2023-24 Rankings

The other thing that makes predicting difficult is both that you obviously don’t know what other teams in the bubble will do and a lot could change to affect sju’s resume. The seton hall loss could move to quad 2, and BC loss could move to quad 3, Utah win could move to quad 2. Either way, there’s very little room for error in getting an at large here.
 
Hardy said:
The other thing that makes predicting difficult is both that you obviously don’t know what other teams in the bubble will do and a lot could change to affect sju’s resume. The seton hall loss could move to quad 2, and BC loss could move to quad 3, Utah win could move to quad 2. Either way, there’s very little room for error in getting an at large here.
Click to expand...
I would say- there is No* margin for error if we wanna get in. Need to win every game. Simple.
 
FWIW, Lunardi now has Seton Hall as the First Four Out. Sunday's game is big for them too. Prov is also in his first 4 out. We and Nova are next 4 out. Butler is in.

 
Redenbacher said:
FWIW, Lunardi now has Seton Hall as the First Four Out. Sunday's game is big for them too. Prov is also in his first 4 out. We and Nova are next 4 out. Butler is in.

Click to expand...

Boy, Memphis has taken a dive, huh?

Weren't they in the top 20 about a month ago? Weak league, though.
 
Utah is now one of the last teams in (11 seed on Bracket Matrix). Our only wins over currently projected Tournament teams are vs. 10 seed Butler and 11 seed Utah. That's rough, and St. John's is now the 6th team out and only in 4/105 brackets. Have to root for Utah/Butler and also Big East bubble teams we've beaten like Providence and Villanova to make the field.

Looking at ESPN's odds of us winning our final 6 games:
Vs. Seton Hall: 76.8%
@ Georgetown: 85.3%
Vs. Creighton: 46.6%
@ Butler: 45.9%
@ DePaul: 94.1%
Vs. Georgetown: 95%

The odds of going 6-0 would then be 12.5%, but I don't think 6-0 is necessary if we can win some in the BET. Eliminating the toughest game and then going 5-0 would be 27.2% odds.

Not great, but obviously anything can happen and one game at a time.

Here's what I think the easiest path would be: win tomorrow, then beat Georgetown as we should. Go 1-1 against Creighton and Butler (both toss ups). Then just beat DePaul and Georgetown which we're heavily favored to.

Beat Seton Hall tomorrow and we'll have a realistic path to the Tournament. Absolute must win.
 
How can our odds of beating Seton Hall be greater than 75 per cent. They usually outplay us, they crushed us not too long ago, the game is just as important to them and is being played at what is close to a neutral court and SJU has not been playing well for a long time.
Dont get it.
 
GardenCity62 said:
How can our odds of beating Seton Hall be greater than 75 per cent. They usually outplay us, they crushed us not too long ago, the game is just as important to them and is being played at what is close to a neutral court and SJU has not been playing well for a long time.
Dont get it.
Click to expand...

I agree that's the one that seemed off to me, but Zach says we're 7 point favorites so the ESPN odds match up. Very surprising but good to see.
 
AP poll 2/19/24:
#1 UConn (-) - unanimous #1
#7 Marquette (-3)
#15 Creighton (+2)

NET dropped 6 spots down to #51.

Assuming we don't win our final 5 games (or the BET), this will be the biggest letdown of a season in decades. The most disappointing part has been Pitino, who has failed to make the proper second half adjustments and then gets headlines in the press after throwing his players under the bus. Calling out freshmen by name for physical limitations is embarrassing, and this tactic clearly has not worked since he started with Soriano months ago. Received 3 texts last night and this morning, and all of them were about Pitino's comments rather than the game itself. A large portion of fans really don't like to see this nonsense.

I'm not saying Pitino won't be successful here, I fully expect him to win in the future and he obviously needs more players like Jenkins, but this has still been a failure of a season. That is at least partially on Pitino, and 99% of people still defending him would be asking for his resignation if his name wasn't Pitino. I'm still glad he took this job and think this will be his worst year here, but it's really tough to imagine a season that could've gone worse than this one.

Final ranked opportunity of the regular season will be against #15 Creighton on Sunday.
 
Lots of warranted frustrations with how the last month has gone but for those that care for metrics I think this is very interesting. Going into the Creighton game (The first game of this 2-8 slide) we were 35th on KenPom. Right now we're 42nd, so we only dropped 7 spots during this skid. As of today we'd be pick'em or favorites on a neutral floor over NCAA Tournament teams Texas A&M (current 10 seed), Northwestern (9 seed), Boise State (10 seed), South Carolina (6 seed), Virginia (9 seed), and Butler (11 seed).

