MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Gregory Sager]

Here's what's on tap for Saturday, as the second round-robin begins:

Augustana (10-7, 3-5) @ Carthage (13-4, 7-1)
Elmhurst (7-10, 3-5) @ North Central (10-7, 3-5)
Wheaton (3-14, 0-8) @ Illinois Wesleyan (15-2, 7-1)
North Park (12-5, 7-1) @ Millikin (10-7, 4-4)

All four games are 4:15 tipoffs. Carroll has the bye.

Since I want to keep poking fun at the Massey Ratings (which, as I was pretty sure would happen, went 2-2 with last night's predictions), here's what Ken's HAL 9000 sees in the crystal ball for Saturday's games:

Carthage 75, Augustana 70	CC 67%, AC 33%
North Central 74, Elmhurst 72	NCC 55%, EU 45%
Illinois Wesleyan 78, Wheaton 64	IWU 90%, WC 10%
North Park 71, Millikin 70	NPU 52%, MU 48%

I'm actually surprised at how reasonable these predictions seem, although I don't think we'll see a reprise of December's overtime battle between the Sonic Atmospheric Disturbance and the Titans. It's far more likely that IWU is going to make mincemeat out of Wheaton at Shirk rather than merely win by 14. And, provided that Ryan Johnson is healthy enough to be his usual dominant self, I don't think that Augustana is going to give Carthage any trouble at Tarble, either. A five-point spread seems much too low for a game in which Johnson is capable of playing anywhere near his normal level.

Millikin effectively slowed down NPU by holding the ball until the last few seconds on each Big Blue possession in the first go-round between those two teams, so I'm nervous about Saturday's trip to Decatur and I certainly don't discount the possibility of a game that goes right down to the wire. Still, I'd say that Massey is probably most accurate when forecasting that the DuPage County Battle of the Birds in the airplane hangar will be a nail-biter. That could very easily be the best game of the day.

[mwunder]

I'm calling the upset at Tarble tomorrow night. CU over CC, 72-68. Carroll has been a sore-spot in Carthage's side, winning 4 of the last 7 matchups.

Unfortunately, mwunder, it looks like you're going to have to repeat Upsets 101. It seems you failed to grasp the basic concepts of the course during the recently completed first semester. 

It's all about perspective....I'm 2 for 2 depending on the lens you look through!

[markerickson]

What a difference in one season!  I attended NPU's game at Elmhurst last year with a couple friends, and saw an absolute stinker of a game.  Elmhurst won by 30 - 96-66.  Last night, Elmhurst could not compete against the visiting Vikings.  I know Elmhurst lost a great player in Ittounas, which brings me to my next point.

After having seen a majority of the CCIW teams, is there even a single player who might be considered AA caliber?  Having said that, I believe the CCIW is down overall this year.  I am highly suspicious of IWU being ranked so high.

Did anyone see the Elmhurst commercial on CBS at 7pm on Saturday right after the NFL game?  That commercial must have cost a lot of money! What student and/or parent would be influenced?  Just seemed to be a very odd marketing choice to me with zero ROI.

[Pat Coleman]

Did anyone see the Elmhurst commercial on CBS at 7pm on Saturday right after the NFL game?  That commercial must have cost a lot of money! What student and/or parent would be influenced?  Just seemed to be a very odd marketing choice to me with zero ROI.

Guessing that was a local commercial solely to your market and while it probably cost a lot by local standards, it almost certainly isn't a budget buster.

[lmitzel]

Did anyone see the Elmhurst commercial on CBS at 7pm on Saturday right after the NFL game?  That commercial must have cost a lot of money! What student and/or parent would be influenced?  Just seemed to be a very odd marketing choice to me with zero ROI.

Guessing that was a local commercial solely to your market and while it probably cost a lot by local standards, it almost certainly isn't a budget buster.

Working in advertising, this is probably true. The fact that it was postgame would have knocked the cost down as well. I would assume a good investment though given the amount of eyeballs.

[Gregory Sager]

After having seen a majority of the CCIW teams, is there even a single player who might be considered AA caliber?

Good question, Mark.

