Which of College Basketball's Problems are Its Own, and Which are Football's?

We're coming, and we ain't back enough.

We don't need a bunch of cats in here.

Yeah, we're looking in the mirror.

Everybody's doing their job.

That's the end.

Hey, were you shut up?

I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today.

Guys being dudes, and they run through our

f**k through a 10 horn, man.

Ah, f**k it.

Thank you, Lee, I'm Alex Kirchner, joined by Richard Johnson.

And because this is a special episode,

where we're going to talk about another sport

and college football's relationship to it,

and common threats between them and things

that can be learned.

Join by Roger Sherman.

Roger, how are you?

Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

Can I see you for that song?

Is that a song they can sing?

Michael, that is, I'm sure copyright of the Columbia Broadcasting

Simpson.

Back up, back up, back up.

Back up.

You'll be here in my attorneys.

You'll be sued for singing a song, like, not like the,

no, it's a performance.

Legally in the clear.

That's not advice for anybody.

Roger, that was the March band in a song.

And it's currently March.

It's not March band is yet.

Another thing I've stolen from March Band is my,

my, that meteor freshman area sign behind me

from the NCA East Regional a few years ago.

Yeah, you need that.

You need that.

Honestly, it'll never get old to me.

Sports writers, you can continue to do this

until the cows come home, send your little tweets

about how you had to put your Gatorade in a cup.

Yeah, and yeah, for those who don't know,

when you cover the NCAA tournament,

when you cover the NCAA tournament,

you are not allowed to bring a drink to the floor,

to the press row area.

That is not in a literal NCAA,

it's just a paper cup.

It has an NCAA logo on it.

And let me, to Roger, can tell you this,

there are people that stand at the tunnel

when you walk to the floor and make you put it in a cup.

There's a table with a stack of cups,

and they are dead serious about making you put

whatever it is, coke, water, whatever, in a cup.

It's a power-aid cup.

It's not a technically an NCAA cup

because power-aid is like the official drink

or whatever of March Band is.

And yeah, I mean, normally it'll be diet,

coaks, and coffees in there,

but they're, it has whatever liquid you are drinking

must be poured into that cup.

So it's still in power-aid valor of everybody

who's sitting on press row consuming a power-aid.

You don't know what's in those coaches and players drink.

It comes either.

This is power-aid.

I mean, there are some schools,

I mean, it's just liquid.

There are some schools that bring gatorade

and put it in the thing, like they don't care.

They just care that it's in the cooler.

One other thing that I must say now that we're,

this is college basketball, hour,

parents, what's on do?

Shout out to Georgia Southern,

this is a thing that broke, contain, right?

Like I'm not, as we know,

not the huge college basketball fan

and we're at least regular season college basketball fan

in the world, but Georgia Southern,

six games in six days take the run

at the absolute first sickle Sun Belt man's tournament bracket.

They made it to the championship

but lost last night to Troy.

And so they almost went the whole way

to win the Sun Belt tournament

for those who were the uninitiated.

You have to win, or I should say,

as the lowest seed in the Sun Belt tournament,

you would have to win seven games in seven days

because basically Roger correct me for wrong here.

The league wants to protect its best teams

as a one-bid league.

Yes, yeah, basically.

So whoever wins the tournament

gets the automatic bit into the NCAA tournament.

If a team performs well in the NCAA tournament,

literally the conference gets paid money.

So you want to, and you'll over again, sure.

Yes, and it's good for the conference in general.

So you want to ensure your best team goes

and the way that the Sun Belt and some other leagues

have done that is to make it virtually impossible

for anybody besides that one seed to win

famously pioneered by the now dying West Coast Conference

with Gonzaga getting like a triple,

double or triple buy into the semi-finals.

And it worked out

because Georgia Southern had played six games

and Troy had played two.

And Troy got it that way.

Get a quintuple buy as one seed Troy.

And Georgia Southern, again, the max here is seven,

which as you will know,

unless you happen to be a first four team

that made a run in the big tournament,

the most you can play in the real tournament is six games.

They played a four and three tournament of games

in a weekend.

They looked gassed last night in that game.

