Ohio State wins their first game in 56 days. That is a quality, quality Quad 1 loss for Illinois.
Ohio State is such a weird extreme. I don’t know what the hell happened to them but that’s wild and like Wake 2006 on steroids. Using Torvik, because we can segment the season by date:
Through January 7, ranked #9.
Since that date, ranked #131.
Them being in the 60s is just the combination of those two periods, and fine, whatever.
It does raise a couple of questions from there:
1) should data be trended, weighting more recent results more?
2) is the Committee sophisticated enough to adjust and not actually count those as Quad 1 wins;
3) why do we delineate on quads anyways?
The last bit is that NET isn’t a ‘ranking system’ in the sense that if Ohio St is at 65 tomorrow they’d be ahead of Wisconsin at 70 in the tournament pecking order. They won’t be. They aren’t making the tournament. They weren’t ahead of Clemson in the tournament pecking order before yesterday despite being ahead in NET. So in that sense, I care a lot less about whether they’re misranked or not.
It is a ranking system in the sense of trying to identify who can beat ‘good’ teams, rather than ‘deserving’ teams. Often the same, but sometimes different. And the version of Ohio State since the turn of the year isn’t a good team either and shouldn’t be treated as such — so it is one of those weird quirks that hopefully has a lot more perceived outrage than actual impact, but who knows.