Can anyone explain why Charlie Creme has Cal a 4 seed? Cal has 9 losses and only 2 good wins at Stanford and ASU. AP has Cal at 25 and USA has Cal below 30. I think Creme (and the selection committee) are vastly overrating Pac 12 ball.
Couple of points.
1. First, again Creme is not necessarily saying that Cal is one of the 16 best teams, he is simply trying to add up a wide range of factors and guess as to how the selection committee will see them, and he may be totally wrong as the committee may decide that Cal is a #5 or #6 seed.
2. When I saw that Cal was rated #32 by Sagarin, I thought Charlie was way off base. But then you add up the strong points (or lack of them) of the teams in the 15-16 or so spots ahead of them and you see why maybe he might turn to the Bears as likely the last #4, though it seems to me two other teams would be better choices. Six of the teams just ahead and Princeton at #8 are mid majors, and as good as these teams may be, Creme knows that the committee almost never puts a mid major in those top 4 seeds unless maybe they have one of the best players in the country on the squad. Of the P5 squads in the 15-16 spots ahead, many of them have sore points. Oklahoma has 11 losses, and Texas may be coming around, but Creme knows that the Horns went 9-9 in a conference that despite what brain-dead RPI may say was the pits this year.
3. So who gets moved in ahead of Cal? Clearly you would look at the projected #5 seeds. But one of them is Princeton, and though the Tigers would be my choice, they are still a mid major, so you need to chuck'em. The other three teams are Mississippi State, North Carolina, and Ohio State to compare with Cal. The Bulldogs have the best record among the four teams, but the schedule was very bad in the weak SEC and they had no T25 wins, so no 'dogs.
North Carolina at #14 in Sagarin and at 24-8 seems like a better choice to me than Cal as they also have a better T25 and T50 record and all of their losses were to top 50 teams, unlike Cal's 3 losses outside the T50. The one big advantage that Cal has over the Heels was getting to a conference final over UNC's quarters loss to a much tougher Louisville team in OT. I'm kind of wondering if Charlie moved Cal up in anticipation of a win over Stanford in the PACT final and just forgot to move them back after they went down.
The other team that seems to be a better choice as a #4 seed is Ohio State, at 23-10, a #20 Sags rating, a similar 13-5 conference record to Cal's, and like Cal a conference tournament runner-up. The Buckeyes have by far the best T50 record, but they also have 2 losses outside the T50. Although like Cal they are 12-4 in their last 16 games, they are also 8-2 in the last 10, better than Cal's 6-4. A better choice than the Bears, though maybe a little behind UNC.
But Creme is also looking at indexes that I would not think to look at because they are worthless, and maybe he saw something in RPI that some of the dimmer bulbs on the committee might look at.
