Welcome to Hell.
Sports hell, that is. Without a whiff of football to be found and basketball in its dog days, the latter weeks of February are sports' darkest hours.
But fear not! Selection Sunday is only four weeks away, and with it comes our sports salvation. Selection Sunday begins an unstoppable chain reaction, leading from brackets to weekends ripe with the tournament's exciting bounty, and when it ends on the first Monday in April, we will have reached the safety of baseball's Opening Day.
And which team will lead us all the way to that promised land? Well, if past tournaments are any indication, we can eliminate quite a few candidates right now with a few rules:
Rule No. 1: This year's champ will come from a BCS conference or be in the final AP top 10.
Rule-Breakers: Every team EXCEPT those from the Big Ten, Big East, Big Twelve, ACC, PAC-10, SEC, Memphis, Butler, and Xavier.
Since the 1995 tournament (which is the last year a team from a now-defunct conference made the Final Four, the Big Eight's Oklahoma State), only one Final Four team has not met this rule. You know who they are, but more on them in a second.
Marquette and Louisville made the Final Four this decade from Conference USA, but both are now in the Big East. Memphis made it from C-USA last year, but they were No. 2. UMass made it in 1996 as the AP's No. 1 team. Utah's national runners-up performance out of the WAC in 1998 was the biggest stretch for a non-BCS contender, and they were No. 7. Of this year's crop, Memphis is currently in the top 10 and it's foreseeable that Xavier and Butler could be by the end of the year.
And then there's George Mason. Yes, they made the 2006 Final Four, knocking off Michigan State, North Carolina, and UConn (sorry, Wichita State, you're not quite as sexy). But I would argue that even just two wins away from the national championship, they still weren't contenders. That was a crazy and fun-filled run (unless, like some unfortunate columnists, your online "sports investing" account was severely drained when GMU upset Connecticut). You could probably call it a once-in-a-lifetime tournament. Well, this is still the same lifetime.
Rule No. 2: This year's champ will rank in the top 30 in team FG percentage.
Rule Breakers: Every team EXCEPT UCLA, California, Wake Forest, Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Kansas, Arizona State, Ohio State, UConn, Missouri, and Arizona.
Every champ from this decade has at least been one of the 25 best field goal shooting teams. 2000 Michigan State was the worst at No. 25, while the last four champs have all been in the top five. (On a side note, 2007 Florida was probably an even better team than we realize, shooting 52.8% as a team that year. The next closest team this decade was 2008 Kansas, which was still a full 1.8% worse.)
The above list, admittedly, is generated from the current FG percentage rankings and not the year-end list. However, there are only a handful of teams that meet Rule No. 1 and are on the cusp of the FG top 30 (Only Xavier, Marquette, NC State, USC, Georgetown, and Baylor are between 30 and 50 in the FG percentage rankings and meet the first rule).
The interesting eliminations from this rule? How about perennial contenders Duke (100th in FG percentage), Michigan State (53rd), and Louisville (202nd)? Those three rabid fan bases will have to hope their teams start shooting the lights out or wait until next year.
Rule No. 3: This year's champ will have seven or fewer losses.
Rule-breakers: California, Kentucky, Florida, Syracuse, Ohio State, and Arizona.
The most losses by a national champion this decade were Michigan State's seven in 2000 (between that and the FG percentage, it's somewhat amazing they were a No. 1 seed and won the tournament). It's not that the eighth loss turns carriages into pumpkins, but rather that the team was beaten eight times makes it suspect to expect it to win six-in-a-row against tournament teams.
Of the teams not eliminated by rules 1 and 2, the six above are either past seven losses (Arizona), at seven losses on the nose and highly unlikely to run the table from here on (Kentucky and Syracuse), or at six losses and facing a tough closing stretch (Cal still has conference battles with both southern California schools and both Arizona schools; Florida still hosts Kentucky and Tennessee, travels to LSU, and has the SEC tourney; Ohio State has Illinois at home, Purdue on the road, and its conference tournament). It seems safe to rule these six out by means of likely exceeding seven losses by Selection Sunday.
