Michigan bball has the 4th best pair of top wins according to BPI

Submitted by Human Torpedo on

Our wins at Texas and at Michigan State rank 4th hardest caliber of any two wins achieved by any team in Division I. Behind only St. John's (Duke, at Nova); Ohio State (Michigan State, at Purdue); and Virginia (at Duke, at Florida State). It confounds me how poor we've been playing lately given this

 

wayneandgarth

February 8th, 2018 at 5:46 PM ^

Nice but doesn't matter in the least if its unfathonable that we could repeat those playing anywhere the level we are currently playing.

Thankfully there is some time to turn this thing around.  Livers will be out a couple games but hopefully others will step up their game.

Richard75

February 8th, 2018 at 6:41 PM ^

Exactly. It’s like the last-five-years data people kept posting during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons. It’s a misleading way of framing things to make it sound like the team is elite.

A more honest stat is B1G efficiency margins. Michigan’s is 3.3, which is behind Nebraska (4.5) and Penn State (3.4). In fact, U-M is much closer to Northwestern (-1.4) than it is to MSU (13.9).

In other words, what we have to wrap our heads around isn’t what the team is supposedly capable of. It’s the fact that, qualitatively, this arguably isn’t a tournament team (although it is resume-wise).

TrueBlue2003

February 9th, 2018 at 2:58 PM ^

gotta be unlikely.

The crazy thing is, St. John's lost 11 games in a row and could still make the tourney.  They're 70th in RPI right now, have played a brutal schedule and if they can finish something like 5-1 the rest of the way, they'd be at 17-14 with metrics that would compare pretty well to Vandy last year which made it with a 17-14 regular season record.

That would have to be a record if they were an at large bid with an 11-game losing streak.

bronxblue

February 8th, 2018 at 6:20 PM ^

What seems to have happened is the team stopped hitting 3s.  That happens sometimes to teams like Michigan, and to their credit they won 2 of those 3 games.  But they have to be better in order to make any hay in the tournament.  

Wolverheel

February 9th, 2018 at 4:18 PM ^

@MSU is practically the same as @Tennessee. One spot higher on Kenpom, but the Tennessee game was the biggest game in a decade in a stadium that fits 6,000 more people, whereas the MSU game was criticized by their fans for a subpar atmosphere. 

 

I'd say a neutral win over #13 is extremely similar to a road win vs #38. 

mgobaran

February 9th, 2018 at 8:03 AM ^

Well St. Johns was 0-11 in conference and then jumped to 1st on this list with wins over Nova/Duke. So it doesn't shock me that you can be rated this high on this list and be inconsistent. 

MGoGoGo

February 9th, 2018 at 2:00 PM ^

Not only that, but MBB has the best trio of wins for games played on a Tuesday when the moon was full and the relative humidity was less than 40%.

/s