HuskerActuary

Random note on James Palmer's very efficient night (30 points on 12 FG attempts): This is only the second game this year against a power-conference opponent that a player has scored 30 or more points on 2.5+ points/FG attempt. The first was Markus Howard for Marquette against Kansas State, who scored an incredible 45 points on 17 FG attempts.

It's actually kind of common - this was certainly a good game for it, though.

I know we have goals bigger than just making the tournament, but Bart Torvik's numbers are still holding strong that we will only need 19 wins to make the tournament. I'll believe it when I see it - 20 seems the safer magic number to shoot for - but at 8-2, we could practically sleepwalk our way to 20 wins at this point. That's merely playing 0.500 ball the rest of the way (meaning we could very realistically go 9-11 in conference play and still make the tournament). Bubble talk seems trivial right now, but I guess old habits die hard. I'm unfamiliar with this new term they call "seeding talk."

The only person shooting fewer FTs per shot on the team is Thomas Allen. Both are in the lowest 5% of D1.

Your math looks good

The 20-11 is the "average" projected record, which could be different than just looking at the game-by-game result. Here's a simple example: Game 1: Nebraska 51% win probability Game 2: Nebraska 51% win probability The projected record would be 1-1, because it's far more likely that we lose one of those two games rather than win them both, even though we'd be favored in both.

Along those same lines, we are projected to have 12 quad-1 games this year - lots more opportunities for tier 1 wins! Last year, we only had 7 of these games and we only won one as I'm sure we all recall.

Also, we are now up to a projected 4 seed on Bart Torvik! Chalk to the Sweet Sixteen! That'd be unbelievable.

This was the second slowest tempo game that we have participated in over the last 2.5 seasons. Only one slower was our 72-52 win over Michigan last year.

Sorry for all of the posts in this thread, but I think what I quoted is essentially what's going on. The efficiencies don't seem to be capped, and therefore the 10 pt scoring margin advertisement is a little misleading. At the end of the day, I think this is a good thing for how we should be evaluating teams. I can't believe we were using RPI for the quad system in 2017 for goodness sake. The NCAA just needs to be more transparent about the NET.

Again though, if the margin of victory is capped at 10 points, we wouldn't be that high. Our huge blowout wins is the reason we are still #10 in Sagarin. Maybe the offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency components of the ranking don't have any such caps like the scoring margin does, in which case I could understand our ranking. But that would basically mean there is essentially "cap" like what they advertised.

That is true, but you should at least be able to make sense of them based on the actual results of the season so far. Nebraska being within three spots of Kansas is something I don't understand. I'm starting to think that the black-box nature of these rankings will result in many a fan being (perhaps rightfully) frustrated with the rankings due to lack of transparency.

How in the bloody hell is Kansas #11 and Nebraska #14? Based on results to date, Kansas should be far more than three spots ahead of us. Makes no sense. I'll need to look into this more later tonight.

Ooooh you're right. In that case, I have no flippin' clue how we could have been #1 in any prior version of the rankings.

Wow!! I had no idea we were #1 before. This tells me that margin of victory is taken into account heavily in this ranking system (meaning that NET rankings may end up being similar to sites like KenPom and Bart Torvik). Again, wow!