VaWolf – Just a couple of thoughts.
1) While a Tuesday win is meaningless, a Tuesday loss could be devastating. There’s a good chance it results in your RPI dropping more than 5 points.
2) OTOH, I think the neutral win over another bubble team would be huge.
3) Finally, who you beat and when you beat them could absolutely matter. The same way it could matter as to your team when they lost.
The key thing here is that you are actually one of those last few bubble teams. Obviously, the committee doesn’t use a straight numerical formula. Their power lies in keeping the process a back-room thing. They are perfectly capable of creating a measurement which would create transparency and let exactly everything they need to do to move themselves into an at large bid. That they haven’t shows that they’d favor the backroom process.
Let’s hope that they use this process to factor in things like – whom are you capable of beating, what was your injury situation like. Has anything happened that artificially inflated / deflated your RPI / Kenpom / Sagarin?
But they key for all 3 of those is that you are part of the conversation. Most of the ACC bubble teams that have missed the tournament have been mid 60s or higher in terms of RPI. I don’t think RPI is there if we go 10-8. Again, we can have a loss that drops us from 48 to a 62 or something like that in the tourney. But in general, I think the schedule sets up for us to be in the 90% range if we win 6 out of 10. I think we both know that ideally, our measurements will be at least in the low 40s in 2 of the 3 big ranking systems (1 definitely needs to be RPI.)