And this is one of the fun things that happens at this.

I love conference tournament week,

almost as much as March Madness,

where all these teams try to decide

who gets their auto bid and hundreds of teams

still technically in the mix as you enter

the first week to narrow it down to 68.

It's basically a 350 team,

single elimination tournament.

If you think about it,

if you think of every conference tournament

as feeding into March Madness,

and as whole hog appreciates,

it has been split zone duo.

Also a very spunky season

in terms of different storylines to follow.

That has always pealed to me.

That I feel like pealed to you.

Where every part of college basketball is involved

in this career.

It does.

And this has been a spunky season

with a lot of very split zone duo centric

college basketball storylines I have thought

and put the men's and women's games.

Roger, you're here because you're a college basketball

knower.

You make very good upset picks every year,

which now live on your YouTube channel,

sports exclamation point, process wise, very good picks.

And some years results wise, very good picks.

If there's a 15 seed that wins something

in the NCAA tournament,

there's a great chance that Roger picked it.

You actually watch multiple games

of the Sun Belt basketball tournament.

You live this shit.

You are very excited about it and then to it.

I'm a fan of college basketball.

Richard is not really.

So we've got different years to join me until March 1st.

Just watch the rest of it.

Wow, you get into March 1st.

Right, man, there's no way.

Should we throw a party?

Should we invite Ali for Rukh Manash?

Yeah, like I'm not, no, I'm not rare about that.

Just to be fair, yeah, just to be clear.

Yeah, yeah, it's until March 1st.

I am now a college basketball man.

Okay, very fair.

National Champions Florida Gators, by the way.

And since they've magically learned

how to shoot like three weeks ago,

looks like they might be running it back.

They were waiting for you to watch.

They were waiting for you to do an effort.

So Roger, I wanted to do this episode

because I have a great interest,

especially in the off season in what college football

can take away from the trials and tribulations

and successes of other sports.

There's gonna be another one of these types of episodes

with a really wise writer on one of my favorite sports,

coming up in just a couple of weeks,

time to the opening of that sports season.

And I wanted to talk about college basketball

because it is sort of the closest cousin of college football.

It's the second biggest college sport in this country.

And man, oh man, does it seem to have not just problems,

but also a culture of people being mad

about those problems, which I guess is understandable.

And what really Roger made me unable to ignore

this confluence between college hoops and college football

was the story of the Miami University Red Hawks

who, as we record this on March 10th,

are probably making the NCAA tournament

with a 31 and zero record.

But that's not universally agreed

or at least it hasn't been until the last couple of days

because a debate from college football

has crossed over into college basketball.

And that is, if you're literally perfect

and your competition is a bad SEC team, is that enough?

Oh, they've got worse in Ken Palm.

I looked a couple weeks,

I was talking to the friend about this,

like a week or 10 days ago and they were 80th.

And look, I've just pulled it up there 91st in Ken Palm.

Yes.

So let's set the table here.

We love the Mid-American Conference

as a college football conference.

Probably slightly better, honestly,

a little bit less depressing and sad

as a basketball conference.

And Miami Ohio runs the table this year.

31 and 0, 18 and 0 in conference play.

Very rare for teams to go undefeated in college basketball.

I think it's happened five times in the regular season

since 2000, most recently Gonzaga in 2021.

But really just not a thing that happens very often

because they're 31 games.

And you're thinking, oh, well, if they went 31 and 0,

they must be out there dominating

and winning every game by 10, 15 points.

Not what's happening at all.

It's very much like a TCU run from a few years ago

where they've had four overtime wins.

They've had five one possession wins in addition to those.

So they're nine and 0 in games that are one possession

or overtime.

I heard Matt Norlander from CBS Sports on his podcast say

that was the most of all time back

when they hit only one seven and now they're up to nine.

So as a result, they're not a particularly highly ranked team

in terms of the analytics, the numbers that the committee

will use to put the bracket together.

They're ranked 91st by Ken Pomeroy,

which is in between 14 and 17 Georgetown

and 13 and 18 Notre Dame.

So it is saying, you know, this is a team

that's probably would be finishing towards the bottom

of one of these high major leagues.