There's a strong chance this will be SJU's best KenPom finish since the 2000 team. Right now only the 2011 team is ahead of this one, by one spot as that team finished 41st. The Lavin final season team that made the tourney finished 50th and the Mullin final season team that made the first four finished 88th.

Does this ease the pain of the last month, no. But it does show that despite how bad the team is seemingly playing and how frustrated the coaches, fans, and players are, we're just a couple bounces or a little mental toughness away from being a really good team.
 
MugCostanza said:
Lots of warranted frustrations with how the last month has gone but for those that care for metrics I think this is very interesting. Going into the Creighton game (The first game of this 2-8 slide) we were 35th on KenPom. Right now we're 42nd, so we only dropped 7 spots during this skid. As of today we'd be pick'em or favorites on a neutral floor over NCAA Tournament teams Texas A&M (current 10 seed), Northwestern (9 seed), Boise State (10 seed), South Carolina (6 seed), Virginia (9 seed), and Butler (11 seed).

There's a strong chance this will be SJU's best KenPom finish since the 2000 team. Right now only the 2011 team is ahead of this one, by one spot as that team finished 41st. The Lavin final season team that made the tourney finished 50th and the Mullin final season team that made the first four finished 88th.

Does this ease the pain of the last month, no. But it does show that despite how bad the team is seemingly playing and how frustrated the coaches, fans, and players are, we're just a couple bounces or a little mental toughness away from being a really good team.
Click to expand...
Strength of schedule is going to take a nosedive these last five games, though.

Nothing we can do about that, but that kind of stuff does hurt the rankings. That's why it would have been nice just to pull out two of the games that we recently lost.
 
SJU61982 said:
Strength of schedule is going to take a nosedive these last five games, though.

Nothing we can do about that, but that kind of stuff does hurt the rankings. That's why it would have been nice just to pull out two of the games that we recently lost.
Click to expand...
That doesn't hurt metrics like KenPom unless you underachieve against the weak teams
 
Yep our metrics improved after the DePaul win due to how massive the margin was, but NET is only part of the formula and the rest of our resume isn't very good. NET has kept us on the bubble but going forward we'll really need to improve our Quad wins. Ultimately we'll still have to win all 5 to have a shot, or go something like 4-1 with a BET finals appearance. We're not out of it completely, but we're truly in win or go home mode for the remainder of the season.
 
Last edited:
Looking at ESPN's odds for our final 4 games:
Vs. Creighton 39.3%
@ Butler: 47.0%
@ DePaul: 93.7%
Vs. Georgetown: 94.5%

Odds of winning all 4 would be only 16%. Let's say if we go 3-1 instead, by eliminating the toughest game (Creighton) there's 42% odds of going 3-0 in the other games, and personally I think the most likely scenario is going 3-1 (losing to either Butler/Creighton). If we only go 2-2 then we'd have zero business sniffing the Tournament anyways.

Going 3-1 would bring us to 18-13 with another Q1 win, and at that point I think we'd be one of the first teams out or last teams in. Of course then we'd have to win some in the BET, especially since they always count as home games for us, but we'd probably be favorites for at least the first game. If we go 4-2 or 5-2 overall then at least we could tune into Selection Sunday for a shot at the First Four.

Anyway, I don't think we're making the Tournament, but there's still a path that isn't too difficult. Really happy to see Repole's comments yesterday, but it's a long wait until November and at a minimum I hope the team can make things interesting these last few weeks.
 
redmen89 said:
Need to beat creighton to move the net up otherwise the Georgetown and DePaul games may actually hurt us if we don’t blow them out
Click to expand...
The one thing we had going for us was ‘strength of schedule’ which the NET considers an important metric. The thing is everyone in the big east has a tough schedule. Our SoS was artificially high becuase we were front loaded. The DePaul and GTown games can only hurt us.

The path to the tournament was somehow get a solo 5th in the big east. It would take some Scott Steiner math to get us there now.

New path to the NCAA win the BET. I mean strange things can happen in sports so there’s a non zero chance of it happening, but I wouldn’t bet your mortgage payment on it.
 
By LMF math we needed to beat SHU and Creighton at home to make the NcaaT as about a 10 seed.

Having lost to the Hall they now need to win out (subbing in what I view as a higher degree of difficulty win at Butler for the home loss to SHU).

Can't be very optimistic at this juncture. It isn't as though the team has demonstrably improved in any way in the past 2 months. They may have even gotten a little worse. Disappointing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top