Tennessee 2025, part 2 | Page 13 | The Boneyard

Tennessee 2025, part 2

It's mind boggling to see the late season decline to the dungeon. No matter how you slice it, it's the coach(s). They have talent that many coaches envy, I'm sure. As we have all seen, talent does not win games, especially in team sports.
The only reason I want them in the tourney is to see them go down, once again. Oh, did I say I am NOT a LV fan?😎
 
I would not even put them in the tourney at 16-13, this is getting to be like any football team at .500 gets to a bowl game. At least there you can say it is about a bunch of companies wanting to have a corporate party so they sponsor a bowl and don't care about the quality of the teams. But now the NCAA is thinking of expanding it, we don't have enough teams already. We have the WNIT for some of the lesser teams. I remember when it was just 16 teams. If your goal is to find a champion if you have the top 16 you will have the best one. Thus look at football, 4 was enough, then 8, then 12, then 16, then 100. When do you stop.
 
MainefanSC said:
It's mind boggling to see the late season decline to the dungeon. No matter how you slice it, it's the coach(s). They have talent that many coaches envy, I'm sure. As we have all seen, talent does not win games, especially in team sports.
The only reason I want them in the tourney is to see them go down, once again. Oh, did I say I am NOT a LV fan?😎
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I'd rather they NOT make the tournament. But that's not gonna happen. So next best thing is they lose in the 1st round.
 
Ralph said:
If your goal is to find a champion if you have the top 16 you will have the best one. Thus look at football, 4 was enough, then 8, then 12, then 16, then 100. When do you stop.
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The NCAA women's tourney is basically still a 16 team tourney with Top 16 hosting the first round. The favorites usually go 14-2, or better in rounds 1&2.

The driver of 128 teams in bball and 32 teams in football is simply TV money. These ridiculous numbers create 64 more bball games, and 32 more football games to broadcast.

That's hours of programming in an era where live sports is the only thing that generates TV ratings.

#3 v #126 still gets more viewers than a Seinfeld rerun...plus generates alumni donations for #126.😁

On Tennesee: I've been a reluctant defender, and they will be in tourney as 11 of 16 losses to Q1 teams. If they end up losing their FR&Soph recruits to the portal however, and have to rely on new transfers again next year, they may be forced to make the coaching change.
 
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packwrap said:
The NCAA women's tourney is basically still a 16 team tourney with Top 16 hosting the first round. The favorites usually go 14-2, or better in rounds 1&2.

The driver of 128 teams in bball and 32 teams in football is simply TV money. These ridiculous numbers create 64 more bball games, and 32 more football games to broadcast.

That's hours of programming in an era where live sports is the only thing that generates TV ratings.

#3 v #126 still gets more viewers than a Seinfeld rerun...plus generates alumni donations for #126.😁

On Tennesee: I've been a reluctant defender, and they will be in tourney as 11 of 16 losses to Q1 teams. If they end up losing their FR&Soph recruits to the portal however, and have to rely on new transfers again next year, they may be forced to make the coaching change.
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Lots of talk about the incoming freshmen class renegeing. Can they if ( as is likely) Kim is retained?
 
Phil said:
Tennessee has 5 wins against Quad one. Only 13 teams have more.

Tennessee has 16 games against quad one. No one has more.
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Oregon’s win over Maryland last night moved its NET to 25 making UCLA’s home win over the Ducks a Quad 1 win. UCLA now has 15-1 record in Quad 1 games and plays another Quad 1 game against Washington this morning.
 
UT vs quad 1:

Bama +11 (But see loss last night-12)
Kentucky + 2 (without Key)
UGA +5
Miss St + 10
Stanford + 3

The above is the argument for UT in dance.

Of the 11 Quad 1 losses only 3 were by single digits. 4 were all time humiliations.

Their best resume piece is probably playing a 2 point game va Texas. Otherwise it's been a fairly mortifying season for UT.

Honestly based on prior Tennessee decision making she should be fired.
 
Phil said:
Tennessee has 5 wins against Quad one. Only 13 teams have more.

Tennessee has 16 games against quad one. No one has more.
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I don’t know if the NET needs tweaking, but there’s an opportunity here to possibly improve it. I’m not okay with…it is what it is. If that’s the case…why implement it in the first place? Of course, it has an intended purpose. Here’s my curiosity.

While you don’t want to penalize a team for playing a competitive schedule…at some point losing games shouldn’t be OVERLY rewarded. It’s the OVERLY part that may need tweaking.

