The latest Rauf Report takes a look at the tournament pictures for both Baylor and North Carolina, the unprecedented rise of Louisville and a potential mid-major at-large candidate.
Folks, we’re almost there.
We are just over six weeks away from Selection Sunday, meaning conference tournaments will begin in a little over a month. Every game becomes even more important as we hit the home stretch of the regular season — which has not been good news for some of the better teams in the country.
Both Oregon and Illinois suffered troubling losses on Thursday night that should drop both from the AP Top 25 next week. Tennessee has now lost three of its last four games (and four of its last seven) after falling at home to Kentucky on Tuesday.
Yet a few other teams suffered more catastrophic losses this week – ones that continue to put their NCAA Tournament futures in question.
This Rauf Report will start with a look at Baylor, which is now 13-7 overall after falling to BYU in overtime this week.
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Baylor is closer to the NCAA Tournament bubble conversation than you think
Scott Drew’s program is still one that commands respect on name alone given its track record and how Drew has built a perennial Big 12 power. Expectations were high coming into the season given the transfer additions of Jeremy Roach and Norchad Omier along with five-star freshman VJ Edgecombe.
But it hasn’t worked out this season. The loss to BYU dropped the Bears to a 7-7 record in games outside Quad 4 – a mark that puts it in the bottom half of power conference teams. Baylor is also a lowly 2-6 against top-50 competition with both victories coming in overtime (or double overtime, as was the case against St. John’s).
That lackluster resume, combined with good-not-great analytics rankings (25th at EvanMiya, 28th on KenPom, 29th on Torvik) has this team on the bubble. In fact, Baylor is included among the six teams “Just in The Field” according to EvanMiya’s new Resume Quality metric, indicating the Bears are currently in a spot to be playing in the First Four.
There are some positive signs for Baylor, namely that Edgecombe is playing the best basketball of his career. He has become the offensive superstar the coaching staff was hoping he would be, averaging 26.3 points over his last three games. It is also listed as a 9-seed on BracketMatrix, meaning there is still some distance between itself and the wrong side of the bubble.
That being said, there are real reasons to believe the Bears aren’t going to turn things around. Their defense ranks 216th against top-50 competition, per Torvik, which is the biggest reason why they’ve struggled in those games. And now seven of their remaining 11 games are against such teams starting with Saturday’s game against Kansas.
However, it also presents an opportunity. If the Bears are able to beat the Jayhawks at home, it would be the best win on their resume and help change this conversation.
North Carolina is close to missing the Big Dance
Perhaps no brand-name program is in as dire straits as North Carolina. The Tar Heels are one of the last teams in the field on BracketMatrix and don’t even crack the field on EvanMiya’s Resume Quality – even sitting behind teams like Texas, Ohio State and Indiana (the Gonzaga inclusion is a conversation for a future Rauf Report).
History tells us this UNC team is in hot water, too. Four of their five most similar resumes missed the NCAA Tournament, per Torvik – and one of the top 10 is the 2022-23 UNC team that was famously left out of the field after topping preseason polls.
This is the reason why Saturday’s game at Duke is so important. The Tar Heels only have three Quad 1 games left on their schedule, and those are the only games that can significantly improve their resume. Carolina is just 1-8 in Q1 games to this point, including 0-7 against Quad 1-A competition.
However, head coach Hubert Davis downplayed the added significance of the Duke game (outside of it being, you know, a Duke-UNC game) when speaking to reporters this week.
“We’ll prepare, we’ll practice and we’ll play with the same type of competitive enthusiasm that we played with tonight,” he said following UNC’s loss to Pitt. “I think every game is the Super Bowl. Whether it’s a preseason game or just any time you get a chance to step out there on the floor, you should be ready to go.”
Should the Tar Heels lose in Cameron, they will have no margin for error for the rest of the season.
Numbers behind Louisville’s 10-game win streak
UNC’s slide opened the door for another team to emerge as the second-best team in the ACC, and no one has taken advantage like Louisville. I talked about the Cardinals in a Rauf Report on Sleepers Media last week because they’re in prime position to accomplish some surprising things this month.
Pat Kelsey’s squad is one of four power-conference teams projected to win each of their remaining games on KenPom in part because it has the easiest remaining schedule of any high-major. The Cardinals do not play any of Duke, Clemson, North Carolina and Wake Forest again in the regular season. A home game against Pitt on March 1 is their only remaining game against a KenPom top-70 opponent.