Both organizations that annually name D3 All-American teams -- D3hoops.com and the National Association of Basketball Coaches -- are reliant upon statistics and team finish for creating their A-A teams, for the simple reason that D3 is so vast that you can't give all of the roughly 2,000 players who start for D3 teams the eye test and then base your ballot solely upon it. So, since we don't know yet who's going to reach, say, the Elite Eight or Final Four, you have to look at the current D3 MBB statistics in order to get a feel for who is likely to be an All-American and who isn't.

The most important statistical category by far is scoring, or, more specifically, points per game. You very rarely find someone named to either set of All-American teams who isn't a big scorer. So ... where does the upper echelon of CCIW scorers rank among D3 in general?

Well, it's pretty eye-opening. The top scorer in the CCIW is Soren Richardson of Wheaton, and it isn't particularly close; he has a lead of more than four points per game over the runner-up, Tyler Knuth of Augustana. Richardson is averaging 20.9 points per game. The eye-opening part is that that's only good for a mere 47th place among D3 players. That's probably not good enough when you consider that D3hoops.com names 25 All-Americans and the NABC names 30. What's more, given that Wheaton is 3-14 overall and winless in CCIW play, it's likely that some D3hoops.com and/or NABC voters are going to dismiss Sorenson out of hand as the one guy on every bad team who does all of the scoring because his teammates are incompetent. (I think that that's an unfair and not entirely accurate way to look at both Sorenson and Wheaton, but that's how these things usually go.) As for Knuth, his 16.7 ppg ranks 181st in the nation. No other CCIW player besides those two is in the top 200, and the NCAA only lists the top 200 players in any category. It's a league that has a lot of balanced offenses; only Sorenson and Millikin's Lane Thomann are scoring more than a quarter of their team's points.

The second-most important category when it comes to A-A teams is rebounding, although it's significantly less important than scoring because of the natural imbalance that exists between guards and forwards when it comes to grabbing boards. Ryan Johnson of Carthage leads the CCIW in rebounding with an 8.5 rpg average. Where is he on the NCAA's national list for D3 rebounders? He's only 76th. The second-leading rebounder, Jacob Naber of Carroll, averages 7.8 rpg, which is good for 131st in D3. As was the case with ppg, there are only two CCIW players in the top 200 in rebounds per game.

The other categories matter much less, and even if they did matter more it should be no surprise by now that CCIW players don't rank well. Wheaton freshman Devin Martin leads the CCIW in assists with a 3.8 apg average. He ranks 125th in D3. Mason Funk of Illinois Wesleyan and DJ Wallace of North Park are tied for the CCIW blocks lead at 1.4 blocks per game -- but they are only two of several D3 players who rank 99th in that category.

There are two CCIW players who rank well enough in rate stats to be in the D3 top forty. Staishaun Kelley of Augustana, who averages 2.7 steals per game, is 26th in the nation, and Lance Nelson of North Park ranks 34th in D3 with a 2.55 assists to turnover ratio. Let's be honest; Kelley and Nelson are good players, but those categories by themselves aren't going to land someone onto an A-A team.

Shooting percentages are a sometimes-useful ancillary to the main categories of scoring and rebounding, although field goal shooting percentage is distorted by the fact that it's always dominated by big men who only rarely take shots that are more than five feet from the basket. The minimum required for NCAA statistics is five FG attempts per game, which is more than the CCIW's minimum of four; therefore, the CCIW's fourth-leading percentage shooter, Terrance Moncrief of North Central (a slashing guard who seldom attempts a shot from beyond the free-throw line), is the CCIW's top shooter according to D3 -- and his .544 is only good for 76th place. Likewise, D3 requires 2.5 trey attempts per game to qualify for trey shooting percentage honors, whereas the CCIW only requires two attempts. Thus, according to the NCAA, the top trey shooter in the league is Tagen Pearson of Elmhurst, whose .415 rate from downtown is only good for 45th place. (Knuth's right behind him in the 47th spot.)