I think what complicates the “eye test” for TN is the number of losses. However, they are in one of the SUPER conferences with built-in Q1 games, with a relatively new coach and young players. They probably should have scheduled more OOC cupcake games like Mulkey to compensate. UCONN has the opposite problem. It’s almost impossible to schedule that many Q1 games because of their conference. How much do you want to penalize such a team?

My eye test is this. Doesn’t really matter if they seed TN at 6 or 9. This range is probably a good reflection of not knowing which TN team is going to show up…and for how long during the course of 40 minutes. No computer ranking can figure that out with any consistency. That makes them (and some others) dangerous…imo. I don’t think they’re going to go deep in the tourney, but they can bust a lot of brackets…opening the door for some unlikely Elite 8 or final 4 matchups.
 
LwrcasefaN said:
I think what complicates the “eye test” for TN is the number of losses. However, they are in one of the SUPER conferences with built-in Q1 games, with a relatively new coach and young players. They probably should have scheduled more OOC cupcake games like Mulkey to compensate. UCONN has the opposite problem. It’s almost impossible to schedule that many Q1 games because of their conference. How much do you want to penalize such a team?
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You've nailed yet another problem with the super conferences.

As people catch on to your salient observation, teams in the two super conferences will realize they ought to schedule more cupcakes. Not decent mid-major teams but bottom of the barrel. If this catches on, it will obviously be horrendous for UConn, but it will also be challenging for good teams in mid-major conferences who would like a chance at an at-large bid and not have to count on winning their conference tournament. Who of the top team will play them?

Among other things, it will make the first half of the season almost unwatchable. At its extreme there will be no competitive games involving good teams until conference season starts. Is that really what we want?

Incentives matter and sometimes it takes a while for the incentives to get enacted but this would not be a good road to go down.
 
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Phil said:
I agree. They are number 21 in NET, which is fairly close to the Massey rating of 23. That would be a six seed but
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You are fixated on this idea that the NET should directly correspond to the committee rankings, even though they’ve been explicit that they are not used in that way. And if you look at Creme's rankings, there definitely is not a 1-to-1 correlation.
 
MainefanSC said:
It's mind boggling to see the late season decline to the dungeon.
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If you look at their schedule, it's not.

Suppose Villanova had their final 10 against #3, #4, #17, #11, #6, #5 plus Texas A&M, Alabama, Georgia, Mizzou -- how many games would they win?
And yet no one bats an eye that they are a projected 9 seed.
 
After watching a few Tenn games this year and especially their tournament opener against Alabama, I concluded their full court press leaves a lot to be desired. Whether it’s technique, execution or athletic ability, it barely causes any disruption to the opponent’s offensive flow.

Especially yesterday, Alabama got more easy bunnies off of breaking the press then the Lady Vols got turnovers.

If Kim retains her job and commits to this style next year, she really ought to ask Geno and CD for some private tutoring during the offseason on how to make it work better.
 
nwhoopfan said:
Further proof the NET is BUSTED. I don't care how tough their strength of schedule. You CANNOT be 16-13 and be in the Top 25 of any ranking system. It's ludicrous. How about try winning more than barely over 50% of your games.

edit--might as well put all the SEC teams in the NET Top 25, regardless of record, leaves room for 9 teams from other conferences. Maybe leave out Arkansas since they only went 1-15 in conference, but everybody else is in.
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+100000

Last year, it was so obvious UConn was one of the top 2-3 teams in the nation. After the pasting of SC in February in the regular season, it was pretty clear. But the lack of "quad 1" wins kept us as a 2 seed. Some kept saying "UConn doesn't deserve a 1 seed cuz of the metrics". My answer to that was "then the metrics are wrong".

Now we have Tennessee. Everyone keeps pointing to the metrics - NET, Quad 1 games, RPI, etc. But the system is broken if a 16-13 team who is 8-10 in their last 12 games and on a 7 game losing streak "deserves" a 7 or 8 seed. And the designation of Quad 1 games is a joke if tennessee has 5 quad 1 wins. Their only wins over ranked teams were during the regular season - Kentucky and Alabama.

Yeah the "experts" wet themselves over how strong the SEC was. I get that. But why are they rewarded for the strongest SOS and highest number of Quad 1 "games" (16) if the lost just about all of them? If the eye test and logic tells you that a 16-13 team is not deserving of a high seed, then something is wrong with the metrics. Just my $.02.
 
Phil said:
You've nailed yet another problem with the super conferences.

