suggests that you think they have NO line. Perhaps this was "close enough" that it wasn't clear-cut, and if the resume had been even slightly worse they wouldn't have accepted them.

To me, without making this political, it's like looking at a very close 5-4 or 6-3 SCOTUS decision where it's a complicated decision that could have gone either way, without recognizing that many SCOTUS decisions come down 9-0. A *lot* more of them, to be frank, than most people think. It's possible that for the committee, this was a 5-4 or 6-3 decision, and your hypothetical MEAC example would be 9-0. 

They had three additional problems:

• Their loss was dreadful.  From this thread I'm not sure that anyone besides me cares but their loss was to the #201 team and thus a Q4 loss.  NONE of the legitimate bubble teams had Q4 loss. 
• Their OOC was dreadful even by MAC standards and even excluding the issue raised about power conference teams not wanting to schedule them.  I had earlier said two because I didn't look all that closely and missed one but they actually played three non-DI games.  Thus their record per NET is "28-1" because the three non-DI games don't even count.
• Their league schedule was weak by MAC standards.  The only other MAC team in the top 129 of the NET was Akron and Miami got them at home (3 point win).

Akron on the road would have been a Q1 game. 

Yeah, and if you recall, when I was arguing against BAB, I was arguing that I didn't think the metrics support including Miami. That including them is a feel good story. And I specifically highlighted that their best win is a 3 point victory over Akron, and that they had 9 wins that were either decided in overtime (4) or were a single basket game in regulation (5). 

But also, that I'm not exactly shedding a tear for an Auburn or some other team that scheduled tough, but didn't win their games, and would be on the 11 line. I don't think it's a travesty that Auburn isn't in the field. They were 4-13 in Q1 games, 3-2 in Q2 games. While that's arguably (and I'd argue on your side) a resume that suggests they're a stronger team than Miami, it's not exactly a resume that suggests they are championship material. 

So either way, I don't care. I think if it were my choice, I'd probably not have included them. But I'm not going to act like anyone who disagrees with me lacks intelligence. They just are valuing something else--a feel good story of going 31-0 in the regular season, a rare feat--more highly than I do. 

[bayareabadger]

How strong would the SoS of a team that went 17-16 have to be before you'd put them in this year's bracket? 

From what I've seen on this thread it appears that I am a very small minority in saying that I'd include this year's Auburn because they played a REALLY tough schedule and I prefer that to clubbing baby seals (Miami).  Ok, where is YOUR line? 

...

What if, hypothetically, Auburn had replaced the six Q4 games with Q1 games and won them all.  They'd have a higher NET and be 10-13 in Q1.  From what I've seen in this thread Max would compare the two and still say "31-0".  To me that is ludicrous.  What say you? 

I don't think 17-16 should get you in, so for something to change that, it would have to be extra-ordinary. 

If they scheduled three or fewer bodybag games, I think I'd be OK with it, depending on the bubble. You could probably convince me to move that to four in a lot of years. 

[bayareabadger]

My point is this.  Lets say Wisconsin and Ohio State had identical teams (an impossibility I know but just hypothetically).  Then lets say that, being identical, they both had the exact same 9-11 league record (per your example).  Then lets say that one of them (again per your example) "bodybag(ed their) way to 11-0" OOC thus to end up 20-9 while the other one played and lost three REALLY tough OOC games (say #1 and #2 seeds).  So now they are both 9-11 in conference but:

• One clubbed baby seals OOC and is 20-11 overall
• The other got clubbed by Duke, Arizona, and Houston OOC and is 17-14 overall. 

I really don't like the message that gets sent if we include the 20-11 team that didn't try and exclude the 17-14 team that did.  First of all the two teams are equal so they should either be both in or both out and secondly if we exclude a team for playing quality games the message is clear:  Don't schedule quality games. 

Something a bit like this happend to UW a few years back (you also forgot to add the BTT losses). 

They went 17-14, missed a win vs a bodybag because of a snowstorm. In terms of quads finished 5-7, 6-6, 1-1, 5-0, with a bad NET. Non-conference losses were No. 9 Kansas and a weird ACC challenge loss to a Wake team with a respectable record and dragged down by a dog ACC.

Dayton teams were (by quads), all with better NETs:
5-6, 4-5, 5-0, 8-1
4-4, 3-5, 5-1, 10-1
4-8, 4-3, 5-1, 8-0
4-5, 3-3, 11-2, 3-0

I was annoyed for a couple minutes, and then I said "Man, that season was shitty, and I don't think that team deserved much. Oh well." And it was fine. Those teams weren't there with fully body bagged non-conferences, but UW was like 11th in the Big Ten. They earned what they got.