NCAA championships by opponents’ total seeds | Page 2 | The Boneyard

NCAA championships by opponents’ total seeds

Tenspro2002 said:
I guess the argument is 1 seeds "deserve" an easy path, and higher seeds like us don't.

The argument gets a lot weaker when you consider that we beat everyone by 13 points or more and none of the games were competitive inside the last TV timeout.

"UConn was lucky they didn't have to face Kansas [who lost to a team we beat by 23], UCLA [who lost to a team we beat by 28], Houston [who lost to a team we beat by 13], or Bama [who lost to a team we beat by 17]."
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This is right on point. We destroyed the field anyway you look at it. No matter how anyone wants to diminish what this years team accomplished it will not change my mind. This was one of the greatest runs ever since the NCAA tourney expanded to 64 teams PERIOD!!
 
ConnHuskBask said:
It's fair to say some of the tourney runs have opened up for us, to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

That said, the only people that seem to care are Kentucky, Kansas and Syracuse fans, with to some degree actually makes it more enjoyable knowing how much it tweaks them.
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I think we faced a number one seed in all but one of our national championships. Is there a “0” seed that we missed?
 
If I'm interpreting the criticism correctly, a Kansas fan is criticizing our title run this year because instead of facing overall #1 seed Kansas we had to play the team that beat Kansas.
 
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The ridiculous thing is that people would have an easier time criticizing our run if they examined luck that fell our way during the games themselves:
  • Ducas freak injury on St. Mary's
  • Timme severe foul trouble early in the 2nd half (#3 and #4 could have gone either way)
  • Nijel Pack's missing shoes

The raw seed number argument is pretty weak, especially considering we ended up far and away #1 in KenPom, with the #3 offense (and we beat the #1 offense) and #7 defense (we beat #4 and #10 defense, as well as #3 and #8 during the regular season). In fact, during our run, we beat Kenpom #76, #13, #22, #8, #24, #14. Several of our opponents were under-seeded, which is why they advanced as far as they did.
 
Rocktheworld said:
Lmao just pathetic

But I mean do they have a literal single other thing to be proud of in Kansas?
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I took a picture next to the world's biggest ball of twine in KS. It was pretty incredible
 
Seeding is still just other people's subjective opinions, even if those people are given the title of "committee". Every year there are a handful of "top" teams however you define that. All this says is that the chattering class was wrong...again. Running though the bottom halves of 16 team leagues will put up gaudy records. There hasn't been a single NCAA champion that hasn't beat at least one of the "really good teams" to get there. People whine about playing Ga Tech, Butler, #8 Kentucky, and SDSU in the finals but fail to talk about beating Duke, Kentucky, Florida, and Gonzaga to get there.

The 2023 destroyed the early non-conference, including Alabama, Gonzaga was another top team, destroyed them too. Kansas couldn't make the game, why does anyone think they were more likely to beat this team than Purdue. I don't hear anyone whining about us missing Purdue. It's all sour grapes. Every team in the field had it's chance to meet UConn in the final if not before and failed. boo hoo.
 
FfldCntyFan said:
If I'm interpreting the criticism correctly, a Kansas fan is criticizing our title run this year because instead of facing overall #1 seed Kansas we had to play the team that beat Kansas.
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Danny Manning says ST FuP
 
FfldCntyFan said:
If I'm interpreting the criticism correctly, a Kansas fan is criticizing our title run this year because instead of facing overall #1 seed Kansas we had to play the team that beat Kansas.
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Nobody that watched that tournament thinks Kansas would have beaten us. Not even Bill Self. No one was beating us.
 
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Hoophound said:
Nobody that watched that tournament thinks Kansas would have beaten us. Not even Bill Self. No one was beating us.
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I know. I was just pointing out how ridiculous the notion was.
 
CL82 said:
I think we faced a number one seed in all but one of our national championships. Is there a “0” seed that we missed?
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@superjohn

No need to take the facts personal. Nor does who we played detract from the accomplishments.

We got a fortuitous break to play two 5 seeds this year, and then played two 8 seeds for titles in Butler and Kentucky. I believe in 2011 it was the first title game to not feature a 1 or 2 seed. So, if anything our title game opponents have been statistical outliers.
 
ConnHuskBask said:
@superjohn

No need to take the facts personal. Nor does who we played detract from the accomplishments.

We got a fortuitous break to play two 5 seeds this year, and then played two 8 seeds for titles in Butler and Kentucky. I believe in 2011 it was the first title game to not feature a 1 or 2 seed. So, if anything our title game opponents have been statistical outliers.
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I just disagree with you. There’s nothing personal about it. If you have seen, there’s actually a lot of charts that show that the data supports that.
 
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I have a few tables I am working on for this discussion (or may start a new one). Should be ready tomorrow.
 
Get a Job said:
It's not remotely ludicrous. There are many instances where the winner in one round is less equipped to beat the next opponent than the team they just beat would have been. Maybe the winner just had a great/lucky night. Maybe the other team just had a bad/unlucky night. Injuries, sickness, matchups, coaches' game plans, I could go on.

