Cracketology: Not So Big East

On the opening night of the 2024-25 season, the Big East had a night to forget. While all eight Big East teams in action won that night, only Marquette and St. John's covered the spread, with five buy game victories coming by single digits. Those six losses led to a collective 72-spot drop in kenpom rankings for those Big East teams that night. While it was far too early to make any definitive statements, this is what I tweeted in response to those results:

Hey Big East, if you want 5-6 bids come March, this ain't it. Collectively, the league needs to be better. pic.twitter.com/7U0BSl8Lnt

— Alan Bykowski (@brewcity1977) November 5, 2024

Right before the first NET rankings came out for this year, I went back and compared the league's cumulative and average NET rankings at the start of Big East play to the cumulative and average NET rankings on Selection Sunday. This was to determine if league NET rankings are effectively stagnant. Yes, individual teams will go up and down with results, but because the results are all in league and what the winning team gains will be approximately equal to what the losing team loses, it would stand to reason that once you get to league play, what you are as a league is fairly similar to what you will be on Selection Sunday. I also looked at how many Quadrant 1 games the league's NET leader at the start of Big East play and on Selection Sunday had. The reason for picking the leader is that team has always been Q1 on any floor, so their Big East Q1 total would be the minimum a team could play (with the maximum being two more than that for a sub-75 team that would play the leader twice). Essentially, this is telling us how many Q1 opportunities are there in league play. Here are the results for the last three years, and yes, I know what the cumulative abbreviation here is. Have a good laugh and continue.

By the end of November, it looked pretty dire for the league. The league had a cumulative NET of 924, which on its own is bad, but worse there were just 5 Q1 opportunities for Marquette, by far the fewest of any league leading team before conference play. The next two weeks saw a dramatic improvement for the league. The Big East/Big 12 Battle was a metric success, the league started to win and cover predicted efficiency margins, and the league cumulative NET improved to 766. The league average went from 84 to 69.6, nearly a 15-spot average improvement while the number of expected Quadrant 1 games went from 5 to 8, putting the league on significantly stronger footing.

The drawback to all this is while the league is collectively much better, there are really three tiers in the league:

Protected Seed Contenders: Marquette, UConn

Single-Digit NCAA Seeds: St. John's

Closer to NIT than NCAA: Xavier, Creighton, Butler, Villanova, Georgetown, DePaul

The problem here is who has what. Xavier and Creighton have metrics to earn a bid, but they are a combined 1-8 in Q1, just not enough resume quality to really be in the hunt. Butler and Villanova both have multiple Q1 wins, but they also have Q3 or worse losses that drag them down. Georgetown and DePaul have enough wins to get them in the discussion, but the quality of their opponents isn't good enough to move the radar. As a result, the league still looks like a 3-bid league as it was last year

But the point is the opportunity is there for teams to get into the field. If St. John's can get to the top-30 in the NET, that makes 6 Q1 opportunities for the next five. If they are all in the top-75 by the end of the year, all of them get Q1 chances when they play each other on the road. That provides 10 Q1 shots each. Any of these teams that can get 3-5 Q1 wins will put themselves in position to push for a bid. 5-6 bids is still possible, but the more the top teams push away from the bottom, the harder that becomes.

Ultimately, if teams with NETs in the 60s and 70s move up to the 40s and 50s, that will be a result of quality wins. Metrics will rise accordingly and allow the league to get more teams in. But if the top dominates, it's possible none of the teams in the middle will break toward the field, and St. John's could even be a casualty as they are sitting with zero Q1 wins at the moment. The league did well to improve the metrics in December, but now needs the wins to back up the statistical improvement.

A few more bracket notes:

• Marquette's Position: Thanks to seven wins in Q1+2 and solid metrics across the board, Marquette checks in as the top 2-seed, #5 overall. You can call me greedy, but I think this is underselling where this team should be. The Dayton loss cost them a seed line at the moment, especially considering the 90% second half win probability and 70% win probability with 8 minutes to play. Three of the teams currently on the top line play in leagues that will likely lead to more losses than Marquette will accrue in this Big East. If Marquette stays healthy and the league quality remains static, Marquette should be a 1-seed on Selection Sunday.
• January Bracketology Accuracy: I'll be the first to say we should take January brackets with a grain of salt. There's a lot of ball left to be played, but I looked back at the first Cracked Sidewalks bracket from last year. In that, 13 of the 16 teams on the first four seed lines were still protected seeds on Selection Sunday. 37 of the top-48 teams in the seed list were in the Selection Sunday field, and if not for bid thieves, it would've been 41 of the top-49 (#2 out Indiana State was team #49). What you see here today is probably closer to the truth of Selection Sunday than you might be inclined to think.
• The Conference Bid Record: Everyone is talking about whether the SEC can get more bids than the 2011 Big East that landed 11/16 teams in the field. Currently we have 12/16 SEC teams in, but with growing conferences, those numbers aren't really relevant. The REAL conference bid record leagues should be compared to is the 1991 Big East that got 7/9 teams in the field. I know 7 is less than 11 or 12, but 77.8% is more than the comparative 68.8% of the 2011 Big East or the current 75.0% of the SEC. To break that record, the SEC would have to get 13 (81.5%) of their teams in. Missouri is currently our second team out, so the SEC isn't far from challenging the real record as well.

Here's our current S-Curve, bracket, and bids by conference:

SEC: 12

Big 10: 10

Big 12: 8

ACC: 5

Big East: 3

WCC: 3

A-10: 2

Mountain West: 2