2024-25 College Basketball Thread

[Flip Wilson]

Couple of scores from first-round women's games:
USC 71, UNC Greensboro 25
Greensboro's starters scored 9 points, and the team was 7-of-54 from the field. On the bright side, UNCG did have 7 assists.

UConn 103, Arkansas State 34
AState shot 17 percent.

 

[Retired_Scribe]

Yeah, very few upsets and no real big ones. There weren't even many close games.

And to think they want to expand to 14 or even 16 teams.

Actually, I think the current expansion plan is adding eight teams - another First Four (which, honestly, is a First Eight, but the Big Ten has 18 teams and the Big 12 has 16 so math isn't a strength of college sports.)

 

[dixiehack]

Oregon and South Dakota State are the only double-digit seeds to make the Round of 32 in the women's draw. Both were 7-10 upsets. Weeeee

 

[HanSenSE]

Oregon and South Dakota State are the only double-digit seeds to make the Round of 32 in the women's draw. Both were 7-10 upsets. Weeeee

And the Jackrabbits' next opponent? UConn. On the Huskies' home floor. Are we ever going to see neutral courts in the first two rounds in the women's tournament in the post-Caitlin Clark era?

 

[Michael_ Gee]

There have been precious few upsets in the men's tournament so far, but I bet if they gave high seeds home games in the first two rounds, there wouldn't be any at all. Just a preposterous unfair advantage.

 

[I Should Coco]

And the Jackrabbits' next opponent? UConn. On the Huskies' home floor. Are we ever going to see neutral courts in the first two rounds in the women's tournament in the post-Caitlin Clark era?

Probably not, because you would have mostly empty gyms.

Sure, some of the prominent programs would have fans travel to neutral sites, but a whole lot of NCAA women's tournament games would resemble Thursday's UW-Columbia game, which had a few hundred fans in the large North Carolina arena.

 

[Bubbler]

One way WBB could do a neutral floor in the first round is to use the same model they use for the Sweet 16 round. Four sites hosting four games each day. A basketball festival.

Another way is to go backwards in time and truly regionalize it. One site (by the model suggested above) or two, any notion of conferences avoiding each other is eliminated. That would get the best chance of having a good turnout.

There's no perfect solution. Speaking as someone who covered a power conference tournament right smack dab in the middle of its footprint with multiple ranked teams, crowds for the non-local games were scant.

Another unfortunate reality? Working on the digital side of things these days, numbers for WBB are low. There's interest, but not day to day interest. Mostly feature-based and not game-based.

WBB, sadly, is still very much a hop-the-bandwagon proposition.

 

[poindexter]

Until the SEC has 3 teams advance to the final four (Big East, 1985) why are we even discussing this?

 

[Chet Lemon]

I'm not the first one to say this, but Pitino's reaction to the question about Luis was unbecoming for someone of his experience. There is a diplomatic answer available. Something like, "He wasn't in sync today with what we were trying to run offensively. Everyone has days like that." Something like that instead of acting like the question was out of like because the reporter "knows why." He knows how this works.

 

[Hot and Rickety]

Actually, I think the current expansion plan is adding eight teams - another First Four (which, honestly, is a First Eight, but the Big Ten has 18 teams and the Big 12 has 16 so math isn't a strength of college sports.)

I don't really want expansion, but if they do, go to 72:

-- All 31 tournament champions get into the main bracket
-- Rank the at-larges. Top 25 get into the main bracket
-- Bottom 16 at-larges play Tuesday-Wednesday in Dayton or wherever, four games each day, eight winners advance into main bracket as the 11-12 seeds.

They'll probably never go for that, but it would probably make the Dayton games more appealing to TV viewers and we'd get two more good days of basketball.

 

[micropolitan guy]

No teams finished 7-11 in the SEC. Texas and Oklahoma finished 6-10, and it is certainly reasonable to feel they should have been told no. That leaves you with four other teams (maybe three) you say should not have been in.

Four other teams went 8-10 so I suspect they are next on your hit list, although one of those was Arkansas so you may want to back down on the Hogs. So who is left?

Mississippi State
21-13 record, No. 32 KenPom, seven wins against tournament teams. Best wins: Texas A&M, Memphis, Ole Miss (x2). Bad loss: Butler

Georgia
20-13 record, No. 38 KenPom, seven wins against tournament teams. Best wins: Florida, St. John's, Kentucky. Bad loss: none

Vanderbilt
20-13 record, No. 47 KenPom, six wins against tournament teams. Best wins: Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas A&M. Bad loss: none

We'll go round-and-round on this forever. Texas and Oklahoma were 6-12 in league play. That alone should have disqualified them.

In fact, I don't care how good a conference is purported to be. If you can't even play .500 basketball in your conference, you don't merit NCAA postseason, unless you win the auto bid. Maybe that eliminates one or two teams every year, so what. Those are the consequences of having a mega conference, where more often than not your record is based on who you don't play, rather than who you do.

 

[dixiehack]

I think the powers that be underestimate how the elegance of the 64-team bracket contributes to interest (and office pools) from casuals that never tune in before March. Even now the First Four games are ignored for bracket challenge contests. If Dayton becomes two full days of play-in games, the ubiquitous posters you see in restaurants, bars, gas stations and other random businesses don't really work any more. And people go from having three days to fill out a bracket to one.