If you are saying that the fact that Team A just beat Team B is sufficient evidence to say that Team A is the more difficult opponent for Team C, then THAT is ludicrous.
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So your argument is the team that LOST is the better team? Ok, makes sense.
 
CL82 said:
I just disagree with you. There’s nothing personal about it. If you have seen, there’s actually a lot of charts that show that the data supports that.
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Adding up the seeds faced en route to a title from 1st round on is a pretty pointless exercise, that will almost assuredly favor the lower seeds that have won.

A better exercise is to probably add the seeds from the regional final, final 4 and title.

2023 - 3, 5, 5
2014 - 4, 1, 8
2011 - 5, 4, 8
2004 - 8, 1, 3
1999 - 10, 4, 1
 
Chin Diesel said:
I agree, and I think most "experts" agreed by the end of the tourney that UConn was far and away the best team in the country. The narrative wasn't "how did a 4-seed win it all?", it was "how did a team this good lose 8 games and get a 4-seed?".

Here's another example. A 13-seed. Their path would be 4, 5, 1, 2, 1, 1. Total of 14.

UConn going chalk this year as a 4-seed would have been - 13, 5, 1, 2, 1, 1. Total of 23.
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That’s with the guys on the board who understood the potential of this team were frustrated about. Are Big East season was insane .
Finishing as low as we did tied for 4th (only because Cooley pulled the rug out from under his team who pretty much quit ) . Otherwise we had to rally to get into 5th position. That was a head scratcher.
Part of it was the way Big East games are officiated .
Tenspro2002 said:
I guess the argument is 1 seeds "deserve" an easy path, and higher seeds like us don't.

The argument gets a lot weaker when you consider that we beat everyone by 13 points or more and none of the games were competitive inside the last TV timeout.

"UConn was lucky they didn't have to face Kansas [who lost to a team we beat by 23], UCLA [who lost to a team we beat by 28], Houston [who lost to a team we beat by 13], or Bama [who lost to a team we beat by 17]."
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Punkbo said:
@REB1094 seems very logical. Is this type of behavior appropriate for this board or should he be banned?
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The only team with a shot was UCLA. at full strength, however they weren’t do it’s a moot point .
Houston was also banged up and at full strength it could have been another interesting game.
Kansas I wanted revenge for 1995 and 2016. We never forget, I wanted to hear the UConn fans chant overrated as I believe we would have beaten them easily . We already blew out a better Alabama team than the one they had in late March.
Actually the matchup with St Mary’s and San Diego were both tougher in theory than some of those teams BB is a game of matchups or sophisticated rock paper scissors.
I was also worried about Pitino wanting a tock fight . Apparently it wasn’t in their DNA When he decided to play their normal game . I started to breathe easier.
 
The salient point is neither how easy or hard our various paths were. For a team that gets very few chances but succeeds you could look at their paths and maybe conclude whether they caught breaks or not.

For a program that gets many chances you would expect the law of averages to apply. Times when the path was hard, times when we caught a break, times when the breaks went against us. These all have applied to us, as an elite program that accumulated many chances.

The unusual pattern for us is that we caught mainly bad breaks in the nineties, while the past two decades we have have had some good breaks. The bottom line is that we accumulated five championships because we were elite and in the hunt enough for the law of averages to result in achieving that many.
 
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ConnHuskBask said:
Adding up the seeds faced en route to a title from 1st round on is a pretty pointless exercise, that will almost assuredly favor the lower seeds that have won.

A better exercise is to probably add the seeds from the regional final, final 4 and title.

2023 - 3, 5, 5
2014 - 4, 1, 8
2011 - 5, 4, 8
2004 - 8, 1, 3
1999 - 10, 4, 1
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I would say that is more random. If a team got a buy into the regional final, there, chances of winning increase dramatically. But even using that method, you still see us defeating a number one seed in 3 to 5 years. That would seem to be contrary to the notion that we somehow “lucked” our way to the championship.
 
Get a Job said:
Seed total is a very sketchy metric for judging the difficulty of a team's road to the championship. If we're being honest, we have to admit that this year's path was super easy. Sure, the team was a cot damn monster truck and probably could have rolled over 6 1-seeds, but the fact remains the bracket broke quite easy for us this year. Where we could have faced 1, 2, 1, 1 we faced 8, 3, 5, 5.
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This is terrible analysis.

We're not talking lab conditions here, where every 1 seed is a 1 seed and every 4 seed is a 4 seed. The level of human error built into the system before the first game tips is already enormous. And that statement is true whether brackets hold to seed or not.

There is no such thing as an easy path or a hard path. Teams 100% control their own destiny. This isn't the sad "Belle of the Ball" "let's all vote on who's most popular" pre-teen drama queen BS that is college football. The moment you start talking luck, you've already left reality and wandered into the fairytale world of what-ifs and who-done-its and gone over to ways no real man should be caught dead arguing.
 
The proper response to that argument is always "Nannie Nannie booboo"... Losers get to argue about the notional "best"; winners get to bask in the actual "winning".
 
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