Tuesday, March 14, 2000
Momentum quick to disappear once tourney begins
Teams on a roll often get rolled
BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
It's easy to love Iowa State and St. John's today, as easy as it is to reject Texas and Ohio State.
Everybody loves a winner, and, attention spans being what they are these days, no one can remember the Cyclones and Red Storm doing anything else.
It has been 23 days since Iowa State last dropped a basketball game. Only 10 days ago, St. John's lost to the Miami Hurricanes, but that was its only defeat in the past six weeks.
The Buckeyes and the Longhorns, on the other hand, suffered conference tournament losses last week.
What that means to the NCAA Tournament is precisely nothing.
Today's hot team could very well become Thursday's first-round loser. Today's hot team could end up in the Final Four. What's important is not who enters the team playing great basketball, but who plays great basketball upon arrival.
That would seem to be self-explanatory, but in practice, it's not. The selection committee for this year's NCAA Tournament invested a lot of its credibility in the idea that a team playing well at the end of the year is a team that will play well when the tournament begins.
There's one problem with that: It's not true.
Teams do not carry momentum into the NCAA Tournament. They generate momentum once inside. Tournament basketball is different from everything that precedes it, and everyone who enters the field understands.
There is no component of the selection process that is less predictive of tournament success than how well a team plays in the final third of its season.
Consider:
• Of the past six NCAA champions, three lost their final game before the tournament began. In 1997, Arizona lost its last two regular-season games.
• In the past two seasons, the 24 teams that reached the Sweet 16 but did not advance to the Final Four had an average record of 7-3 in their final 10 games. Seven were .500 or below.
• One fourth of last year's Sweet 16 — Florida (5-5), Iowa (5-5), Southwest Missouri State (5-5) and Purdue (4-6) played poorly down the stretch.
Consider UC in 1997-98. That was a team that earned a No.2 seed on the basis of a strong record against the Ratings Percentage Index top 100 but also because of its 9-1 record in the final 10 games it played.
That team was on a roll. It won its Conference USA tournament games by an average margin of 14.3 points. It closed the season with nine straight wins.
So how come that team needed a late D'Juan Baker jump shot to escape a 15th seed in the first round and then was vanquished lost in the second round by to a 10th seed?
Because momentum was not an issue once the Bearcats stepped off the plane in Boise, Idaho.
The “stretch run” factor obviously is something the committee has not thought clearly enough about.
It sounds good, because people can grasp the idea that teams playing their best basketball in March are the ones likely to succeed in the NCAAs.
This year's committee placed more emphasis on this issue than any in recent memory.
Of the eight highest-rated conferences, seven have tournaments. The winners of the SEC and Conference USA events needed the championship to earn bids to the NCAAs and were seeded accordingly.
Of the other five (Michigan State, Iowa State, St. John's, Duke and Temple), none was seeded lower than a No. 2.
Teams that enjoyed superior regular seasons (Ohio State, .786 winning percentage; Louisiana State, .839; Syracuse, .828) were punished for early elimination.
An early loss in a league tournament can indeed signal that a team is deteriorating, but it can just as surely be deceiving. The committee is not in the position to make such judgments. Its members should measure each team's performance over the entire regular season.
A victory in November should mean no less than one in February. March tends to take care of itself.
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