Big Ten Tournament preview: Breaking down the top-five seeds
No. 1 Indiana
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No. 1 Indiana
The Daily Cardinal's Thomas Valtin-Erwin has created his own predictive rating system to project the winner of any college basketball matchup. These ratings are based on offensive and defensive efficiency, or points per possession for and against. They are adjusted for strength of schedule. The adjustment was made by correlating rating to how far the team went in the NCAA Tournament, so as to best predict tournament performance.
Following the departure of two all-time Wisconsin greats in Sam Dekker and Frank Kaminsky, the fate of the program was expected to fall squarely on the shoulders of juniors Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig. Redshirt freshman Ethan Happ was considered nothing more than a solid prospect.
Anyone who has watched a Wisconsin game this year has been aggravated by its incredible inability to make shots in the paint. Despite Vitto Brown's tremendous improvement in the mid-range game, the Badgers have made just 45.7 percent of their shots from 2-point range, good for 276th in the country. Four schools are currently shooting better from 3-point range than UW is from two-point range, and 111 are shooting better overall.
Chaos ruled Week 11 of college football, as eight ranked teams lost and nine more won by 10 points or fewer. It was an especially rough week for teams with Tigers as mascots: Both Memphis and No. 17 LSU lost to lower-ranked teams, while No. 1 Clemson survived a scare from 3-7 Syracuse, which it fended off by just 10 points.
Frank Kaminsky was the best player in Wisconsin basketball history. By the time he left for the NBA, he ranked ninth all-time in total points, eighth in field goals, seventh in field-goal percentage, first in blocks, 11th in rebounds and, believe it or not, 11th in assist-to-turnover ratio. All this despite playing nearly 500 fewer minutes than anyone in the top 10. He played just 8.9 minutes per game in his first two seasons with the Badgers.
No. 5 LSU might be the only team in the country that can say it has been as impressive as No. 2 Baylor. A fifth straight convincing win has the Tigers at their highest ranking since 2012, but they couldn’t be playing a more different style from that team.
What a wild week of college football. Of the 20 ranked teams that played this week, five won by just one score and three more lost to unranked teams. No. 10 Alabama struggled mightily against 2-4 Arkansas before pulling away in the fourth quarter, while No. 1 Ohio State got everything they could handle from Maryland.
Wisconsin’s long-standing tradition of offensive dominance is well documented. A wildly successful lineage of running backs and offensive linemen have accounted for the vast majority of the Badgers’ success. Equally well-documented has been Wisconsin’s recent transition to a dominant defense.
Defense wins championships. It’s an old adage, but one that has withstood the test of time. Over the past decade, ignoring Auburn’s sieve of a defense in 2010, NCAA Championship teams have had, on average, the fifth-best defense in the country.
This week’s graph charts offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency, with bubble size representing Football Power Index. Teams in the top right quadrant have shown exceptional efficiency on both sides of the ball, and that’s likely where the four playoff teams will come from.
Preseason AP and FPI rankings have not been as kind to the SEC in recent years as they have been in the past, but that may end soon. SEC teams currently hold the top four spots in FPI—No. 3 Ole Miss, No. 8 LSU, No. 7 Georgia and No. 12 Alabama round out the top.
Two weeks of college football are in the books, and the playoff picture is still as murky as ever. No. 1 Ohio State has looked vulnerable in back-to-back first halves, but then looked invincible again down the stretch of both of its first two games. No. 15 Ole Miss has obliterated two unsuspecting foes, scoring 76 and 73 points to open the season. No. 3 TCU got back to its old ways after a week one scare against Minnesota by torching Stephen F. Austin to the tune of 70 points.
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The Ohio State Buckeyes wrapped up last season with 13 straight wins and won the inaugural College Football Playoff. As the first ever unanimous No. 1 in the preseason AP poll, they don’t show any signs of slowing down. Everyone and their mother is predicting that they are a shoo-in for the Playoff this season as well. Prediction, though, is a fickle beast.
There are certain moments in any sport that define a player’s career: Michael Jordan’s Flu Game in the 1997 NBA Finals, Derek Jeter’s walk-off hit in his final at-bat, Rafael Nadal’s grueling five-set win over Roger Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon final. Nicole Bauman’s historic three-point barrage against Ohio State was her moment.
It’s no secret that Corey Clement is going to be the star of Wisconsin football next year. He’s already got four multi-touchdown games under his belt, and has a career average of seven yards per carry. That’s a higher rushing average than James White, Montee Ball and John Clay. Everyone’s waiting with bated breath to see what he will do, and that’s a lot of pressure.
When the final buzzer sounded and the Badgers fell just one win short of immortality, basketball fans around the country were distraught. Even as the favorite going into the game, impartial fans were cheering almost exclusively for Wisconsin. But why?
For better or worse, this Kentucky team is going to be remembered for a long time.
March Madness is the best playoff system of any sport at any level, and it isn’t even close. The combination of a huge number of teams and the single-game elimination system makes it unpredictable every year. So unpredictable, in fact, we haven’t seen two No. 1 seeds make the championship since 2008, the only year where all four No. 1s made the Final Four. And there haven’t been multiple 1-seeds in the Final Four since 2009, when Connecticut and North Carolina were the only two.