As people catch on to your salient observation, teams in the two super conferences will realize they ought to schedule more cupcakes. Not decent mid-major teams but bottom of the barrel. If this catches on, it will obviously be horrendous for UConn, but it will also be challenging for good teams in mid-major conferences who would like a chance at an at-large bid and not have to count on winning their conference tournament. Who of the top team will play them?

Among other things, it will make the first half of the season almost unwatchable. At its extreme there will be no competitive games involving good teams until conference season starts. Is that really what we want?

Incentives matter and sometimes it takes a while for the incentives to get enacted but this would not be a good road to go down.
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Case in point LSU. Not hurting them at all, is it?
 
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cabbie191 said:
After watching a few Tenn games this year and especially their tournament opener against Alabama, I concluded their full court press leaves a lot to be desired. Whether it’s technique, execution or athletic ability, it barely causes any disruption to the opponent’s offensive flow.

Especially yesterday, Alabama got more easy bunnies off of breaking the press then the Lady Vols got turnovers.

If Kim retains her job and commits to this style next year, she really ought to ask Geno and CD for some private tutoring during the offseason on how to make it work better.
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I noticed this as well. I think the front half of the press is actually good. It does force some mistakes and TO's. but once the team crosses half court, their defense is pretty average. I will say this - their offensive rebounding is elite. The number of points they get off O-boards and put backs must be close to 10 points per game.
 
No, not at all but if you misunderstood perhaps someone else did as well so I'll explain further.

I'm not at all enamored with the NET. It reminds me of RPI, which is horrendously bad early in the season and gets better and better during the season and ends up merely being bad. I don't know a lot about the internal mechanisms of NET, but it's my observation it's not quite as bad as RPI. It's silly early on, but gets better. It may be better than RPI; I wouldn't be surprised. I'd love to see someone do an analysis, and I'm well aware that it's only one of the dozen things the committee looks at. But it does have an attribute that some of the other factors do not — it's well defined. I'm sure the "observable component" carries a lot of weight, possibly more than NET (at least at the margins), but six people will have six different conclusions about the observable component for any particular team. That's not the case with NET. We can argue about the weight, but nobody can come in and disagree about the value.

I'm also well aware that the committee doesn't even use Massey, but it's my informal observation that it's a better single metric than almost anything else. I use Massey as a jumping off point for a full season metric, but mentioned NET first because more people are familiar with it. The fact that both are close to each other suggests it's a little less likely that one of the other is an outlier. And I use those two metrics as us starting point for a rough season wide metric, then recognize that the selection committee has more recency bias than full season metrics, and made a crude adjustment to estimate where I think the committee will end up. I used that to agree with YOU that TN is unlikely to fall to the 10-11 range.

Given that entire thrust of my post was to pick the value different than the NET value, I can't comprehend how you would conclude I'm "fixated on this idea that the NET should directly correspond to the committee rankings,". if anything I'm making the opposite point.
 
cabbie191 said:
After watching a few Tenn games this year and especially their tournament opener against Alabama, I concluded their full court press leaves a lot to be desired. Whether it’s technique, execution or athletic ability, it barely causes any disruption to the opponent’s offensive flow.
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There are multiple things you want to happen if you adopt an approach to full-court press virtually hundred percent of the time. Some of those things are obvious and you hope they happened early in the game — eg. 10 second violations and turnovers, but even if those things don't early, the ace in the hole is that you want to wear down the other team so they are exhausted and you can mop up at the end of the game.

My oversimplified analysis is Caldwell found that effective against D2 teams and non-elite D1 teams, but underestimated the superior conditioning of the elite teams. The fourth quarter blowouts almost never happened when your team is playing arguably the toughest schedule in the country. What works against the Little sisters of the poor doesn't work as well against well conditioned teams
 
triaddukefan said:
If I were Cooper, I would have told Coach to kick rocks .. .. well I would wait til they got back to Knoxville
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I recalll …. Someone made the kind of pass that you only make when you’re screwing around on the playground. It was clear to me that that player was not in the right mindset and needed to be taken out.

Not sure if that was Cooper but it all fits together.
 
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Vowelguy said:
I recalll …. Someone made the kind of pass that you only make when you’re screwing around on the playground. It was clear to me that that player was not in the right mindset and needed to be taken out.

Not sure if that was Cooper but it all fits together.
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It was Cooper. I had the same reaction as you: playground pass. The camera went to Caldwell who had a “what was that?” look on her face.

Curious about status of Copper.
 
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