Dunn Done

[stever20]

If Nova gets to 9-9, they are in the NCAA tourney no matter what this year. 20 wins with wins over Kansas and Iowa neutral site- yeah that's good enough.

UConn didn't need to beat a single ranked team in the BET that year to make the tourney. PERIOD.

[FriarJ]

I think I read in here somewhere that Kris Dunn is having season ending surgery

[TheHall]

If Nova gets to 9-9, they are in the NCAA tourney no matter what this year. 20 wins with wins over Kansas and Iowa neutral site- yeah that's good enough.

UConn didn't need to beat a single ranked team in the BET that year to make the tourney. PERIOD.

lol

[XUFan09]

I can't believe you're still on the "9th place in conference" schtick, when:

1) Conference record is just one piece of the tournament resume.
2) The Selection Committee, directly and indirectly through the media's sources, were repeatedly saying that year that they would take a number of bids from one conference if they were deserving, acknowledging that the Big East was really deep that year and also noting that there isn't a conference "quota."

Here's UConn's tournament resume heading into the BE tournament:

22-9 (Conference 9-9) vs. a top 10 SOS
9-9 vs. RPI 1-50
2-0 vs. RPI 51-100
10-0 vs. RPI 100+
Kenpom ranking: 26

This is not an amazing resume, but it's good enough. 22 wins when playing one of the tougher schedules in the country? That's pretty damn good. 9-9 vs. RPI top 50? That's decent. 12-0 vs. teams outside the top 50. That's pretty impressive (The key here being not a single bad loss). 9-9 record in conference? That's not so good, but it's not horrible when you consider the conference. Heck, Xavier made it in from the A10 with a 10-6 conference record in 2011-2012, and they had bad losses and not nearly as many good wins. In UConn's case, though, conference record is the only negative aspect of their record, and it's not a huge negative considering the quality of the Big East that year. And, to balance it out, everything else about their resume was positive. UConn was making the tournament prior to the BET, plain and simple. They just improved their seed that weekend.

Want further proof? Here's Warren Nolan's page on the 2011 Huskies:

http://warrennolan.com/basketball/2011/ ... onnecticut

There's a box with rankings by week, including AP and Coaches' ranking, his ranking, RPI, predicted RPI, and projected seed. Here's UConn's projected seed in Week 11 (when he starts that) through Week 18: 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, and 5. When they started doing poorly in the second half of the conference schedule, their projected seed started dropping and by the beginning of the conference tournament they were projected to be a 5 seed. It was a bad stretch, but they had beefed up the resume so much until that point. It's akin to a student racking up a bunch of As and a couple Bs in a class, only to get more Bs, and Cs in the last third of the semester (No Ds or Fs though; remember that they didn't lose to anyone outside the top 50). That student isn't on pace to get the same grade he was after for much of the semester, but his grade isn't going to plummet either after all the work he did. UConn is that student turning around after a poor recent performance and getting a 100% on the final exam to squeak out an A-.

[TheHall]

I can't believe you're still on the "9th place in conference" schtick, when:

1) Conference record is just one piece of the tournament resume.
2) The Selection Committee, directly and indirectly through the media's sources, were repeatedly saying that year that they would take a number of bids from one conference if they were deserving, acknowledging that the Big East was really deep that year and also noting that there isn't a conference "quota."

Here's UConn's tournament resume heading into the BE tournament:

22-9 (Conference 9-9) vs. a top 10 SOS
9-9 vs. RPI 1-50
2-0 vs. RPI 51-100
10-0 vs. RPI 100+
Kenpom ranking: 26

This is not an amazing resume, but it's good enough. 22 wins when playing one of the tougher schedules in the country? That's pretty damn good. 9-9 vs. RPI top 50? That's decent. 12-0 vs. teams outside the top 50. That's pretty impressive (The key here being not a single bad loss). 9-9 record in conference? That's not so good, but it's not horrible when you consider the conference. Heck, Xavier made it in from the A10 with a 10-6 conference record in 2011-2012, and they had bad losses and not nearly as many good wins. In UConn's case, though, conference record is the only negative aspect of their record, and it's not a huge negative considering the quality of the Big East that year. And, to balance it out, everything else about their resume was positive. UConn was making the tournament prior to the BET, plain and simple. They just improved their seed that weekend.

