Pool C

[KnightSlappy]

Looking at the numbers, the south region is going to have a really hard time earning legitimate hosting sites. Guilford will probably deserving if they can run through the ODAC tournament gauntlet, but other than that the region is quite bleak from a numbers standpoint.

Maybe the ASC winner gets one as well to try to limit flights, but they look like a stretch unless either Concordia TX or Hardin-Simmons can run the table.

[fantastic50]

Looking at the numbers, the south region is going to have a really hard time earning legitimate hosting sites. Guilford will probably deserving if they can run through the ODAC tournament gauntlet, but other than that the region is quite bleak from a numbers standpoint.

Maybe the ASC winner gets one as well to try to limit flights, but they look like a stretch unless either Concordia TX or Hardin-Simmons can run the table.

If a Texas team wins the SCAC, and the ASC gets two in, then I think the ASC champ will host, rather than flying multiple teams out of Texas.

[Gregory Sager]

Looking at the numbers, the south region is going to have a really hard time earning legitimate hosting sites. Guilford will probably deserving if they can run through the ODAC tournament gauntlet, but other than that the region is quite bleak from a numbers standpoint.

Maybe the ASC winner gets one as well to try to limit flights, but they look like a stretch unless either Concordia TX or Hardin-Simmons can run the table.

If a Texas team wins the SCAC, and the ASC gets two in, then I think the ASC champ will host, rather than flying multiple teams out of Texas.

... plus, if Rhodes or Hendrix wins the SAA tourney (a realistic prospect, since Rhodes is currently first and Hendrix currently third in that thoroughly-mediocre league), then you can add the Lynx or the Warriors to the mix of two ASC teams and one SCAC team and hold a self-contained, Texas-based pod that doesn't require any flights, if -- and this is a big if -- the pod is held on LeTourneau's campus in Longview.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

The idea of a fake SOS comes down to this... Vande Streek has said that the straight line from .030 to 2 games gets slightly curved at .060 to 4 games and gets downright blurry at .090 to 6 games... so if a team has this enormously high SOS, it basically gets pushed aside and they start diving into the other criteria. They don't want a ridiculously high SOS determine what is going to happen as it did a few years ago much to everyone's disappointment. I think there was a point that the SOS was assumed to be the holy grail and as the NESCAC (and others, yes others) have figured out how to get the best SOS... we went too far in just going on SOS numbers. I again point to Emory... great SOS last year and a WL% above .667... didn't get in. The committee is going to base their information on more criteria and data... and they feel that some very high SOS numbers are more a result of benefits other teams can't enjoy. In other words, it is a way of evening the playing field a bit so that NESCAC schools (or the like, and I think we can find some that can adjust their SOS numbers despite conference scheduling) don't have a huge, and arguably unfair, advantage of schools with conference schedules that limit them greatly. Conferences have shown willingness to adjust schedules to start making up for the gap and I think the committee wants to be sure that just because a team has a scheduling advantage... they don't get in just because of it.

[fantastic50]

I again point to Emory... great SOS last year and a WL% above .667... didn't get in. The committee is going to base their information on more criteria and data... and they feel that some very high SOS numbers are more a result of benefits other teams can't enjoy.

Emory was the UAA champ last year, and won the regional they hosted.  Are you thinking of Rochester (17-7, .561 SOS, 3-4 vRRO)?

[Gregory Sager]

The fact that the NESCAC chooses to play only 8 football games, declining both non-conference games and playoff opportunities, speaks to their commitment to keeping intercollegiate athletics in perspective, as is part of the D3 philosophy.  I think that the same is true of the league's hesitance to schedule midweek athletic contests.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't predispose the league to play a mere single round-robin in basketball.

I'm not convinced that the NESCAC's lack of a double-round-robin (or something close to it) is quite that big a deal.  Consider that about half the league plays two extra rivalry games against NESCAC opponents (Amherst/Wililams/Wesleyan and Bates/Bowdoin/Colby), and that their tournament has a quarterfinal round.  This means that if Amherst or Williams makes the semifinals, they would have played 14 games against other NESCAC teams.  That's the same number as a UAA team, and only one less than a WIAC team with a first-round bye.

