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Message: [QUOTE="Plebe, post: 2607285, member: 6927"] The margin between their resumes is razor-thin, when you get into the nitty-gritty and team sheets. Louisville has two losses, but one of those losses is to UConn, which for comparison purposes can be ignored. Louisville's other loss (to Florida State) and Miss State's lone loss (to South Carolina) are roughly equivalent and mutually canceling. So it comes down to a comparison of quality wins. [LIST] [*]Miss St has 11 top-50 (RPI) wins — plus quality wins over Oklahoma St and Arizona St, both probable tournament teams. [*]Louisville has 13 top-50 (RPI) wins (one of them over #50 Miami). [*]Miss St has 7 top-25 (RPI) wins — plus wins over #26 Georgia (a likely top-16 team per committee) and #28 LSU. [*]Louisville has 7 top-25 (RPI) wins. [*]Miss St has 2 wins over the committee's top 10 (#6 Oregon and #7 South Carolina). [*]Louisville has 3 wins over the committee's top 10 (#6 Oregon and twice over #4 Notre Dame). [/LIST] If the committee is weighting the entire body of work evenly, it might just come down to the fact that Louisville's two wins over ND are better than anything that Miss St has on its resume. I say "evenly," though, because the committee has a certain reputation for not penalizing teams too heavily for what happens in their conference tournament. And if they're paying attention to how dominant vs. how close a team's body of wins have been, there's no doubt that Mississippi State was the more dominant team. Their only close calls were over Missouri and Oklahoma State. Louisville had extremely close wins over Ohio State, South Dakota State, Georgia Tech, Duke, Virginia Tech, and NC State. To sum up: Louisville may get the slight edge on a comparison of marquee wins. Miss St may get the edge if the committee is swayed, even if subconsciously, by overall degree of dominance and/or by a tendency to be more forgiving of conference tournament setbacks. [/QUOTE]

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