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Butler

Making the Final Four from the #8 seed is damn near impossible.

Here's a good article on the difficulty of winning in the tournament as a #8 seed. Nate Silver models the odds of making it to the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, and Final Four from each seed regardless of how good the team is and finds that the #8 and #9 seed always have the lowest odds of going far in the tournament next to the #15 and #16 seed.

When 15th Is Better Than 8th: The Math Shows the Bracket Is Backward

Suppose that, lucky you, you’re the coach of a team given a No. 8 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament bracket.

This is a less-than-ideal position: provided that you win your first-round game, you’re due to face the No. 1 seed in the second round.

But a friend of yours — another coach who owes you a favor — calls you with a “Let’s Make a Deal” proposition.

His team is seeded No. 10 in another regional. He offers to swap with you: you get his No. 10 seed and he gets your No. 8. The teams in each region are otherwise about as strong as one another.

Are you better off switching?

The answer is almost certainly yes: the No. 10 seed is intrinsically a better position than the No. 8 seed. So, for that matter, is the No. 11 seed. The 12th seed is also better than the No 8. As are the 13th and 14th seeds. And possibly even the No. 15 seed, depending on your objective.

Welcome to the strange intersection of bracketology and bracketonomics, in which the worse a team’s seed, the better off it may be.
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Screw Stevens. I'm just happy that Mr. Wellman was able to even find someone to replace Coach Guadio and all of his culture problems. The fact that we were able to land a coaching giant like [Redacted] to right the ship still amazes me. Folks - "[Redacted] is your coach" (Hoosiers voice). Dissenters need to Buzz off.

:rolleyes:
 
I'll take a good tournament coach over a good regular season coach. Izzo > Barnes.
 
deacvision7 said:
Making the Final Four as a lower seed means (usually) you went thru higher seeds, aka "better" teams on the way to the Final Four. I would suggest that should enhance ones opinion on a coach.

Do you disagree?
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The regular season has far more predictive value.
 
This is all part of IAI's absurd anti-tournament campaign. For some reason, he believes if Butler beat Florida in December, it would have more value in determining the best team than beating them at the end of the season.
 
Izzo must have a horseshoe stuck up his arse then.
 
TBR said:
I think there are coaches that are better at preparing for games under tournament conditions than others.
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Yes, but this skill isn't nearly as significant as the role of luck/variance. That's why something like PASE shrinks as the sample size grows, and why it's quite common to see "bad tournament coaches" turn it around.
 
ChrisL68 said:
Izzo must have a horseshoe stuck up his arse then.
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Even if tournament coaches involved absolutely no skill, we would still expect a coach with Izzo's record based on pure chance. The real question is how much do coaches, as a whole, deviate from what we'd see if there were no such thing as tournament coaching ability.

I don't think there's much doubt that someone like Izzo will indeed have his teams doing better in the tournament than an average coach, but I also don't think there's much doubt that he's performed above his true tournament coaching level of his career.

As he continues coaching, the expectation would be that his tournament coaches record regresses towards the mean.
 
I think it would be extremely interesting and enlightening to shadow a coach like Stevens (well thought of for his preparation) during a tournament weekend.
 
Before last season, Stevens had a 1-2 NCAA tournament record.

In last year's tournament, it took two missed open threes by Murray St. in the 2nd round for them to avoid being upset. It took a missed five foot shot by Draymond Green to beat Michigan State. Against ODU this year, it took a blown layup and then a buzzer-beating putback. You know what happened against Pitt and Florida.

Just by the anecdotal evidence over the past two seasons, you can see how much luck plays a part (even more than tournament success, it's been shown that teams have some, but not a lot of control over winning close games)

He's a great coach because of what he's done with Butler's program as a whole more than these two Final Four runs.
 
No question luck plays a role. No one is saying otherwise.
 
Before last season, Stevens' teams performed to seed. Now he's performed well beyond seed two years in a row.
 
IAppreciateIt said:
Before last season, Stevens had a 1-2 NCAA tournament record.

In last year's tournament, it took two missed open threes by Murray St. in the 2nd round for them to avoid being upset. It took a missed five foot shot by Draymond Green to beat Michigan State. Against ODU this year, it took a blown layup and then a buzzer-beating putback. You know what happened against Pitt and Florida.

Just by the anecdotal evidence over the past two seasons, you can see how much luck plays a part (even more than tournament success, it's been shown that teams have some, but not a lot of control over winning close games)

He's a great coach because of what he's done with Butler's program as a whole more than these two Final Four runs.
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The simple idea that an opponent missing a layup makes you "lucky" is just so damn absurd to me.

Because if you are "lucky" that they missed then that means the opponent was "unlucky" to miss, correct? How is somebody "unlucky" to miss a layup or shot? They aren't. They simply weren't good enough.


This whole notion of "luck" in sports is absurd. Especially from somebody that treats statistics like they are his Bible.

The sooner we eliminate the idea that people are "lucky" when their opponents fuck up, the better.
 
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