Cincinnati’s Dillon Mitchell and Jizzle JamesDylan Buell/Getty Images
Through Wednesday morning, there were seven teams with an average scoring margin of at least 32.7 points per game.
Four of those teams—Texas Tech, Cincinnati, Iowa State and Houston—play in the Big 12, which was at the epicenter of last year’s running argument about the impact of scoring margin on the NET rankings and whether it’s harder/more impressive to beat a decent team by 15 or a terrible team by 50.
Those four teams have played a combined total of 14 games: 13 wins by a minimum of 16 points each against teams that presently rank in the bottom 50 percent nationally on KenPom, and Houston’s five-point loss to Auburn.
For their combined zero victories over top-180 foes, they rank third, seventh, ninth and 10th on KenPom.
Plenty of teams do this to some extent—many more try to do it and fail miserably—but it does seem to disproportionately be these turnover-forcing Big 12 teams who make a mockery of the system by demoralizing teams who never had a prayer. (In Houston’s most recent win over Louisiana, the Cougars had 17 steals to ULL’s 15 made field goals.)
And while Iowa State was the focal point of last year’s ire with the efficiency-based rankings, get ready for Cincinnati to wear that crown this year.
This would be nothing new, of course. When Mick Cronin was at Cincinnati, he practically built his legacy on annihilating pathetic non-conference schedules. Per KenPom, Cincinnati’s NCSOS ranks from 2010-11 through 2018-19 were: 334, 338, 304, 294, 108, 197, 167, 294 and 243. The Bearcats got a No. 10 seed or better in each of those nine years and went a combined 6-9 with one win over a single-digit seed.
That doesn’t make this year’s Cincinnati schedule any less laughable.
The upcoming road game against Villanova looked solid before the season began, but yikes. Now, it seems the toughest non-conference games the Bearcats will play are the home games against in-state, way-too-early-bubble teams Xavier and Dayton. And even in league play, they’ll only have one game each against Houston, Iowa State, Kansas, Texas Tech and Arizona.
Should be quite the adventure, trying to figure out whether Cincinnati is actually one of the 10 best teams in the country.
Read the full article here
