MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Gregory Sager]

I am befuddled that the NCAA sent Cal-Lutheran to New Jersey (Rowan hosting).  What a nightmare of a trip!!

The NCAA was going to put them on a plane regardless. Since they're on an island the committee was able to ship them pretty much anywhere they needed to. Doesn't negate your point that that's a nightmare of a trip, to be sure, but there's a reason for it.

Having to play Rowan on the home floor of the Profs is by far a bigger nightmare than a five-hour plane ride, especially since the Kingsmen will undoubtedly fly out to New Jersey at least a day early.

I think that these West Coast vs. East Coast matchups are a great novelty. I'll bet all the corn in Manito that Cal Lutheran and Rowan have never crossed paths before in any sport.

[sac]

I am befuddled that the NCAA sent Cal-Lutheran to New Jersey (Rowan hosting).  What a nightmare of a trip!!

Long maybe, but thats LAX to Philly non-stop.  The worst part of the trip will be the bus ride from Thousand Oaks to LAX .

[Gregory Sager]

A quick bit of research on the Vikings opponent, Sewanee.  Two (Kahl-16.4ppg and Marr-21.4ppg) earned 1st team AC. Two (Corrigan-11.4ppg and Avaliani-10.6ppg) earned HM.

Sewanee got hot in its conference championship game, shooting 56/39/88%.  Marr and Kahl accounted for 58 of 86 points.  The above-listed four scored 81 of 86 in the victory over #1 seeded Berry in which only eight Sewanee players saw action.  Thus, four players totaled five points.

Sewanee is a high-scoring team with good shooters. Teams like that can be dangerous even though they've played inferior competition to date. The Tigers are much more efficient, scoring-wise, than their opponents, which is no big thing at all for North Park; it's pretty common for opponents to outshoot the Vikings. But the Tigers give up a lot of offensive rebounds, and offensive rebounding is one of the keys to North Park's success. Look for that to be a factor on Friday evening. NPU averages a significantly higher number of possessions than do the opponents of the Tigers to date; while the number of field goal attempts is roughly the same, NPU averages 25 FT attempts per game (5th in the nation), while Sewanee's prior opponents have averaged only 17.3 FTA per game.

Couple NPU's penchant for attacking the basket and drawing opponent fouls with the fact that Sewanee plays a strict eight-man rotation without exception, and the Tigers might be fighting foul trouble on Friday. Also, nobody in the SAA plays notably fast, so the Tigers may be a prime candidate to react badly to North Park's speed-you-up-against-your-will approach.

Senior 6'3, 165 guard Russ Marr (21.4 ppg) is Sewanee's big-time scorer and obvious linchpin. Look for Mr. Marr to get a heavy dose of Jackson and Pumphrey on Friday in the Wash U Field House.

[Gregory Sager]

North Park has never played Sewanee before in men's basketball.
North Park's record against Wash U is 2-1; its record against Coe is 3-3.

Wheaton's record against Illlinois College is 7-5.
Wheaton has never played Carleton; its record against St. Norbert is 5-4.

Matt Snyder's computer has North Park as a 14-point favorite on Friday.
Matt Snyder's computer has Wheaton as a 6.5-point favorite on Friday.

[bbfan44]

The quad that Wheaton is in appears to be the toughest.  It has teams ranked #2,4,9,14,15,17,20,21, and 25.
Wheaton has a hard road ahead in its quest to get back to Fort Wayne; especially without Eli Considine.

[USee]

one statistical measure I like to refer to is points per possession (PPP). It's a pretty common statistic in the NBA and D1 that measures efficiency on both the offensive and defensive end of the floor. The stat helps account for styles like NPU vs more traditional styles. It can be measured with different lineups, certain individuals, or teams for a season, a half, or even against different defenses (man vs zone, etc). On offense, anything above a 1.0 is good, above 1.2 is great. Defensively, anything below 1.0 is good. The best teams are often 1.1 or better on offense and below 1.0 (.9-.95) on defense.

NPU is 1.08 as a team for the season on offense and .96 on defense.
Sewanee is 1.07 on offense and .101 on defense

Wheaton is 1.1 as a team on offense and .96 on defense.
Illinois College is 1.1 as a team on offense and .86 on defense

This statistic doesn't adjust for strength of schedule and it's a lot easier to calculate for D1 teams where you can use more robust calculations that are available.