On a side note, those seven losses by the 2000 Spartans are a little more understandable than they might look on first glance. The 1999-2000 season was a classic example of a Tom Izzo non-conference schedule; Michigan State played Providence, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina, Kansas, Arizona, and Kentucky in less than a month. Three of their seven losses came in that stretch, so it's probably fair to assume those Spartans would have had fewer than seven losses against a normal schedule. That's why I feel their seven-loss threshold is a comfortable cutoff for championship contenders.
Rule No. 4: This year's champ will have no more than eight players averaging 10 minutes or more per game.
Rule-Breakers: UCLA, Wake Forrest, North Carolina, and Missouri.
We've all heard depth glorified and canonized by scores of college basketball broadcasters. But as it turns out, depth might not be all that it's cracked up to be in determining a national championship. Of this decade's champions, all but one (again, those freaky 2000 Spartans) have had eight or fewer players average double digits in minutes per game.
Now, admittedly, this fact could be caused by any number of puzzling factors. The distribution of a team's minutes can be affected by the number of blowouts it is in, the pace of the game they play, or the whim of the coach. However, I'd suggest two influences that are most important: injuries and talent.
The influence of injuries on the average distribution of minutes is fairly straight-forward. If a team loses a starter to injury in the middle of the season, that starter will probably maintain his 10+ minute average on the strength of the minutes he had already played. In addition, the minutes he was previously getting will likely be inherited by one replacement player, very likely driving his minutes into the double digits. However, this team now is getting significant minutes from a lesser player than the injured starter, so by nature this team most often will not be as good as before the injury. The spread of significant minutes to a larger number of players reflects that.
Additionally, the distribution of minutes on a team reflects how good its best players are. Now, I happen to think a lot of Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim. However, it didn't take superhuman coaching in 2003 for him to play Carmelo Anthony more than 36 minutes per game. As you would expect, Syracuse wanted to maximize how much Anthony was on the floor, and his average of less than four minutes on the bench per game shows just how much Boeheim thought of Anthony. It also shows a lot about Anthony's performance, as that average suggests he was able to avoid foul trouble, injuries, and getting winded.
Of the nine national champions in the 2000s, seven had a leading minute-getter play more than 33 minutes per game. Of the four teams eliminated by this rule for this year, none has a leading minute-getter much past 31. In fact. Missouri's leader in minutes, DeMarre Carroll, only logs an average of 26.6 minutes per game. Now this partly speaks to the Tigers' uptempo style, but what does it say about Mizzou's best players that their coaches are willing to let them sit for well more than a quarter of the game?
Rule No. 5: This year's champ will have at least four scorers averaging 10 or more points per game.
Rule-Breakers: Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Kansas, and Arizona State.
Without exception, every national champion this decade has had at least four players average double digits in points per game. More specifically, every team except one (you guessed it, Michigan State in 2000) has had four scorers average at least 11.1 points per game.
Why does this matter? While we showed that depth on the bench isn't all that helpful in Rule No. 4, it makes sense that having depth of scoring ability in a team's best players is very important. After all, it makes sense that the best teams have four players good enough to average at least 10 points per game in major college basketball (certainly no small feat). And as the tournament progresses, it becomes more likely an opponent will find a way to shut down any other team's best scorer, so having a quartet of adept scorers is a huge benefit.
So who does that leave us with? If past tournaments are any indicator, the Connecticut Huskies are in good shape to take down another national title. Sure, last week's injury to Jermone Dyson makes things complicated. If Dyson does, in fact, miss the remainder of the season, it will affect the makeup of UConn. However, UConn's ninth minute-getter is only at 4.5 minutes per game, leading me to believe Jim Calhoun will distribute Dyson's minutes to the current major players rather than try to replace Dyson with a single individual. And Kemba Walker (8.7 ppg) and Craig Austrie (7.9 ppg) seem likely to up their averages to cover some of Dyson's scoring. Austrie, in particular, is a seasoned player who has handled larger roles before.
Sadly, we're still four long weeks away from even beginning to know if the Huskies will deliver. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to read up on two of the least likeable corners of sports: A-Rod and steroids.
Welcome to Hell.
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