But -- miracle of miracles! -- the CCIW does have a player highly ranked nationally in a category, and that's AJ Johnson of Carthage, whose .926 shooting from the charity stripe is 6th in the nation. However, the day that FT % is regarded as anything more than a nice bonus (no pun intended) to a résumé built upon scoring and rebounding (and maybe assists) is the day pigs will fly. If AJ Johnson gets All-American honors it'll be because of his 16.0 ppg, 5.3 rpg, and 3.7 apg -- and, while those numbers are very good, I doubt they'll get him onto an A-A team.

Interestingly, in his Q-cast interview with Wesleyan (CT) head coach Joe Reilly on Monday, Bob Quillman said of the Illinois Wesleyan senior class that there are "at least three of them All-Conference guys, maybe a couple of them All-Americans." Methinks that Bob donned the green-tinted spectacles when he said that, because, regardless of IWU's success as a team, none of the Titans are really putting up All-American numbers. The Titans are doing it by committee, similar to how the Vikings are doing it. If anybody's gonna put up All-American numbers it'll be AJ Johnson or one of his Carthage teammates; those guys hardly ever come off of the floor. Carthage has four players in the CCIW top twenty in minutes per game, whereas IWU and NPU have one each, and the five Firebirds starters plus Colton Sigel take all of the team's shots.

I'm not discounting the possibility that Nick Roper of IWU might make somebody's All-American team, strictly as an artifact of his being named to the D3hoops.com preseason team coupled with deep-into-the-tourney IWU team success. But his numbers are only close to reaching borderline in terms of being All-American numbers. As I said, the top player from a team that goes deep into the tourney can sometimes sneak in with borderline numbers (e.g., Jahn Hines of Christopher Newport last season). And two All-Americans? As I said, a bit of wishcasting on Bob's part.

TL;DR: Mark, I think that your suspicion is right about CCIW All-American candidates. I will say, though, that the league's reputation counts highly enough in national circles that it would be a plus for any CCIW player who's considered to be borderline.

Having said that, I believe the CCIW is down overall this year. I am highly suspicious of IWU being ranked so high.

I don't have an issue with IWU being ranked as high as it is, because the Titans have a very good record (15-2) that's been accumulated against a very good schedule.

But on the matter of the CCIW being down this season I definitely disagree. The CCIW had nowhere to go but up this season, since last season the CCIW finished with a losing cumulative non-conference record for the first time in half a century. This season, by contrast, the CCIW is back up to more familiar territory, posting a 50-31 (.631) cumulative record outside the circuit in November and December. Six of the nine teams in the league have overall winning records, and two of the underwater trio (7-10 Elmhurst and 6-11 Carroll) aren't awful, recordwise.

The only CCIW team that's having a genuinely horrible season is Wheaton (3-14, 0-8), and, honestly, Wheaton isn't really bad as much as it's simply very, very young. A bad team wouldn't have been eight seconds away from beating Illinois Wesleyan, as Wheaton was earlier this month, or have lost to North Park by only three, which is what happened back in mid-December, or have been within a single point of a pretty good Millikin team in the final 30 seconds of a game played just last night.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

I'll just say for us, in house, those kinds of numbers are not really part of the process.  We may look at numbers against the very best teams on the schedule to get a sense of what they can do, but, speaking for myself, as one of the people making the lists for D3hoops.com, I work hard to watch a couple of games from most of the players we'll be considering.

When we rely on things outside personal experience, it's quite often on all-conference teams.  Coaches know their conferences best and if we've got questions, their understanding of who's best is very informative.

I will say, a team like IWU, is going to suffer, because they spread everything around so much, it is much more difficult for an individual player to stand out enough to get selected.  Not that it's impossible, but often that's a sacrifice a player ends up making for team success.

Bob is always about the hyperbole.  I've come to recognize that when he says "that guy's an all american," he means they're good enough to be considered, which is usually true.

Of course, performance in the last couple weeks of the season does have some outsized weight - showing up in big moments is a good separator.

We do try very hard not to be entirely stats based.  I can think of a few times where defense got people on the list - Austin Butler of Whitman in 2019, made first team without mind-blowing stats.

The other element we use are regional panels voting on all-region teams, which give great guidance to final all-american selection.

