I'm conflicted also. I won quite a bit of money on this game but obviously I hate to see the season end this way, particularly with a senior team and no honest threat of a rerun next season.
Bottom line, you can't expect much from a team that is seeded extremely high but wasn't rated equally high in preseason. The fraud factor is enormous. I provided those stats in the selection day thread a couple of weeks ago. Miami fell in line with the numbers from that thread that I linked, an average of 1.9 wins in the tournament.
If given the choice, I always take the option of being a team that was rated very, very high in preseason and barely snuck into the tournament, above a team that was moderately rated in preseason and had a phenomenal year and high seed. Scenario A will handle Scenario B more often than not, and you're getting points to boot. Everything tends to drift back to the beginning.
As I posted last week before the illinois game, the danger spot is when you run into someone who was rated higher than you in preseason, yet you are the favorite in the game. I've bet this angle for more than 15 years. Game after game unfolds like the one tonight. It's merely the disguised superior team, winning as it should. Worst of all, the inferior team actually buys into the hype and believes they are better. They are unprepared going in, and shellshocked as the game unfolds. While Miami was #28 to #37 for Illinois in Sunday's game, tonight it was #9 Marquette against #28 Miami. That aligns with a neutral court spread of Marquette -4.5, a full 10 points apart from the actual betting number.
Best of all, I can blab this angle all I want. Year after year. It works in bowl games as well as the NCAA tournament but the slob conventional wisdom shout is that preseason ratings mean nothing, and the only way to handicap is off the most recent results, blah...blah...blah. Meanwhile, that's exactly what the sportsbooks want you to do, make subjective stabs based on current and recent form. I always get a chuckle when somebody points to preseason flops like USC in football, or Kentucky from the link below, and uses that example to denounce preseason ratings, while ignoring all the instances the preseason numbers were astute, and destroy flimsy variables like regular season results.
http://www.teamrankings.com/blog/nc...n-ratings-schedule-strength-for-all-347-teams
