Nothing like November

[glabedz]

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a college basketball fan who’ll tell you March isn’t the best month of the season. I don’t disagree; seasons are made, and most importantly, completed, in March. But when you’re like me and you cover an entire conference and root on 14 teams night-in and night-out, it feels like the season is made in November. Just 2 or 3 weeks into the season, it’s easy for teams to play their way in or out of the NCAA Tournament at-large conversation. There are only so many opportunities for the conference as a whole to move the needle, and they are all right now. Once conference play begins, the focus switches from across conferences to within conferences. There’s no more picking up big wins for the league when the league is facing itself. There’s no more “awesome night for the Atlantic 10,” or “damn, I wish the conference had that one back” once the New Year rolls around. In a sense, this makes November and December my two favorite months to watch hoops. It’s a...

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[e_parade]

I enjoyed that write-up there. I mean obviously it's all fairly positive news for my team so far this season compared to expectations, so it's hard to be disappointed by that. The general consensus I've been hearing from other UMass fans is that we'll need to win the next 2 (fairly winnable) to get to 5-0 before hitting the toughest part of our OOC slate. The the going will get rough and we'll expect to lose a few there. 7-9 wins is what we'll want to see with maybe some potential to steal a game in there. Oddly we finished the OOC at 7 wins last year but then the wheels feel off and we only won 4 more the rest of the season.

It's still early, but currently realtimerpi has the A10 rates as the 8th best conference, directly behind the MVC, but directly ahead of the B10, Big East, and Mountain West. Interestingly enough it seems to be the American that's really struggling so far this season (St. Joes certainly helped out there), currently sitting at 26th in RPI with a 19-9 record and the 32 ranked SOS.

Looks like we currently have the 6th best OOC record as a conference and have it against the 14th ranked SOS. Certainly could be worse off than this, even after that dreadful day earlier in the week.

 

[glabedz]

I enjoyed that write-up there. I mean obviously it's all fairly positive news for my team so far this season compared to expectations, so it's hard to be disappointed by that. The general consensus I've been hearing from other UMass fans is that we'll need to win the next 2 (fairly winnable) to get to 5-0 before hitting the toughest part of our OOC slate. The the going will get rough and we'll expect to lose a few there. 7-9 wins is what we'll want to see with maybe some potential to steal a game in there. Oddly we finished the OOC at 7 wins last year but then the wheels feel off and we only won 4 more the rest of the season.

It's still early, but currently realtimerpi has the A10 rates as the 8th best conference, directly behind the MVC, but directly ahead of the B10, Big East, and Mountain West. Interestingly enough it seems to be the American that's really struggling so far this season (St. Joes certainly helped out there), currently sitting at 26th in RPI with a 19-9 record and the 32 ranked SOS.

Looks like we currently have the 6th best OOC record as a conference and have it against the 14th ranked SOS. Certainly could be worse off than this, even after that dreadful day earlier in the week.

Appreciate it! Interesting note on the real time rpi -- is that an ESPN metric? I will take 6th best OOC record in a heartbeat, and I can only imagine SOS is going to get better with some of those preseason tournaments coming up. The A-10 has had its fair share of struggles against cupcakes, but Charlotte beating Davidson and Ohio beating St. Bonaventure were really the only 2 egregious losses thus far.

 

[e_parade]

RealTimeRPI is actually independent of ESPN: http://realtimerpi.com/rpi_conf_Men.html and it's kept pretty much in real time. As of this post the B10 has passed us and we're down to 9th in RPI.

If you click into each conference you can see where teams currently stand out of all D1 as well. Here's the A10: http://realtimerpi.com/rpi_atl10_Men.html

6 teams are currently in the top 30, bolstered by decent to strong SOS and good records. Duquesne has two wins but a really bad SOS so far, so their RPI is bad as well.