As you said, it's impossible to see everyone we need to see at the level we need to see them to make selections solely on eye-test opinions, but we, at D3hoops.com, do as much as we possibly can to get as close to it as we can manage.

[iwu70]

Ryan, good info.  Thanks.

I agree about IWU -- as they have a 10 player rotation, lots of folks contributing but no big stud like Leritz a few years ago, or Crabtree the year they won it all.  Various players are valuable in different ways -- Bazzell for three-point shooting, Anderson for rebounding, and Hakim Williams for D, just filling up the stat line with steals, assists and the intangible things, big shots in key moments.  Roper is likely the only one that stands out a bit, given his numbers, his offense and his slashing to the basket.  This is the way that many Titan teams have done well over the years, with 4-5 players in double figures, or very close to it.  No huge stand-out.

They are fun to watch as good, fast-paced team basketball . . . and now with two excellent PGs in Niego and Fridman. 

As I've stated here, my main worry is inconsistency, and sometimes playing down to the level of their opponent.  Big games coming up vs. NPU and Carthage.  I'm still not entirely convinced that IWU is a top 5 team nationally.

As Greg has mentioned, 15-2 is pretty good given the schedule they've played to date. 

[Gregory Sager]

Good post, Ryan, and very informative, although a couple of your statements:

I'll just say for us, in house, those kinds of numbers are not really part of the process.

We do try very hard not to be entirely stats based.

... are contradictory. (Emphasis added, of course.) You're quite right about how All-Conference and All-Region honors enter into D3hoops.com's All-American selection process, which I neglected to mention to Mark, so thanks for adding that. My point remains, though, that if Mark or anybody else really wants to get a mid-season read on who is likely to make the D3hoops.com All-American team, the best way to do so is to look at the D3 ppg table on www.ncaa.org (and maybe the rpg table as well) and at the various conference standings on d3hoops.com.

You're also right about Bob's hyperbole, of course; after a quarter-century of bantering back and forth on this board, Bob and I have a pretty good understanding of how the other guy expresses himself. Which means that I'm pretty likely to see Bob's hyperbole where IWU is involved as being more pronounced than it is for other teams and other teams' players, and Bob's pretty likely to disagree with me regarding what I claim to be seeing in his posts.

[Flying Dutch Fan]

Love this AA conversation!  It got me thinking about how those stats (PPG and RPG) looked for the 25 members (5 teams of 5) of the 23-24 D3Hoops AA Teams.  So I went and looked up their ranking (NCAA dpoes top 200) for both metrics.  Only 10 of the 25 AA players were ranked in both PPG and RPG, and 4 of them were not ranked in either category.  "Curious" that the two best summed up rankings are on the 2nd and 4th teams.

This table shows those rankings as well as a sum of the two (I used 201 for anyone not ranked):

Player	School	PPG Rank	RPG Rank	SUM
Spencer Freedman	New York University	93	201	294
Josh Angle	Claremont-Mudd-Scripps	64	201	265
Logan Pearson	UW-Platteville	6	201	207
Jeff Hunter	Keene State	137	2	139
Jalen Overway	Calvin	50	24	74
Luke Chicone	John Carroll	84	201	285
Tyler Dearman	Guilford	44	201	245
Christian Parker	Mount Union	36	65	101
Dan Cook	St. John Fisher	28	47	75
Joshua Van Gorp	Central	5	31	36
Donyae Baylor-Carroll	Penn State-Harrisburg	91	201	292
Uchenna Egekeze	Calvin	201	201	402
Octavio Brito	Keene State	50	121	171
Davidson Hubbard	Hampden-Sydney	201	201	402
David Murray	Connecticut College	131	85	216
Vinny DeAngelo	Swarthmore	113	201	314
Jahn Hines	Christopher Newport	201	201	402
Brody Fox	UW-Stout	2	201	203
Aaron Nkrumah	Worcester State	43	109	152
Ja'Zere Noel	Rowan	15	44	59
Anthony Mazzeo	Case Western Reserve	61	201	262
Cortez Garland	Trine	201	201	402
Jeremiah Sparks	Oswego State	66	201	267
Dominic Dunn	Widener	201	169	370
Will Bartoszek	Hardin-Simmons	13	176	189

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

I'd just add there are always scorers in the Top 10 of PPG who never get a look for AA, just because of the level of competition they play during the year.  Stats may be an indicator, but stats alone aren't going to be super predictive.

