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Message: [QUOTE="ocoandasoc, post: 2640969, member: 3032"] I watch a lot of SEC WCBB. Here are my observations. The SEC does play a different style of basketball -- and for reasons I don't understand, the refs go along with it. But when the Tourney rolls around, the games may be called a bit differently. In general, SEC teams overall stress athleticism over shooting abilities. Even within the Conference a team like Missouri notched many of its SEC wins against more talented teams by spreading the floor and making threes. Few SEC teams do that, and so after 16 conference games most of the teams have forgotten how to defend it. (Georgia and Tennessee, for example, are helpless against highly disciplined teams that can shoot from the outside.) When you gear your offense and defense to play a certain way because most of your serious competition plays that way it leaves you vulnerable to teams that play a different way. WCBB is changing. Even ten years ago a physical, pressing SEC team could simply beat up and out-muscle many teams. Not anymore. Teams in the Power 5 -- and even the mid majors -- have become much more adept at beating the press and toughening up their rebounding. So the SEC teams have lost a bit of that advantage. Three of the best SEC coaches have their teams in the Sweet 16. These three teams also happen to have the best balance and ball movement. And that's no coincidence. If two of these teams reach the Final Eight, and one gets to the Final Four, it will be impossible to say that the SEC is "overrated." Several SEC teams were seeded too high. Why? Tennessee was seeded too high because of two bogus wins against a Wilson-less South Carolina and because, well because they're Tennessee. They were arguably the seventh best team in the SEC this year -- but they get a three seed? Then, once the Committee makes Tenn a three, how can you go lower than 4, 5, and 6 for the teams that beat them? (A&M, Missouri, LSU) Then they make Georgia a four, since they beat Missouri and A&M, even though they lost BADLY to every other ranked team they played. It was a real domino effect. The selection committee continues to overrate the Power Five conference teams. They forgive those teams lots of losses to other teams in their conference, but downgrade a mid-major for losing to another conference team. Buffalo and Central Michigan, for example, had 9 losses between them, and three of those were to each other! CMU beat two of the three Power Five conference teams they played and has now won 22 of the last 23 games it has played, including beating the Big 10 champ on their home court by 18. Buffalo also went two and one against Power Five teams. (Heck, the third-best team in the MAC went two and oh against Power Five teams!) But doesn't the "eye test" come into play? Nope. Because the selection committee doesn't watch that many mid-major games. AP and RPI ratings come into play here as well. But in odd ways. The AP starts with a set of assumptions. This year, SEC teams were ranked highly. Most of them played soft ooc schedules so they stayed in the Top 25. AP voters make sure to stack the initial ratings with teams from the Power Five based on last year's results and this year's forecasts. Then AP voters seem to designate one or two mid-majors to put in the 18 to 25 slots. (This year Marquette was ranked 16th before playing a game, but gave way to Villanova and Green Bay. (CMU checked in at #35 in the last AP tally, Buffalo not at all, as AP voters inexplicably chose Belmont at 23 and Mercer at 25.) ESPN doesn't fare much better. In his late February ranking of mid-majors Graham Hays had CMU and Buffalo ranked 9th and 10th. With the RPI, mid-majors get less credit for the games they win than some Power Five conference teams get for games they lose. But when Buffalo showed up with a high RPI ranking many said it wan an anomaly, and they barely made the Tourney. SEC fans are eager to use the argument that if some of these other teams played in the SEC they'd have a lot more losses. That might or might not be true. But, look at it this way. If CMU or Buffalo had been SEC teams (or any Power Five for that matter) and lost four or five more games they would have been seeded between 4th and 8th, not 11th! [/QUOTE]

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