Sunday, January 24, 2010

Both Gary Parrish and Jeff Goodman Leave Vandy out of Top 25

Only one way to earn respect: Big game week Dores

11 comments:

Chuck Heston said...

First, sorry about the Jets.

Gary Parrish sure went on a limb. TN fell to #10 in the country after the loss in GA. Anyone else think TN is one of the top 10 teams? How does TN with a WORSE record merit a #10 ranking and Vandy is nowhere to be seen.

Heckuva job Gary!

VandyGold28 said...

Gary Parrish is an idiot. I can't believe he's CBS' go to guy for college hoops on the net.

Stanimal said...

In all fairness, Gary Parrish looks at our resume and sees no wins against "currently" ranked teams and 0-3 against "currently" unranked teams. Tennessee at least beat Kansas after they lost 4 guys to idiocy. If we want respect, we need a "signature" win, and we can get it if we show up for the full 40 minutes.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Stanimal's point that we can't exactly be outraged at not being ranked until we get at least one signature win. Parrish putting a team at #26 that has a losing conference record and is in a three-way tie for seventh in the Big Ten is certainly a bit suspect. I have significantly more respect for ESPN's college basketball analysts though, most of whom included Vanderbilt on their ballot. Plus, we'll undoubtedly be in the new AP poll tomorrow and probably the Coach's poll. It'll put a bit more of a national spotlight on these next two games.

Stanimal said...

Man these next two games are huge

Steve said...

I think I like our chances vs KY better than I do with UTK

Steve said...
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Steve said...
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Delicious said...

Why, Steve? I appreciate taking a unique perspective, but that is just crazy-talk.

Andrew Smith said...

The whole problem with the quality wins/losses theory is that it relies so heavily on your pre-season estimates of who is good and bad. Many analysts decided before the season that basically half the teams in the Big East, Big 10 and ACC were among the Top 25. With that as a presupposition, they can justify ranking teams with 500 records in those leagues by saying they have quality wins and tough losses, while teams with far better records in less favored conferences fall out of the ratings.

The problem is that there's no real way to test the strength of the respective conferences. December play really doesn't mean all that much and most teams don't really play enough quality opponents from enough different conferences to establish good ideas of league strength. I'm not sure there's any real way to compensate for this, though I think you can compensate for it somewhat by considering how many players from team X would start on team Y.

The other problem for ranking teams across college basketball right now is that the Big East plays an entirely different game than what has traditionally been called college basketball and the Big 10 is starting to play it. They use so much more illegal physical contact that they will dominate other leagues unless refs show a willingness to make such play impossible, which they haven't shown to date.

If Big East games were called in a way that I consider proper, all the players on both teams would foul out within the first ten minutes of every game. That, of course, would be hard to watch so Big East games aren't called like that, and Big East teams get ever more physical.

Then, when they meet teams from regular leagues, they play the same style. The refs call them for the first few minutes. But most people in basketball have a very strong bias that, in any given game, both teams commit about the same number of fouls, so it just isn't acceptable for the refs to call 20 fouls on one team and 107 on the other, no matter how much more the second team fouls.

Thus, because the refs will always call roughly the same number of fouls on the two teams, no matter how much you actually foul, the advantage always goes to the team that fouls more, particularly when its shoving under the basket rather than obviously slapping a shooter's hand.

I've never been energetic enough to run numbers on this but I'd be willing to bet that refs call at least twice as many fouls on one team in less than 1 percent of all basketball games when, in fact, one team actually commits twice as many acts of illegal physicality as the other in about one in four games. Some teams really are a lot more physical than others and most of that is illegal. That means that fouling teams have a big advantage.

In other words, the NCAA needs to address the Big East or it's going to wreck college basketball.

Drew said...

Wow, Andrew. Nice work there.