Want further proof? Here's Warren Nolan's page on the 2011 Huskies:

http://warrennolan.com/basketball/2011/ ... onnecticut

There's a box with rankings by week, including AP and Coaches' ranking, his ranking, RPI, predicted RPI, and projected seed. Here's UConn's projected seed in Week 11 (when he starts that) through Week 18: 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, and 5. When they started doing poorly in the second half of the conference schedule, their projected seed started dropping and by the beginning of the conference tournament they were projected to be a 5 seed. It was a bad stretch, but they had beefed up the resume so much until that point. It's akin to a student racking up a bunch of As and a couple Bs in a class, only to get more Bs, and Cs in the last third of the semester (No Ds or Fs though; remember that they didn't lose to anyone outside the top 50). That student isn't on pace to get the same grade he was after for much of the semester, but his grade isn't going to plummet either after all the work he did. UConn is that student turning around after a poor recent performance and getting a 100% on the final exam to squeak out an A-.

How many other 9th place teams in any conference have gotten an NCAAT bid in history?

[TheHall]

Instead of waiting for another dodge of that key point consider this. The reason your thorough analysis is revisionist history is because that year the BE had 8 other teams with great resumes too, but what they had over Uconn is they had in-conference tie-breakers. That was always the downside of the super-sized BE, plenty of teams had great resumes. It wasn't until the BET that Uconn separated itself from the rest. Even with the great run in the BET & even thought they had beaten UK in Maui, the Huskys were still underdogs to UK in the F4.

[TheHall]

I think I read in here somewhere that Kris Dunn is having season ending surgery

Terrible, are you hearing any good news about the freshman...I'm not.

[stever20]

so I'm guessing Hall that we're supposed to just forget about Villanova who LOST on Tuesday but made the tournament- not even as a bad seed but as a 9 seed...... But UConn wasn't in the same boat...... Reconcile that bud

[TheHall]

so I'm guessing Hall that we're supposed to just forget about Villanova who LOST on Tuesday but made the tournament- not even as a bad seed but as a 9 seed...... But UConn wasn't in the same boat...... Reconcile that bud

Check page three of this thread instead of wasting time asking old questions. Btw who's the "we" lol!

[XUFan09]

How many other 9th place teams in any conference have gotten an NCAAT bid in history?

Never, because it was an unprecedented year. One conference was really deep while the bubble was also really weak. That's your argument? Just that? Wow. So your argument boils down to, "A 9th place team has never made the tournament before, theyrefore they couldn't have possibly been a tournament team prior to that run...because it's never happened before." Sorry, something's unprecedented nature doesn't work as an argument. Sports has plenty of once-unprecedented things.

There's nothing revisionist about my analysis. Warren Nolan had them as a friggin 5 seed before they went on that run; that was his actual projection, no change. ESPN bracket analysis listed them as a lock (that I remember). It's hard to find other information simply because it was three years ago and not even the final bracket projections, since the conference tournaments hadn't happened. There's nothing revisionist about their resume either. About the only thing you could say is that maybe Marquette wasn't a top 50 team but fell just outside prior to the postseason (just as Michigan State, who they beat, fell just outside after the postseason). Okay, so in that case they were 8-8 vs. top 50 teams instead of 9-9 and 3-1 vs. 51-100 instead of 2-0. Really, not too much different of a resume, as they went 1-1 against a borderline top 50 team, not a borderline top 100 team (the latter being at risk of being a bad loss but the former being nothing unusual). Everything else is absolutely what the resume was prior to the tournament. Maybe you thought they weren't a tournament lock, but that's not much of an argument when you have shown that you don't have a great sense of how the Selection Process works.