No, Iowa would not have finished 5th. LSU would have been 5th in the Big10 though. From a National relevance, the SEC is down,they only had 3 teams in the top 16 and I think LSU will have a tough time advancing today.
I don’t know how anyone but a hyperpartisan could watch Georgia and Iowa and see anything but two teams separated by homecourt advantage.
No but where am I wrong?
Honestly, I haven’t paid enough attention to Michigan to know what they have. We’ll see.
Iowa is 3-0 against SEC teams in the last 4 NCAA tournaments, including dominant wins over Sophie Cunningham's Missouri and Rhyne Howard's Kentucky.
Lol this is quite a hot take. SC didn’t exactly throttle Georgia at home either. Not sure why some SC fans feel the need to diminish Clark/Iowa.
Interesting comparison. Both had Cinderella(ish) tournament runs but haven’t accomplished much aside from that. Barnes has done a better job recruiting and appears to have Arizona well set up for the future so we’ll see how it pans out. Neighbors missed the tournament altogether this year and appears to be on a downward trend.
“Hey, Georgia’s almost keeping it inside double digits” is different than “wow. Will Iowa pull this out or not?”
Georgia also kept it close at home vs. SC until the 4th. They're not chopped liver. Iowa would finish much better than 5th in the SEC.
Iowa loses at Georgia. Heck, they might have lost with a normal home crowd instead of 119 decibels in the final seconds.
Yep. Stanford was inconsistent all year. My bracket is a mess but I got this pick right.
Iowa actually sold out all sessions in 53 minutes when tickets went on sale. The ESPN capacity for NCAA Tournament is wrong, the setup required by the NCAA removed all floor seating except for disabled persons.
I knew something was different. SC sold out the entire lower bowl for their sessions plus yesterday there were a couple hundred upstairs. Listed though, it only had our attendance at under 11,000. They took all of our floor seating also.
Did Iowa sell all of its allotment or were all tickets sold? Tournament games are NCAA games, not Iowa or UConn or South Carolina games. Ticket allotments have to be set aside for each team in the pod. If the team doesn’t sell its allotment the school can buy them and give them away or turn them back in to be sold. It’s almost impossible for every seat to be filled for this reason.
The rule of thumb for home-court advantage is that it's worth about three points. Massey specifically calculates it for each team and comes up with 2.7 for Iowa. Iowa won by eight, so I think it's possible to see something other than just home-court advantage. I'm not suggesting home-court advantage hurt but it's not obvious that it made the difference.