NPU should be favored and Wheaton has a tough matchup if Illinois College is as good on defense as this statistic implies.

[USee]

They should be, but I threw my arms in the air on that topic about a month ago.

But I'll bet a whole lot of Manito's corn that they will be come season's end.  Draw your own conclusions about what needs to happen for an unranked team to get ranked in the final poll.

Almost certainly won't need to wait for the final poll. There's a poll on Monday.

They should be, but I threw my arms in the air on that topic about a month ago.

But I'll bet a whole lot of Manito's corn that they will be come season's end.  Draw your own conclusions about what needs to happen for an unranked team to get ranked in the final poll.

I'm 100% sure that the Vikings will be ranked today. Where they'll be ranked, I don't know, but they will be ranked.

My barometer is the ballots of what I call "the transparent voters" -- the D3hoops.com Top 25 voters who post their ballots on Twitter each week. Of the transparent voters who have refused to put NPU on their ballots this season, I've already spotted two who have the Vikings 17th on this week's ballot, and another who has them 18th. I've only seen one transparent-voter refusenik continue to hold out on the Vikings on this week's ballot.

Of the two voters who were backing North Park in late December before the brief stumble of the loss to St. Mary's (MN), Bob Quillman has NPU all the way up to #10 on his ballot this week, and Benedictine SID/broadcaster Tim Calderwood has NPU #15.

Edit: Just spotted another refusenik's ballot who has made it clear that he's a refusenik no longer. He has the Park at #16 on his ballot.

I didn't realize there would be a poll this week, since the games will decide things from here out.

I'm glad the Parkers are ranked now.  But let's be clear -- this is late.  They didn't show anything this past week that they haven't shown over the course of the past two months.  And as we know, I am anything but a NPU homer.

Sure they did. They won the CCIW tournament.

Not trying to speak for Kiko, but I am pretty sure he was saying there is plenty of evidence for voters that North Park is definitively a top 25 team well before they won the CCIW tournament. No one who regularly watches CCIW basketball and has seen NPU play this year was at all surprised that they won the CCIW tournament.

[Pat Coleman]

I'm glad the Parkers are ranked now.  But let's be clear -- this is late.  They didn't show anything this past week that they haven't shown over the course of the past two months.  And as we know, I am anything but a NPU homer.

Sure they did. They won the CCIW tournament.

Not trying to speak for Kiko, but I am pretty sure he was saying there is plenty of evidence for voters that North Park is definitively a top 25 team well before they won the CCIW tournament. No one who regularly watches CCIW basketball and has seen NPU play this year was at all surprised that they won the CCIW tournament.

I wouldn't argue that, but nonetheless, that is the difference between this week's team and last week's team and winning the CCIW tournament is not something that voters take lightly.

[kiko]

They should be, but I threw my arms in the air on that topic about a month ago.

But I'll bet a whole lot of Manito's corn that they will be come season's end.  Draw your own conclusions about what needs to happen for an unranked team to get ranked in the final poll.

Almost certainly won't need to wait for the final poll. There's a poll on Monday.

They should be, but I threw my arms in the air on that topic about a month ago.

But I'll bet a whole lot of Manito's corn that they will be come season's end.  Draw your own conclusions about what needs to happen for an unranked team to get ranked in the final poll.

I'm 100% sure that the Vikings will be ranked today. Where they'll be ranked, I don't know, but they will be ranked.

My barometer is the ballots of what I call "the transparent voters" -- the D3hoops.com Top 25 voters who post their ballots on Twitter each week. Of the transparent voters who have refused to put NPU on their ballots this season, I've already spotted two who have the Vikings 17th on this week's ballot, and another who has them 18th. I've only seen one transparent-voter refusenik continue to hold out on the Vikings on this week's ballot.

Of the two voters who were backing North Park in late December before the brief stumble of the loss to St. Mary's (MN), Bob Quillman has NPU all the way up to #10 on his ballot this week, and Benedictine SID/broadcaster Tim Calderwood has NPU #15.

Edit: Just spotted another refusenik's ballot who has made it clear that he's a refusenik no longer. He has the Park at #16 on his ballot.

I didn't realize there would be a poll this week, since the games will decide things from here out.

