So how much better than last year's MBB team do we have to be this year to get to the NCAA tourney? It's obviously impossible to answer, but the attached spreadsheet attempts to estimate the impact of better players against last year's schedule/results and says we need to be 6 or 7 points better on average per game.
This assumes of course that the overall average difficulty of this year's schedule is about equal to last year's.
Enter the value 6 into cell G1 and it calculates we would have been 21-10 overall and 7-9 in conference. Use 7 points better per game and we're 24-7 and 9-7 which is a definite NCAA berth.
Surely we're 7 points better per game this year right? We have a ton more fire power, so we'll easily score 3.5 more points per game on average. We'll have many more capable bodies to shuffle in for an all out aggresive defense ALL GAME. That means 3.5 points per game less that the opponent will score on us.
This also assumes that all other teams do not change either, while it is an interesting statistic there is just too many variables to make it worthwhile.
Nice work on the spreadsheet Bob. ISU lost 6 conference games last year by 6 points or less. That would have given ISU a final record of 24-10 and and at least a NIT bid if it swung ISU's way. I think depth would have made a serious impact last year if we had it.
It appears however that ISU's problems were definitely not scoring but stopping the other team from scoring. ISU in conference games were ranked 5th in scoring but 9th in scoring D, and 9th in scoring margin.
I think this team will go as far as their defense will take them.
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