Friday, February 3, 2023

Doggy's Doghouse 2/3/2023

 











 




GO UCONN!!!!!

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Late night with more cousins!!

Barrett and Logan with their new Mohawk Haircuts!!

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GAMES

Upset noted with red **

Late Games

No. 2 Stanford at Washington State
No. 7 Utah at Oregon State
No. 14 UCLA vs 22 Arizona

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Straight from the Dog


I'm too tired to write much more after this effort. Thankfully Phil carried the load in this blog. 


 

Creme and the SEC

The subtitle of Dr. Strangelove is “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”. While not an exactly parallel situation, it helped my blood pressure when I decided to stop worrying about what Charlie Creme said and take it less seriously.

After all, he works for a media company interested in attention. A boring recitation of the principles and procedures in constructing a bracket isn’t going to generate a lot of clicks or discussion. In contrast, placing us in the same bracket as Tennessee, or placing three of the five Big East teams in the same bracket is more likely to generate a reaction.

That’s not necessarily all bad. At an extreme, some contributors take provocation to a level that is better described as trolling than thoughtful commentary. One contributor to Vol Nation openly admitted they were a troll. In contrast, I think Creme engages in selections that are better described as provocative than as trolling. If they spark a debate that’s all good. If they are bad for blood pressure, time to rethink your reaction.

I know some think Charlie is anti-UConn, and it is not hard to amass a pile of evidence in support. But on 3 February 2023, he has UConn as a number one seed, following a week in which we had a close call with Villanova and a very forgettable performance against Providence. Anyone truly anti-UConn would have found it easy to drop UConn to a two-seed.

Instead, he said some things that will resonate in other circles.

Specifically, he said:

   LSU's weak nonconference schedule has been well chronicled, but the SEC's down year hasn't been discussed nearly as much. LSU's 10-0 league mark is impressive, but it doesn't carry the same weight as it might have in past seasons.

I know it’s easy to say that the SEC is weak, and I have heard that from many UConn fans. I’ve discussed before the difficulty of making a summary statement about an entire conference, but at this time I simply want to make the, hopefully uncontroversial, claim that a comment about a conference strength may be relative to the POV of the commentator. Let’s face it, as UConn fans, we are used to looking at other teams from high perch.

Let’s pretend we aren’t UConn fans, but fans of a team ranked in the low triple digits say San Diego State ranked 100 or Wyoming ranked 107. We aren’t seriously contemplating beating the top teams in P5 conferences, but we might view conferences in terms of whether they had any teams we could reasonably beat. So, with a ranking like that we can look at the Big East and say we have a great shot against # 203 Xavier, we could take on # 124 Wisconsin in the Big Ten, or # 144 TCU in the Big 12. We find it a little tougher to take on the weakest team in the Pac 12 # 94 Arizona State.

With that as background, if we are assessing conferences, it’s one thing to look at them top to bottom. The SEC’s weakest team # 99 Texas A & M is stronger than the weakest team of any other conference other than the Pac 12.

That hardly qualifies as weak.

But many of us are UConn fans. From our point of view, we aren’t seriously worried about taking on Pittsburgh or TAMU or TCU, so we don’t pay much attention to the bottom end of the conference when thinking about the conference, we pay attention to the top end.

Obviously, with South Carolina the undisputed number one team in the nation, we take them very seriously, but one team does not make a conference. One is likely to rate a conference strong if there are multiple teams that would give you concerns in a matchup.

We know that’s been the case with the SEC in the past. While it took actually playing the game to realize that Arkansas was pretty good, we have relatively recent experience with Arkansas and Mississippi State and South Carolina being challenges.

This year, obviously South Carolina qualifies, the jury is still out on LSU but beyond that, who would keep us awake at night? I’m sure Geno would say he has a longer list, but he gets paid big bucks to lay awake at night worrying about things that don’t give us pause.

Good grief, I wanted to make a point and I can’t believe I’m still blathering on with the intro. It’s time to fish or cut bait.

Let’s look at the number of SEC teams in the top 25

Current 2
2022 4
2021 6
2020 5
2019 4
2018 7

At the moment, there only two teams in the top 25

I posted the last five years during which the number of top 25 teams ranged from four to seven.

These aren’t even the strongest years for the SEC, which had seven in the top 25 each year between 1995 and 1997.

You have to go all the way back to 1982 before you can find the year that had as few as two teams, and I think it was a top 20 list at that time. (I’ve looked but haven’t found the year in which it transitioned from top 20 to a top 25.)

In other words, one metric of a conference is the number of teams in the top 25, and by that measure the SEC is the weakest in at least 40 years, and possibly for the entire history of the top 25.

(I confess I was somewhat surprised. I was expecting to say something along the lines of this year ranked near the bottom, but I didn’t think it would literally be the bottom. In fact, if Tennessee or some other SEC team manages to get ranked, so that they have three ranked teams, that will simply qualify for this year as tied for the worst since 1982.)

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