Wichita State will be this year’s most fascinating bubble team
When Wichita State fell in overtime to rival Northern Iowa in the Missouri Valley semifinals on Saturday night, the Shockers didn’t just squander their chance to secure an automatic NCAA tournament bid.
They also became an ideal test case for how much the selection committee values other metrics besides the RPI.
Wichita State (24-8) won the Valley regular season title by four games, but the Shockers don’t have a profile that traditionally earns teams an NCAA bid. They’ve only beaten one opponent in the RPI top 80 all season, a 67-50 rout of Utah on Dec. 12. Besides that, their most notable victories are a sweep of Valley runner-up Evansville and a lone win in three tries against Northern Iowa.
One argument in Wichita State’s favor is the absence of star point guard Fred VanVleet for three non-league losses, but it’s unlikely that will sway the committee. While those games represented three of the Shockers’ only chances to secure top 75 RPI wins, fellow bubble teams Vanderbilt, Connecticut and LSU can all point to key midseason injuries too.
There’s really only one reason the committee might take a closer look at Wichita State than it typically would a team with the aforementioned profile. The Shockers are 10th in stats guru Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, which are considered the most accurate tool available for projecting how good a team is rather than assessing the strength of its win-loss record.
The selection committee traditionally has ignored advanced metrics while selecting the NCAA tournament field, but that has begun to change in recent years. While the RPI is still embedded in the selection process because it’s the metric through which the quality of wins and losses are assessed, choices made by last year’s committee suggest that the KenPom ratings were at least considered.
Colorado State missed the field last year with a top 30 RPI, something that had only occurred three previous times since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams. The Rams had pre-NCAA tournament KenPom rating of No. 69 by contrast.
You also appeared to see some KenPom influence in the way teams were seeded. Maryland’s No. 4 seed was a rung lower than many mock brackets had the Terps, perhaps because they were 34th in the KenPom rankings. Iowa’s No. 7 seed was a rung or two higher than most mock brackets had the Hawkeyes, perhaps a nod to their No. 25 KenPom ranking.
Why does Pomeroy’s system differ so widely from the RPI? A big difference is that Pomeroy takes margin of victory and defeat into account. A 20-point victory over North Carolina is more valuable than a one-point win over North Carolina in the KenPom rankings. It’s not in the RPI.
The KenPom rankings have Wichita State 31 spots higher than the RPI in part because the Shockers have destroyed many of the opponents they’ve beaten. Their average margin of victory in their 16 league wins this season was a whopping 22 points.
The risk of factoring in the KenPom rankings too much in the selection process is that who you beat has to matter. Two dozen 50-point victories over Quinnipiac doesn’t make you an NCAA tournament team any more than two dozen one-point losses to Michigan State does.
The risk of factoring not factoring the KenPom rankings at all, however, is excluding one of the nation’s best teams or grossly misseeding one. The absurdly unbalanced 2014 bracket may easily have been avoided if that committee had paid closer attention to what the advanced metrics said about the strength of Wichita State, Kentucky, Louisville, Duke and Michigan.
It will be up to this year’s selection committee to figure out how strongly to weigh the KenPom rankings, and Wichita State will be an ideal test case.
The Shockers have an elite coach, two senior guards with ample NCAA tournament experience and a recent history of remarkable success. They made an unexpected Final Four run in 2013, they finished the regular season with an unbeaten record in 2014 and they beat in-state foe Kansas to reach the Sweet 16 last March.
Is Wichita State one of the best 40 teams in the country again this season? Probably. Do the Shockers have one of the 40 best resumes in the country? Probably not.
– – – – – – –
Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
