Someone on the list was wondering if the Cats would be ranked after a very good week. The answer is “NO”. And after the Cats beat Illinois and hammered tOSU, they got…not even a…single…vote.
When I look at the polls on ESPN, I see that the Cats got 32 votes in the AP poll and 23 in the coaches poll, maybe you looked too soon?
I think if they had been able to pull off a road win at Nebraska, they might have made the top 25, or at least gotten closer. Two key road games this week.
To be honest, I don’t know if I care if they’re ranked right now, I just want a good seed when the official Tournament brackets come out. 7-8-9-10 means a really tough 2nd round game.
Someone on the list was wondering if the Cats would be ranked after a very good week. The answer is “NO”. And after the Cats beat Illinois and hammered tOSU, they got…not even a…single…vote.
I guess that we’ll have to take care of Purdue in West Lafayette and at Minnesota to get 3 or 4 votes this week.
Theoretically that means we should be ranked no worse than 28. ( With the “also getting votes” ). We aren’t So either Lunardi is off , or the voters are off
But we were. Both polls had the Cats receiving 20+ votes, though maybe not quite #28. The earlier post was premature, probably made before sites like ESPN had updated their polls yesterday.
Nobody knows the formula behind the NET rankings, the NCAA won’t publish it.
FWIW, Northwestern is #60 in the latest NET rankings, how that correlates with a 7 seed is a bit of a mystery to me. Nebraska is #59 and they’re an 11 seed.
The big issue I’m seeing debated is “why would Michigan State have a NET rating far lower than ours?” I’ve seen arguments on both sides, but the consensus seems to be that NET focuses on margin of victory/loss vs pre-game forecasts. In our case, when we win, we tend to (OSU aside) win by smaller margins. I don’t agree with it, but that’s what I’m hearing.
This runs the risk of being a compound issue. If NET ratings are based in part on road vs home and Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4 are determined based on both NET ratings and home/neutral/road, then location is getting double-factored.
Maybe so, Mike. But the official NET rankings includes only Road record, not home or neutral, plus Q1-Q4 records. Without the ranking formula it’s impossible to tell how much each counts.