I'm glad the Parkers are ranked now.  But let's be clear -- this is late.  They didn't show anything this past week that they haven't shown over the course of the past two months.  And as we know, I am anything but a NPU homer.

Sure they did. They won the CCIW tournament.

Not trying to speak for Kiko, but I am pretty sure he was saying there is plenty of evidence for voters that North Park is definitively a top 25 team well before they won the CCIW tournament. No one who regularly watches CCIW basketball and has seen NPU play this year was at all surprised that they won the CCIW tournament.

My broader point was:

(1) the only thing NPU did last week was beat a pair of teams ranked below them in both the region and the conference that they had already beaten before.  Hence, 'they didn't show anything they haven't shown already'.  A third win over Elmhurst should not be the extra push that a voter needed to realize this is a Top 25 team as if that is the case, I'm kind of at a loss as to why that wasn't gleaned from, I dunno, the first two times they beat that (very good) team.

And (2) I guess you can argue that a reason North Park moved into the rankings is that they won the conference tournament, but I suspect it had more to do with teams ranked in the lower region of the top 25 losing in *their* tournaments.  In other words, not getting caught up in the carnage, even if it involved not really providing any new evidence as to the caliber of the team at Foster and Kedzie, was IMO as much of a factor as punching the Pool A ticket.  This suggests it wasn't that NPU proved something new, but rather that the other teams proved they weren't who the voters thought they were.

By extension, the voters collectively figured out that these teams should not have been ranked above the Vikings in the first place.  Which is why I said 'great that NPU is ranked, but this is late'.  Because the fact that it took this long was rather head-scratching from here in the cheap seats.  To put a different spin on the 'they'd be ranked if they had Illinois Wesleyan on the front of their jerseys' argument, Calvin's resume doesn't exactly look better than NPU's -- they lost to a Wheaton team that NPU beat, and to an Elmhurst team that the Vikings beat multiple times -- and hasn't for several weeks now.  But the Knights got the benefit of the doubt week after week in a way that a more emergent program simply did not.

That anchoring bias is something that happens in all walks of life, and is in many ways a useful shorthand that helps human beings simplify choices.  We all do it.  So it can be excused to a point.  But it took too long for the collective POV on North Park to become unmoored based on what we were seeing on the court in 2022-23.

[markerickson]

As an NP fan who attended home games this year and also streamed, I was surprised the Vikings won the conference tourney title.  In specific, I attended the loss to Carthage and the debacle versus Millikin.  Watching the creaky Carroll victory with out-of-state friends fell far below our expectations.  Only after Bulwa energized the team in the second half of the final game did I know the Vikings would cut down the net.

[USee]

As an NP fan who attended home games this year and also streamed, I was surprised the Vikings won the conference tourney title.  In specific, I attended the loss to Carthage and the debacle versus Millikin.  Watching the creaky Carroll victory with out-of-state friends fell far below our expectations.  Only after Bulwa energized the team in the second half of the final game did I know the Vikings would cut down the net.

A true skeptic! What did you think of the two other wins vs Carthage? The win over Wheaton at home (who went 14-2 in the CCIW) or the 3 wins over Elmhurst (who beat Wheaton 2x)?

[USee]

The D3 Datacast guys have NPU as a 14pt favorite over Sewanee with an 89% probability of a win. They have NPU's PPP as 107.7 on offense and 89.5 on defense.

They also have Illinois College as a 6.5pt favorite at Wheaton with a 38% chance to win. IC has a 107 offensive PPP and 90.9 on defense. Interesting data.

[tjcummingsfan]

They also have Illinois College as a 6.5pt favorite at Wheaton with a 38% chance to win. IC has a 107 offensive PPP and 90.9 on defense. Interesting data.

Yeah I was confused by that, do you think they just put that -6.5 on the wrong line?  It has Wheaton with a 62% chance to win...

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

They also have Illinois College as a 6.5pt favorite at Wheaton with a 38% chance to win. IC has a 107 offensive PPP and 90.9 on defense. Interesting data.

Yeah I was confused by that, do you think they just but that -6.5 on the wrong line?  It has Wheaton with a 62% chance to win...

Yes, that was a mistake on the graphic.

[Wildcat]

 Illinois College probably watched the last few games that Wheaton played including the loss to Elmhurst in the conference semifinals . Does anyone know if the concessions will be open today? Because they weren't last Saturday.