This Gives Me Hope

[Sweetest OU Girl]

I have been studying the Brackets posted by Charlie Crème, and realized once again that we may well do quite a bit better than he and many believe.

First, he really undervalues us by saying the regular season means absolutely nothing in the Big-12. He ranks Texas several spots above us. Both are shown as 6 seeds, but he then says we are actually a 7 seed and he did a "procedural bump" to move us to a 6 seed. That means he places vastly more importance on the tournament than the regular season. We were 4 games ahead of Texas in the regular season and 1 place behind them in the tournament. I strongly disagree with CC. The regular season is an 18 week grind against exactly the same opponents week after week. To say it is meaningless simply means he is in the group that devalues every game played for 2 months leading up to a 3 day tournament. His claim is just an attempt to motivate fans to quit spending money going to games - since he says they are meaningless anyway. There are lots of reasons to not place 100% of your thinking on a single game - like having a one day poor shooting performance, or a team having one of those "every shot goes in" days, a bad matchup, etc. We all know that - but he does not. That kind of thing may happen on a given day, but if it is out of line with your team's actual ability it cannot happen 18 times in a row.

But when I took a look at his normal conference view I realized he has no understanding of the Big-12. For example I looked at the ACC. He says (by his seeds) that OU would finish 7th at best in the ACC. That means we would almost certainly have a losing record - and actually end up with probably only 3-4 wins in the ACC. Why? Not a single team below us at 7th there has a winning record - and he is saying about half their games were against teams better than all but 1 team we played. Clearly he believes we would likely lose to almost all those better teams - and several more - since even some of the better teams lost to some of those weak teams. Certainly he thinks we - as a middle of the roader would too.

My hope comes from thinking that is flawed logic. We would not end up with a losing record in the ACC. We would probably end up in the top 2 to 4 slots at worst. It is simply stupid to think 8 or 9 of those teams could come to LNC and almost all of them beat us. It would not happen. If we won say 8 of those at home (we were very hard to beat at home this year), we would probably win at least half of our road games (several are teams who won only 2 or 3 games all year for heavens sake - worse than Kansas), giving us 12 conference wins. That is a mile from 7th, 8th, or 9th in the ACC.

I think if we get a good matchup string of games we can do better than he thinks. If we are actually the 25th or so team in the tournament that means almost half the teams in the field are better than us, and after 1 game we are suddenly about the worst team left in the field. I do not believe that. But if so, we are in danger of losing our first game and have virtually no chance of winning two.

Do you think we are that bad?

 

[gosooner2]

Not a matter of being that bad. He has 9 teams in his bracket that we have played. Only 3 are seated above us, Baylor, Duke, and Kentucky. Texas won 2 out of 3 against us. Iowa State beat us and they are a 12 seed! Duke beat us by 20 points and finished 5th in the ACC. We are very, very inconsistent, we could just as easily lose the first game as win it.

 

[rocjunkie]

Sweetest, no we are not that bad, the problem is which team is going to show up. We have proven that we can play pretty much with any one in the country, except probably UCONN and the IRISH. The problem is how hungry are we, and can we come to play like we have against Baylor, Kentucky, the first half at Duke, well you get the idea. I see this team storming to the sweet 16 or laying an egg and heading home early. You just never know at tournament time.

 

[Sweetest OU Girl]

You guys misunderstood my point. I don't think we are a bad team. Certainly not a top 5 or 10 team but we are not as bad as some think.

Look at the Big-12 standings for a while. We are closer to 1st place than we are to 3rd place. That is not an accident.

Were we disappointing at times? Certainly. The low point - at least of conference season - was Kansas. Just horrible in my opinion. But our whole record is representative of a pretty good team.

Now, let me show you some details. CC has Duke as a 3 seed. Let's look at their record.

Overall: 21 - 10. Just about like ours.

But they do not have a single signature win (like ours over Baylor). Not one. Not even a really good win. They did not beat a single top 10 type team.

In the ACC there are some REALLY weak teams.
Virginia Tech: 1-15 in conference and 12 - 20 overall.
Wake Forest: 2 - 14 in conference, 13 - 20 overall.
Clemson: 1 - 15 in conference, 9 - 21 overall.

Duke has 5 of their 21 wins (and one loss) from that group. Think about it. You discard those meaningless wins and they have a record of 16 - 9. That is not what you expect from a 3 seed type team.

Duke lost 4 of their last 6 games. We have been criticized for only winning 4 of our last 6. In case this confuses anyone, Winning 4 of 6 is better than winning 2 of 6. But none of that has impacted their seed in any way according to CC. Really dumb analysis.

They played 11 games against the lowest 9 ACC teams and had a record of 8 - 3. They played only 5 games against the top 6 ACC teams and had a record of 3 - 2. To put that in perspective, OU played 10 games against the top 6 teams in the Big-12 and was 7 - 3. We did as well against the top of the big-12 as Duke did against the bottom dwellers in the ACC.

It is foolish to think Duke is a 3 seed and we are a 7 seed when you look at all that. Yes, we lost to Duke. Early in the season with a pure freshman point guard - on their home court - and with them shooting 30 free throws and we shot 12. With the same crazy official who called that fiasco in the Bahamas against Kentucky (who shot an unbelievable 53 free throws against us and saw 6 of our players foul out). By the way, Duke is hard to beat on their court. They were 15 -1 at home. To say we had to beat them there to be in the top 20 would mean only 1 ACC team can be in the top 20.

Now what is the point? I think we are being seeded lower than we may well prove we should be. Of course part of that will depend on the schedule we draw. A 3 seed is given at least 2 pretty easy games, while a 7 seed is often given none. The 7 - 10 line sees more upsets than any seeds below 7. But with a reasonable draw and if we play a decent couple of games I think we can get to the sweet 16. Time will tell.

 

[rocjunkie]

Thank goodness Charlie is not on the committee. When the seeders get into the war room they will look at all aspects of the season. I don't think we will be a 7 but I also don't think we will be above a 5. It will still come down to which team shows up for the tournament. Will it be the team that struggled against Kansas and Texas or the team that put it together and beat Baylor and Iowa State. I'm not too concerned about who we play but how we play.

 

[Sweetest OU Girl]

Thank goodness Charlie is not on the committee. When the seeders get into the war room they will look at all aspects of the season. I don't think we will be a 7 but I also don't think we will be above a 5. It will still come down to which team shows up for the tournament. Will it be the team that struggled against Kansas and Texas or the team that put it together and beat Baylor and Iowa State. I'm not too concerned about who we play but how we play.

I think you & I see this about the same. I expect we will be a 5 or 6. We likely gave up any hope for a 4 seed with the Kansas loss, certainly with the loss to Texas. We really needed to win one of those two - particularly with the number of losses in the pre-conference. Had we played more home games pre-conference we would probably be something like 24-6 and be in a position to host rounds 1 & 2. But you can't fix that now. At the same time, virtually none of the other 4 seed contenders did as well as we did over their last 6 games - especially with our win over Baylor. But our Kansas loss put us in a difficult spot. It should not have happened - and does extract a cost.