Saturday, March 13, 2010

Falcon Men's Basketball Review--quality of wins, losses

Ok, so now that the games have ended, I'll take some time looking back at the season to see what we might  find out and what we might learn for the year ahead.  I was thinking about the pre-conference schedule, and how we look at those teams when we play them and don't always know what we were facing.  I thought it might be interesting to look back and see how those teams finished up.

Note that I did the analysis a couple of days ago, so the RPIs might not reflect the latest tournament results.

Let's look at our wins and losses for the season.



So, what can we learn from this?

BG's best win of the season was clearly the win against Kent, both because that was the best team we beat and because it was on the road.

The next best win was over St. Louis, who actually ended up being a pretty good team, finishing 4th in the tough A-10.  That was a quality win for the program.  Those are our only two wins against teams with top 100 RPIs.  Next, you have the win over OU, though, in fairness, that was a different team than the one currently ripping through the Q.  (Sidenote:  what was stopping Bassett from playing like this all year?  Just wondering).

On the whole, however, we won games we should have won.  Only 4 teams we beat ended up with .500 records...Kent, St. Louis, OU and EMU.  In comparison, 3 of our wins came against teams with single digit wins (including Toledo and Fordham, two of the worst D1 teams), and Savannah State is in that class, but as an independent schedules their was to a respectable record.  Two of our wins were over teams that barely had double digit wins--ie, NIU and Towson with 10.

With the exception of Kent, St. Louis, and OU, we beat teams who were not terribly accomplished.

Switching to losses, our worst loss was to Ball State, with their 217 RPI.  Iowa was a really poor team and ripe for an upset from a strong MAC team, but they drilled us.  In total, 7 of our losses were to teams with RPIS of 100 or better.

The one that got away---that UWM game that went into OT would have been a nice victory for us.

11 of the teams that beat us finished with a .500 record or better.  Only Miami and Iowa finished with sub .500 records.

I think the theme we are going to see is that analysis leads us to the conclusion that this was a 10th place team.  We were good enough to beat some teams, but rarely did we really rise us and deliver a surprise.  Rarely, however, did we lose to a team we really should have beaten.

While the team seemed inconsistent, it may very well be that we were very consistent.

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