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« on: November 17, 2023, 05:33:59 pm »
It's interesting. In the final fan poll, released before tournament started, Chicago was 15, Calvin 9. By all rights, that's a pretty fair matchup in a round of 16. In 4 pods of 4, it's a 2.25 seed vs a 3.75 seed overall. Considering a 4 team pod should be 1v4 and 2v3, it's darn close.
That's the thing about having 16 teams left out of 400+. Anyone can win at any time. That's why Messiah (1) is out, North Central (6), F&M (7), Emory (T14) and Kenyon (16) are all out from the final Top 16 ranking. That's almost 1/3 (5/16). You can say, well, the seedings were wrong and they lost to good teams, but for the highly ranked teams that dropped, W&L (RV), Washington College (RV), Ohio Northern (RV), Occidental (RV), and UWEC, or 5/16 of the remainder, were outside the Top 25. UWEC wasn't even in the RV category.
To get to the Sweet 16, W&L had to beat SUNY Oneonta (18), Washington College (Otterbein T24, Kenyon 16), ONU (Lynchburg 22, Messiah 1), Occidental (Trinity TX 20), UWEC (North Central T9, UW-P 19). Everyone one of these teams had to beat at least one team ranked ahead of them.
Did the voters do a bad job? Did the committees do a bad job? No.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. For the most part, the difference between the top 5-7 schools is negligible. You can put them in order, but it's really who started faster, who had the blemish longest ago, or who has the most impressive victory. None of which are actually good measures of anything. The difference between 7 and 15 is essentially irrelevant. The difference between 10 and 25 is razor thin. The difference between 15 and 35 is basically squat. And somewhere from 25-50 is pretty much splitting hairs. Yes the groups overlap, and yes they should.
For all of us who have participated in these polls, we know anywhere you put teams in these groupings is essentially equal, you are just finding some way to justify them with a number, and rarely is that justification based on anything truly relevant.
So yeah, 2 very good teams played today in a hard fought game that sends one home. It's going to happen tomorrow a lot. Because within these final 16 teams, there isn't much difference. Some will play well, some may not. It may look like a big difference on the day, or it may look like the Chicago - Calvin razor thin match. But if you played these 8 games 10x, they would probably average out to mostly close games and probably a whole lot of overall close records.
There just isn't that much difference anywhere in the bunch.
So according to the voters, who has the easiest game in this round and who has the hardest?
Calvin (T9), Chicago (15)
St Olaf (12), UW-EC (None)
ONU (RV), CC (14)
Tufts (8), W&L (RV)
MW (2), WC (RV)
Montclair (7), Conn (5)
Amherst (3), Oxy (RV)
Cortland (6), Middlebury (4)
Well the biggest chalk should be Mary Washington or Amherst. For me, the toughest draw was not Calvin/Chicago, it's Cortland/Middlebury, followed by Montclair/Conn. The Calvin/Chicago game would have been the third most unfair out of the 8 games.
Overall, looking at the pods, the Amherst pod is by far the most brutal. Cortland/Middlebury is, in a 4 team pod, a 1 vs 1.5. That whole pod has a .75, a 1, a 1.5 and an Unranked. That's a savage pod. Not far behind is Mary Washington, with a .5, a 1.25, a 1.75, and an Unranked.
The easiest pod overall is Tufts'. That pod has a 2, a 3.5, and two Unranked. That actually leaves the Calvin, Chicago pod as second easiest, a 2.25, a 3.75, a 3, and an Unranked.
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