And yes, for the past few weeks,

there has been this very like college football,

heavy college football reminiscent debate

of like, why are we letting this perfect big major team in

when we could be letting in a roughly 500 SEC or big 10 team?

And it seems like for now, now that they've gotten to the

like literally with at most one loss,

they're probably going to be in right now.

The bracketologists have them on the 11 line.

They'd have to drop to a 13.

Yeah, they will never give this easy to their 11 seed.

Well, they shipped this team to them to our first four.

If they lose, I think they're clear for now.

If they lose the conference tournament,

if they lose in the conference tournament,

I think they're clear for now.

But there was a real conversation of like,

if they lose one or two of these final games

and enter the season or enter the tournament

with two to three losses,

would that be enough to get them in?

And this is just, if you're a college football fan,

you've got to be hearing this and feeling like this

is reminiscent of the way we were just talking

about the college football playoff

with James Madison in Tulane.

And you know, just generally with teams that go 12 and 0

or 13 and 0 and are still being called like,

you know, not necessarily worthy of being in the playoff

that the Cincinnati UCF conversations.

And one of the big topics is about strength of schedule.

There was a great piece by our internet friend, Matt Brown,

where he foiled all of the emails.

Miami of Ohio had sent to power conference teams asking,

can we play you this year to boost our strength of schedule?

And all of them either leaving Miami of Ohio on red

or writing like, oh, sorry, we've filled up all of our dates

and are gonna be unable to play you guys.

But once again, people are debating whether or not

these very well performing,

whether you should get rewarded for playing this well

in the regular season as a non-power conference team

or whether we should just dump in more teams

from the middle to bottom of power conferences.

Just to be clear, when you mentioned it,

we've talked about it.

Can pomeroy's ratings, which is, you know,

the college basketball, Bill Connelly.

Gold standard, yeah.

The non-conference strength of schedule

for Miami of Ohio is a 360 first.

Out of 365 or so.

Out of 365.

Their strength of schedule is 270 second in the country.

So, and their luck is, they are 11th in his luck metric.

So they really did try that.

They really did try to get those non-conference games

and nobody wanted to play them

because they were a pretty decent mid-major last year.

They went 14 and four in the Mac.

They made it to the Mac title game in the conference tournament.

But, yeah, this is, and the annoying thing is

on both sides of the equation,

both in college basketball and college football,

I do see the, like, I do see the logic

because it is true that these, I would push back,

I would push back on that in basketball

because in basketball, more fluky things can happen

and cause you to win games, right?

Like in football, Oregon was beating James Madison

nine and a half, that James Madison team

nine and a half times out of 10.

We set it on this show for a month.

Alex and I were crystal clear

about what was gonna happen in that game.

Now, we were also crystal clear about

James Madison's place to be there.

But the physical advantage in football,

the physical disparity, I should say,

in football makes it different from basketball

where we have all seen.

Like, Miami, Ohio can get in one of these games

and the shots just will not fall next week

and they'll lose or they'll win

because the, for sure, our conference team

they're playing isn't making shots.

And Miami makes a lot of shots.

That's how they got there.

Yes.

Well, college basketball has this very rich tradition

of upsets, the college football,

at least in the playoff era does not really have yet.

And we built March Madness on these Cinderella stories,

on these teams from these mid-major conferences

making it far.

And yet in the past decade or so,

we've seen the power conferences close access

to schools from smaller leagues

and really shut them off and try to take these schools

out of March Madness.

The stat I have here is that from 1995 to 2014,

so about 20 NCAA tournaments,

the selection committee gave at large bids

to an average of nine schools from mid-major conferences.

So like, you know, selecting them

even if they didn't win the conference.

An average of nine, they topped out at 12 in 1995, 1998 in 2004.

So that's 12 teams that from outside the power conferences

you know, teams getting selected to the NCAA tournament

even if they didn't win their conferences.

This year we're probably going to see two or three teams

from outside the power conferences selected,

probably both from the West Coast Conference.

Good Zaga or Santa Clara, whichever of those two loses

tonight's conference championship game

and then St. Mary's will probably be in.

