Bracketology

Run duke clean off the floor when we meet and let’s revisit this. Which I expect 100% btw. They cannot guard Miami whatsoever. Run those bigs out of the game and they’re done early
 
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Hilarious that you think that. If that one loss was by 15 points to a lesser team, we will likely be voted out of the Top 25 as a pretender.
If you’re 7-1 and in first place in the ACC with a 16-2 record, you are at the very worst the 10th ranked team in the country
 
If you’re 7-1 and in first place in the ACC with a 16-2 record, you are at the very worst the 10th ranked team in the country


Got some assumptions in there...

We play ND, GT, BC, NC St, and Syracuse in those next 5 games. Four of those 5 teams are at the bottom of the ACC standings AND hovering around .500 overall (while the fifth team, NC State, had a great OOC record, but is currently near the bottom of the ACC standings too). And if we lose one game, it's possible that either Clemson or Pitt could still be undefeated and in first place. Two of our 3 ACC victories have come against two of the four teams lowest in the ACC standings.

Furthermore, ND and GT are two of the other four teams lowest in the ACC standings, neither has a conference win yet. Losing either of those games would be disastrous, and winning both of those games will not vault us forward in the conversation. So we've got two weeks until anything will give us traction (other than "everyone else in the Top 25 loses").

BC and Syracuse are each 1-1 in-conference and have a near-.500 mark overall. Same as above, a loss would be horrible, and wins would merely induce yawns.

Which leaves us with ONE decent game pre-Duke, and that is NC State, which is still a bottom-4 ACC team (at this time).

So what are the options? If we lose a game to anyone other than NC State, then beating NC State only serves to minimize the stench of the bad loss, which will likely leave us right back where we started, if not worse. And if we lose to NC State, then we just split the season with a decent but unranked team that has only one OOC loss. Which would mean we are pretty much identical to NC State.

I realize that a bunch of you are counting on Top-25-loss mayhem over the next 3 weeks, but I'm not putting a lot of stock in that.

Being "first place in the ACC" doesn't mean a lot for us when we (at that point) haven't yet played Clemson or Pitt or F$U or VaTech or Duke or UNC or Wake. Yes, the UVa win was great, but we can't even get ranked ahead of them.
 
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Next 3 weeks...

Purdue - FAMU, Rutgers, Ohio Taint, Ped State, Nebraska, Michigan State, Minnesota (the bottom half of the Big 10) - UNLIKELY TO LOSE
UConn - Villanova, RANKED Xavier, Providence, Creighton, Marquette, St. Johns, Seton Hall - ONE TOUGH GAME
Houston - Tulsa, UCF, SMU, Cincy, USF, Tulane - EASY PEASY
Kansas - OK St, Texs Tech, RANKED West Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa St, K-State - OK, NOW WE ARE TALKING, THREE OF THOSE TEAMS HAVE 10+ WINS
Arizona - AZ St, Washington, Wash St, Oregon St, Oregon, USC - TWO CHALLENGING PAC 12 GAMES, NOT TOO TOUGH
Texas - Oklahoma, K-State, OK St, RANKED TCU, Texas Tech, Iowa St - COMPARABLE TO KANSAS' SCHEDULE, WITH TCU INSTEAD OF WVU
Tennessee - Ole Miss, RANKED Miss St, South Carolina, Vandy, RANKED Kentucky, RANKED Miss St (again) - NOW THAT IS A **** TOUGH 3 WEEKS
Alabama - RANKED Miss St, Ole Miss, RANKED Kentucky, RANKED Arkansas, LSU, Vandy - DITTO, SEE TENNESSEE ABOVE
Arkansas - LSU, Mizzou, RANKED Auburn, RANKED Alabama, Vandy, Mizzou (again) - DITTO, SEE TENNESSEE AND ALABAMA ABOVE
Gonzaga - Eastern Oregon, Pepperdine, San Francisco, Santa Clara, BYY, Portland, LMU - CHALLENGING, FOR WCC, BUT NOT THAT TOUGH
UCLA - Wash St, Washington, USC, Utah, Colorado, Arizona St - TWO CHALLENGING PAC 12 GAMES, SAME AS ARIZONA, NOT TOO TOUGH

That means, outside of Kansas/Texas and the SEC troika of Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas...IF MIAMI WENT 4-1 AGAINST FIVE TERRIBLE ACC TEAMS...you would need to see those ELEVEN teams above lose two or three games apiece to fall below Miami, which is what would be required in order for Miami to get into the Top 10. And I'm just not seeing a lot of openings, unless the SEC turns into a Mexican standoff.

The next 3 weeks will be toughest for ranked SEC teams, challenging for Big 12 teams, and only moderately challenging for Pac 12 teams. Let's see how these 11 teams fare for three weeks.
 
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Could very well be 17-1 going into the Duke game and be in the top 10. Maybe top 5 if teams ahead of us lose.
 
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Anything could happen but the NC St game scares me as our biggest challenge before Duke.
Agreed. They’re much better than their record and their 3 ACC losses to date are to the top 3 teams in the ACC… go figure.

By the time we play them though they may be completely exasperated. They have Duke and VT before us, both good teams. If they lose both of those and start 1-5 in ACC I’m not sure if they’ll respond well to that adversity, but we will find out soon enough.
 
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I’d take these first weekend matchups in a heartbeat. Bama is tough though (also no idea Birmingham (?!) was selected as a first weekend host, wtf).

We’ll see, keep trucking along. Go Canes!
 

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Also, our NET is 39 after last night's win. Of course they don't use RPI anymore, but our RPI is 13. Ken Pom has Miami 41. Our SOS is 56 (but has risen like 100 places since ACC play started).
5-1 in Quad 1 games which is very important to the committee.

How can our SOS be that bad when we played Providence, Maryland, UCF, Rutgers non conference and already played UVA, N.C State twice in league?
 
5-1 in Quad 1 games which is very important to the committee.

How can our SOS be that bad when we played Providence, Maryland, UCF, Rutgers non conference and already played UVA, N.C State twice in league?
FAMU, Louisville, and the two St. Francis schools are really dragging the SOS down. Out of 363 schools, St. Francis (PA) is 328, Louisville is 337, St. Francis (NY) is 349, and FAMU is 360. You can get away with 1 or 2 sub-300 teams, but 4 of them will be an absolute anchor, especially only midway through the season.
 
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