I disagree completely. First, the scheduling effects of the extracurricular triads of Amherst/Williams/Wesleyan and Bates/Bowdoin/Colby get overstated by NESCAC advocates. Those extracurricular triads only affect six of the league's eleven teams; they are not within the purview of the league (i.e., they don't affect the league's standings and they're elective, like all non-con games, even if they are traditional and thus unlikely to be eliminated); and they're only two games apiece out of the whopping fifteen regular-season non-con games (i.e., only 13%) each NESCAC outfit enjoys. Put another way, even if one concedes the idea that the extracurricular-triad games are binding and not subject to change, that still only improves the regular-season assignment of games against league opponents from 40% to 48% for those six NESCAC teams, while the standard-sized league slates of double round-robin leagues of eight, nine, or ten members apiece make up 56% (fourteen-game league sked), 64% (sixteen-game league sked), or 72% (eighteen-game league sked) of the total allotment of regular-season games. Those are still very big discrepancies.

Amherst and Williams are traditionally the two big powers in NESCAC basketball, and the two western Mass purple powers tend to get the lion's share of poster support on d3boards.com, and those two things seem to be the reason why so much emphasis is put upon the extracurricular triads when defending NESCAC scheduling. But you can't get around the fact that they only augment the schedule of barely half of the league's members, and that legitimately solid NESCAC programs such as Tufts and Middlebury (the latter of which has been nationally competitive for some time now), as well as two NESCAC programs that have been Final Four participants in the past (Trinity CT and Conn College), can't fall back upon the extracurricular-triad defense at all.

Second, while the NESCAC does ameliorate the scheduling imbalance a bit by having a third layer to its postseason tournament, that, too, is an overstated factor. A triad team that plays three league tourney games -- in other words, a NESCAC team that maxes out its possible number of games played against fellow NESCAC members prior to Selection Monday -- will still have played only 54% of its 28 games against league opponents. At the other end of the spectrum, a non-triad team that gets eliminated in the NESCAC quarterfinals will have played only 42% of its games against NESCAC opponents, and a non-triad team that makes it to the semifinals will have played only 44% of its games against NESCAC opponents. Meanwhile, all of the teams from the other leagues that started off having played 56%, 64%, or 72% of their games against league rivals will have upped their ante as well by playing tourney games in their respective leagues.

And, to speak directly to your point, a UAA Pool C aspirant (i.e., two out of the trio of Wash U, Rochester, and Emory) will have played 56% of its games against UAA opponents, while Amherst or Williams, should one or the other lose in the NESCAC semis, will have played 52% within the NESCAC -- so it's not an equal number at all. And a WIAC team with a first-round bye that gets knocked out in the semis will have played 58% within the WIAC. So, even when you're cherry-picking the best-case scenarios for Amherst and Williams in particular, you're still lagging well behind even the teams from the smallest qualifying leagues, including the league that doesn't even play extra games.

Sorry, fantastic50, but it is a big deal.

[Gregory Sager]

The idea of a fake SOS comes down to this... Vande Streek has said that the straight line from .030 to 2 games gets slightly curved at .060 to 4 games and gets downright blurry at .090 to 6 games... so if a team has this enormously high SOS, it basically gets pushed aside and they start diving into the other criteria. They don't want a ridiculously high SOS determine what is going to happen as it did a few years ago much to everyone's disappointment. I think there was a point that the SOS was assumed to be the holy grail and as the NESCAC (and others, yes others) have figured out how to get the best SOS... we went too far in just going on SOS numbers. I again point to Emory... great SOS last year and a WL% above .667... didn't get in. The committee is going to base their information on more criteria and data... and they feel that some very high SOS numbers are more a result of benefits other teams can't enjoy. In other words, it is a way of evening the playing field a bit so that NESCAC schools (or the like, and I think we can find some that can adjust their SOS numbers despite conference scheduling) don't have a huge, and arguably unfair, advantage of schools with conference schedules that limit them greatly. Conferences have shown willingness to adjust schedules to start making up for the gap and I think the committee wants to be sure that just because a team has a scheduling advantage... they don't get in just because of it.

OK, this makes sense and it's a good way to describe the committee's corrective methodology. I just have a problem with the word "fake" and what it implies, that's all. But the semantics of the matter really aren't that big of a deal.

[Pat Coleman]

I'd agree with Greg on the terminology, especially in the current climate as it relates to that word. If I were the mouthpiece for the concept, I'd really choose a better title for it and try to define it more succinctly.

[Ryan Stoppable]

I'm not convinced that the NESCAC's lack of a double-round-robin (or something close to it) is quite that big a deal.  Consider that about half the league plays two extra rivalry games against NESCAC opponents (Amherst/Wililams/Wesleyan and Bates/Bowdoin/Colby), and that their tournament has a quarterfinal round.  This means that if Amherst or Williams makes the semifinals, they would have played 14 games against other NESCAC teams.  That's the same number as a UAA team, and only one less than a WIAC team with a first-round bye.