Other than that, it'll take like something weird

or flukey happening in a conference tournament

like if Miami were to lose to Acker

and they'll probably get a bid.

But we've seen this real narrowing down

of the amount of at-large teams that are given these spots.

The power conferences have seized, well, you know, the power.

That's why we call the power of the power conferences, I guess.

And the annoying thing is that it's somewhat justified

by the results because, you know, last year was the chalkiest

NCAA tournament ever.

Four one seeds made it to the final four.

There were no 13, 14, 15 or 16 upsets.

And it was also sick.

The final four last year was sick.

It was great games.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also the women's tournament is even shockier

in general than the men's tournament.

And in general, it's continues to be.

It's going to be heavily dominated, probably,

by you kind of UCLA this year, yeah.

I ran the stats here and this reminds me

a lot of college football.

Five years ago, the average in 2022, five seasons ago,

the average rating of an average team in the top five conferences

was 7.1 points better than the average team

from the next five leagues, like six through 10.

So, you know, significantly better, but now it's seven points.

And this year, it was up to 12.4 points

between the top five and the next five.

So just a huge increase from, like,

basically about twice as large,

the margin between those teams from the power conferences

and the next few conferences.

There's the gap is really starting to form in 2023.

There were, I'm sorry, I'm throwing a lot of numbers.

I know people love just listening to lists of numbers,

but that's what college basketball often is.

In 2023, there were 75 upsets of a non-power team,

beating a power team in their regular season.

This year, there were just 29.

So that also cut off by more than half.

So there really is this kind of huge gap

growing and growing and growing

between the four power leagues

that we know from college football and the Big East.

And everybody else.

And it reminds me so much of college football

because a few years ago, you know,

when a team was running the table

from a mid major conference in college football,

you know, something like a UCF or Cincinnati situation,

it felt like they would have a chance in a game

against those power conference teams

and the SP plus ratings reflected that.

And often they were winning those, you know,

those New Year six bowl games.

And right now, it feels like those teams

are miles apart, the best teams from like the American

or the the Mount West are just not even really,

as you said, like blowing on the same field.

Is this just an NIL portal story

thought up to 12?

Yeah, it feels like the portal and NIL

have been figured out after a kind of a brief adjustment period.

And those schools are figuring out

how to consolidate their power and the difference,

which I have for a long time pushed back

on the idea that these teams for the power conferences

are significantly better,

but it really is showing up on the court in college hoops

and on the field in college football

to an increasing extent, to a worrisome extent.

And it does make me worried about some of these

potential Cinderella's in March,

like I'm so excited about these Red Hawks,

they've had so many great buzzer beaters,

they've had so many great overtime games,

there's such an incredible story, 31 to no,

but I really don't have confidence in them,

winning a first round game.

I know they're gonna be an 11 seed,

which is it even gonna give them one of the better teams

and they're probably gonna be like a 13 or 14 point

underdog of that game.

And here's where this becomes the college football story.

I also have no confidence in Miami of Ohio,

but guess what?

I wouldn't have any confidence in the 12th best team

in the SEC or whoever to win more than one or two,

three of things get great for them in the tournament.

Whereas I think Miami's probably a similar story.

If they absolutely are on this magic carpet ride,

maybe they get to the sweet 16 and that's that,

they're ultimately not championship contenders.

And so as a fan of the sport, as a viewer,

why would I want to hit Cinderella

over the head with a wrench instead of letting Cinderella

have a chance in the college basketball tournament?

Don't we glorify this in college basketball?

Isn't this a difference?

Isn't this a difference?

Cinderella thing in college basketball is like,

at least in college, and I'm being a little tired of cheek here,

but at least in college football,

everybody kind of understands that college football

like hates Cinderella in post-era when we get the post season.

But in college basketball, we love Cinderella.

It's why we love March.

Roger just explained the fact that they were letting in

so many, not non-chour.

Made in major.

Thank you, major, yeah.

Men majors in, whereas yeah, you put them in over,

what was the Bruce Pearl thing?

It was like Auburn, which has 50 losses?

They're slightly above, slightly below 500 at this point.

Thank you for listening.

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