[Gregory Sager]

Speaking of stats, since each CCIW team has now played roughly half of its games against non-con competition (which, of course, varies widely from one CCIW team to another in terms of opponent quality) and half of its games within the league, I thought it'd be interesting to chart how North Park is doing statistically. Given the team's rough start in the first 10 days of the season and how well it has done in CCIW play, I figured that there'd be s pretty big discrepancy between how the Vikings statistically measure up against the rest of the league overall and how they measure up within league play. This is what I found:

category	overall rank	CCIW rank
Offense ppg	3rd	4th
Defense ppg	7th	4th
Scoring margin	5th	3rd
FG %	6th	2nd
Opponent FG %	7th	9th
Trey FG %	6th	2nd
Opponent trey FG %	3rd	1st
Treys made	t-3rd	1st
Rebounds	6th	5th
Opponent rebs	6th	3rd
Offensive rebs	4th	3rd
Defensive rebs	9th	9th
Rebounding margin	7th	5th
Assists	2nd	1st
Turnover margin	1st	2nd
Assist/Turnover ratio	4th	3rd
Steals	1st	1st
Blocked shots	2nd	2nd

NPU is doing better in twelve different categories against CCIW teams only than they are overall. It's a snapshot, really, of how much better the Vikings have played as the season has gone along.

[Gregory Sager]

Love this AA conversation!  It got me thinking about how those stats (PPG and RPG) looked for the 25 members (5 teams of 5) of the 23-24 D3Hoops AA Teams.  So I went and looked up their ranking (NCAA dpoes top 200) for both metrics.  Only 10 of the 25 AA players were ranked in both PPG and RPG, and 4 of them were not ranked in either category.  "Curious" that the two best summed up rankings are on the 2nd and 4th teams.

This table shows those rankings as well as a sum of the two (I used 201 for anyone not ranked):


                                                           

Player	School	PPG Rank	RPG Rank	SUM
Spencer Freedman	New York University	93	201	294
Josh Angle	Claremont-Mudd-Scripps	64	201	265
Logan Pearson	UW-Platteville	6	201	207
Jeff Hunter	Keene State	137	2	139
Jalen Overway	Calvin	50	24	74
Luke Chicone	John Carroll	84	201	285
Tyler Dearman	Guilford	44	201	245
Christian Parker	Mount Union	36	65	101
Dan Cook	St. John Fisher	28	47	75
Joshua Van Gorp	Central	5	31	36
Donyae Baylor-Carroll	Penn State-Harrisburg	91	201	292
Uchenna Egekeze	Calvin	201	201	402
Octavio Brito	Keene State	50	121	171
Davidson Hubbard	Hampden-Sydney	201	201	402
David Murray	Connecticut College	131	85	216
Vinny DeAngelo	Swarthmore	113	201	314
Jahn Hines	Christopher Newport	201	201	402
Brody Fox	UW-Stout	2	201	203
Aaron Nkrumah	Worcester State	43	109	152
Ja'Zere Noel	Rowan	15	44	59
Anthony Mazzeo	Case Western Reserve	61	201	262
Cortez Garland	Trine	201	201	402
Jeremiah Sparks	Oswego State	66	201	267
Dominic Dunn	Widener	201	169	370
Will Bartoszek	Hardin-Simmons	13	176	189

Great work, FDF! Thanks!

[Gregory Sager]

I'd just add there are always scorers in the Top 10 of PPG who never get a look for AA, just because of the level of competition they play during the year.  Stats may be an indicator, but stats alone aren't going to be super predictive.

It goes without saying that if you play in the CNE or the SLIAC or the MASCAC or the UMAC you have a steep hill to climb in terms of making the D3hoops.com A-A team, but you're right that it should probably be said, anyway.

[Gregory Sager]

BTW, Ryan, great piece in Around the Nation. Very poignant, and very timely.