Apparently this needs to be said constantly since people continue to bring it up. We are NEVER going to play Drake or UNI in non-con unless it is at Hilton. We don’t schedule home and homes with Missouri Valley Conference teams.
Jamie Pollard on KXNO today
- Thread starter BigJCy
- Start date
Just now getting to the M&C podcast from yesterday. Trent is spot on with how poor of a job the committee did.
I agree. It should be irrelevant, but according to what this year's committee has said, non-con SOS appears to be more important than a superior overall SOS and TWO wins over the AP #1.
But as an earlier post mentioned, next year's committee (March Madness and/or CFP) will come up with some bizarre reason to exclude or oddly seed a team not branded for TV.
This year's committee definitely stepped in it. Who gives a rat's rump if ISU played Cupcake Tech college in November? ISU played in the toughest conference and placed 2nd. They also won the conference tournament (impressively) and beat the #1 team in the nation 2x. You are going to tell me that because they played Cupcake Tech, you think they are the 8th best team? Most of the credible pundits agree it was a screw job. Note: Clark Kellogg is not in this category of being credible.
Did any other team defeat an NCAA Tournament qualifier by 55 points?
Scheduling is complicated; I mean look at our pre season outlook
This year's team returned:
30% of its scoring
52% of its total rebounding
43% of its total assists
47% of its total steals
In addition to that they lost one of the best defenders this program has had and an elite shot blocker. Add to those facts they had 4 new starters and 2 of them weren't even in the program last year and 1 of those 2 was in high school.
For these national idiots to think that Iowa State to think that 1.) they should have scheduled harder and 2.) anyone was willing to put this team in a spotlight non conference game is just that... an Idiot.
TJ and staff had no clue this is what they had and the scheduled appropriately in the summer. Iowa turned out to be way worse because in most years thats a Q1 game. DePaul went from ass to mega ass. The ESPN Orlando tournament field went from "these guys are pretty good" to "those guys ****** sucked."
Could they have gone less SWAC/MEAC heavy? Absolutely but I think we are all kidding ourselves that if they moved 3 of those Quad 4 games to Quad 3 the committee would have magically moved us about North Carolina.
First rule of The Committee...
I wouldn't hold my breath. How many hundreds of other guys have come off that committee over the years and it's still an absolute secret.
Look no further than how the women's committee treated the conference tournaments vs the men's. Neither Texas or Iowa are 1 seeds without the conference tournament games carrying significant weight. Now do Iowa State and Auburn on the men's side... Standards should be the same, these f*cking AD's shouldn't be able to just make sh!t up as they go.
The problem with a loaded non con is that only certain schools will get away with the losses. Look at Tennessee, they lost to Purdue, Kansas, and North Carolina and beat an ok Illinois. If that's Iowa State the committee's comments would have been "Iowa State played a challenging non con but they also lost most of those games". Unless there is a firm and transparent process the committee can just make it up as they go.
Damn. I was thinking the same thing but didn't know how to word it.
This is exactly right.
While I think it's hard to argue with the results, the counterarguments are:
- What they returned is not really out of the ordinary in today's game. Ultimately three of the starters (Lipsey, Jones and King) and two more rotation guys (Ward and Watson) from the end of last year returned.
- I don't think it's crazy to think playing nothing but garbage did not exactly prepare the team well for Orlando and could be in part to blame for the poor performance.
- Lastly, getting a bunch of still bad teams in the 150-200 range that ISU would've all beaten at home would've not changed the practical outcome, but it would've changed that stinking ass number behind ISUs non-con SOS.
I don't agree with the committee, and the fact that non-con SOS essentially got double counted is BS. And the results are what they are. The team is a top 5 team, #2 seed, and playing well. Whether the scheduling strategy helped, hurt, or had little impact is impossible to say. But considering where the team is at I'll pretty much just blindly trust whatever TJ to do.
In the end, I think it all worked out. I'm not concerned one bit about the draws, or being a two seed, or even the last two seed. If the path you have because you're the last #2 instead of first one is the difference in making it out of the first weekend, you probably weren't going to anyway. Just keep getting in the tourney with 1-5 seeds consistently, and ISU is going to end up reaching a final four.
JP isn't going to lock into a multi year scheduling contract with UNI or Drake. Drake's NET this year is a solid 47 but they are 1 hire away from that falling off a cliff. UNI is 109, that is a non value added game for Iowa State. Yes, it's better than a 300 type team but you would rather just offset that with a strong holiday tournament and an upper half Big East team in the challenge. Ideally Iowa gives you a lift as well. Say what you want but there really isn't much of an incentive to schedule a mutli year commitment with Drake or UNI.
Another thing to keep in mind is that we will never be able to load a schedule like Kansas, Mich St, Duke, or Kentucky. Those guys benefit from a strong holiday tournament annually as well as other promoter driven events like the Champions Classic. It's also not fair for the committee to look at these teams and expect non blue bloods to even begin to arrange such a schedule. It's not easy folks. Some of these games are purely invites. Once some of these events start sprinkling in NIL money it's only going to favor the blue bloods even more.
Exactly, Tom izzo just farts and he ends up playing North Carolina on a Navy Ship, Then comes back to play in some invitational tournament, then gets a Game against a blueblood because that's the way it is.
Its actually not a secret - they've held multiple events over the years with the media doing a mock bracket.
They just did a lousy job this year.
And thus the problem with SOS measurements in general, but especially NCSOS- they don't measure what you achieved, just what you scheduled.
The blue bloods scheduling each other basically pads that metric for them. It goes up win or lose. And because they're blue bloods, they never take the kind of hit from the media others would when they lose. either.