But those projections aren’t just because of the schedule – this Louisville team has been playing at a very high level during its current win streak. It has already beaten UNC, Clemson, SMU and Wake Forest all by double digits and beat Pitt on the road.
In fact, they’ve been playing like a top-10 team since late December, per Torvik.
Those numbers put Louisville in high-level company. This chart from CBB Analytics shows that Louisville has been most similar to teams like Auburn, Duke and Florida during this stretch when it comes to how dominant it has been on both ends of the floor.
“We’re just clicking,” Kelsey told reporters after beating Wake Forest this week. “You just kind of feel it. We have a lot of momentum. We’re playing well together. Our offense is in a great rhythm and then they’re really guarding. No matter what the score is, if you’re up 20, you’re up 25, you’re up 27, when we get to those media timeouts the first question I always ask is ‘what’s the score?’ They all say, ‘zero to zero,’ and we’re just trying to win that next four-minute segment. Typically, our team is really good in that regard.”
If you want to question how Louisville would perform against the elite elite teams in the country (aka the ones they’re being compared to in the above chart), that’s fair. Its best victory of the season is likely either the Clemson or Pitt victory, and it won’t have a chance to get a bigger one until the ACC Tournament.
But you can’t question how this team performs against everyone not in the nation’s top tier or two because it has been flat-out dominant.
Bruce Thornton could determine the rest of Ohio State’s season
I tried to gauge Ohio State’s NCAA Tournament resume in last week’s Rauf Report because it’s the opposite of Louisville’s in a way. The Buckeyes have three of those real high-end wins — neutral court vs. Texas, neutral court vs. Kentucky and at Purdue — but have lacked consistency against comparable teams.
Ohio State’s success (or failure) in those games has come down to the play of Bruce Thornton. That’s not necessarily a surprise given that he’s the team’s best player, but it’s clear how important he is to everything head coach Jake Diebler wants to do.
Thornton is responsible for running the offense and being the primary playmaker along with being the team’s top scorer, which is a significant burden. When he’s able to handle it, the Buckeyes win. When he struggles or is inefficient, Ohio State hasn’t been able to pick up the slack around him.
Picking up that slack around Thornton is something Diebler is focused on. Freshman John Mobley Jr. has shown the ability to step up more frequently in recent weeks, capped by a 19-point, eight-assist, six-rebound showing against Penn State on Thursday.
Postgame, Diebler praised Mobley’s contributions and what it allowed Ohio State to do.
“It was great because we were able to get Bruce [Thornton] open looks from three because we were able to move them around some and I think that’s really important for us,” he said. “We’ve got to continue to be versatile on the perimeter.”
Ohio State still needs Thornton to be at his best if it’s going to secure an NCAA Tournament bid, Mobley’s emergence helps increase that margin for error.
Could UC Irvine get an at-large bid?
So, with all these teams slipping closer to the bubble, there has to be someone that benefits from it, right?
UC Irvine may end up being that team. The Big West leaders rank among the best mid-major teams according to the analytics sites (57th on EvanMiya, 61st on KenPom, 79th on Torvik). Those rankings, coupled with the fact the Anteaters lead their conference, has them as the highest-seeded auto bid on BracketMatrix.
But does UC Irvine need the auto bid to go dancing?
I think that’s a realistic question that doesn’t have a straightforward answer. According to EvanMiya’s Resume Quality, head coach Russ Turner’s squad should be in – with some distance between it and the bubble.
It is perhaps worth noting that the Anteaters have the highest number of Expected Bubble Wins among that group, too. Recent history tells us that teams in similar positions have gotten some benefit of the doubt with three of Torvik’s top five most similar resumes (when removing auto bids) having earned berths.
All three of those teams that did get in were selected to the First Four. That 2019 UNC Greensboro team was the first team out of the field, meaning it nearly made it, too.
Any at-large bid for UC Irvine probably has it going to Dayton for the First Four as well. It would also (likely) require it to win all its remaining regular season games given that one more sub-150 loss (virtually every Big West conference game) would drag down this resume dramatically.
But, if the Anteaters take care of business, it may not need to win the Big West Tournament to go dancing.
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