Meanwhile, a team from another 11 team conference like Benedictine will have only played 5 non-conference games instead of 13/15, giving them far less of a chance to build up a gaudy SOS in what is historically a weak conference to begin with.

To me, that is quite a difference.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I again point to Emory... great SOS last year and a WL% above .667... didn't get in. The committee is going to base their information on more criteria and data... and they feel that some very high SOS numbers are more a result of benefits other teams can't enjoy.

Emory was the UAA champ last year, and won the regional they hosted.  Are you thinking of Rochester (17-7, .561 SOS, 3-4 vRRO)?

Yes... sorry... thinking Rochester... not sure at what point I twisted that into Emory, but I certainly did. SMH

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I'd agree with Greg on the terminology, especially in the current climate as it relates to that word. If I were the mouthpiece for the concept, I'd really choose a better title for it and try to define it more succinctly.

It is the word they have used for two or more years... not one I created.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I'm not convinced that the NESCAC's lack of a double-round-robin (or something close to it) is quite that big a deal.  Consider that about half the league plays two extra rivalry games against NESCAC opponents (Amherst/Wililams/Wesleyan and Bates/Bowdoin/Colby), and that their tournament has a quarterfinal round.  This means that if Amherst or Williams makes the semifinals, they would have played 14 games against other NESCAC teams.  That's the same number as a UAA team, and only one less than a WIAC team with a first-round bye.

Meanwhile, a team from another 11 team conference like Benedictine will have only played 5 non-conference games instead of 13/15, giving them far less of a chance to build up a gaudy SOS in what is historically a weak conference to begin with.

To me, that is quite a difference.

Yeah, but sometimes the conference doesn't help either. You can find some conferences with a lot of games, but the conference does well from top to even bottom and the SOS doesn't hurt. Conferences like Benedictine unfortunately have a lot of teams at the bottom who aren't good, don't schedule well on top of that, and drag the SOS down whether Benedictine tries to make a differente or not.

Lancaster Bible was a testiment of both last year... horrible conference numbers coupled with lousy out-of-conference scheduling. If LBC had done a little better in out-of-conference they may not have been in a "undefeated or stay home" situation while the conference could have helped as well. Not surprisingly, next year they change the conference structure and schedule.

And fantastic50... Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin play a second round of games against each other while the other half of the conference doesn't... while yes, there is some double-round-robin built in, it doesn't come close to comparing to even ODAC who plays an off-set conference schedule. And your example of using the conference tournament to build up the NESCAC schedule ignores the fact that a vast majority of conferences have teams playing games 17, 18, 19, 20, etc. in conference by that same point. The UAA is another place we see high SOS numbers, but for slightly different reasons and why the "Rochester" (not Emory, I again apologize) is such a good one to keep in mind. And per your WIAC point, that is recent since they lost a conference mate (Superior). Not something we can point to historically as of yet.

But again... six teams of the five have those NESCAC numbers you are trying to to make even. 12-conference opponents (10 conference games) is half of those six schedules. That is FAR more out-of conference games they can schedule during the regular season. More than the UAA teams. And if you look at the other five, they have less than half of their schedule in conference. That makes a BIG difference when your SOS isn't influenced closer to .500 from playing a double-round-robin. You have to get into the second round or the championship of the conference tournament to equal what most conferences do BEFORE their conference tournaments. There are 43 conferences in Division III and you found two that half the NESCAC comes close to? Seems to make the argument in the other direction than where you tried to make it.

[Pat Coleman]

I'd agree with Greg on the terminology, especially in the current climate as it relates to that word. If I were the mouthpiece for the concept, I'd really choose a better title for it and try to define it more succinctly.

It is the word they have used for two or more years... not one I created.

I understand that. But you're the conduit for the committee's voice and terminology to be heard -- feel free to speak in terms that benefit the audience, aka, the fans. You don't have to call it something just because they do.

[Dave 'd-mac' McHugh]

I'd agree with Greg on the terminology, especially in the current climate as it relates to that word. If I were the mouthpiece for the concept, I'd really choose a better title for it and try to define it more succinctly.

It is the word they have used for two or more years... not one I created.

I understand that. But you're the conduit for the committee's voice and terminology to be heard -- feel free to speak in terms that benefit the audience, aka, the fans. You don't have to call it something just because they do.

... though, at the same time I don't want to change a term they are using around and either add to confusion with different terms OR screw up their intent. I would be happy to chat with them about the term, but not sure I want to change it when they may say it another way. And we have been saying it for two-plus seasons.

[Gregory Sager]

I'm with Pat on this one, Dave. As a journalist, your primary responsibility in terms of effectively communicating an already-arcane set of statistical variables is to your audience and not to your sources.