.500 in the Big Ten -- Question
How does everyone know that going .500 in the Big Ten would guarantee us a spot in the tournament? In Brian's post 'Unverified Voracity Owes Georgia A Beer' he says Jay Bilas is most certainly wrong that we would get in with or without a win against Minnesota. What does that one extra win do? I don't understand much about the selection committee or their criteria.
Thanks.
Usually a losing conference record does not look good.
Oh, so are you saying .500 is some sort of threshold that would get us in because we have some big wins to go along with it?
There are no thresholds, there are no absolutes.
Like said, being .500 in your conference looks good. Is it necessary? No, but if you're sub-.500 you likely need a lot more positives to make up for it. It just simply looks bad to be below .500.
In our case, .500 was always a goal because it seemed (still does) like our out-of-conference season was very good and that it would take "only" a .500 conference record. At that time, it was more of a general thing, like I said earlier, to avoid looking bad.
Agreed. For us it also has a bit to do with "going intot the tournament hot." If it came down to us or another team and they were on a 5 game win streak and we had lost 3 of 5 then they may get in based on that. It just so happens that for us winning our last game would also put us at .500 as well, which looks good in both aspects. It is basically a win or go home game against Minn. unless we can win the conference tourney, which would obviously be a near miracle.
It is all relative and there are no absolutes so we set goals of what we think the criteria would be.
The Big Ten top to bottom posted pretty good out of conference records with some big wins to bump up the general perception of the conference as a whole. In a competitive conference it is slightly more acceptable to have a worse conference record. .500 is just an imaginary threshold that the media and fans hold as a minimum to get into the tournament for the Big Ten. The SEC is thought to be a down conference this year so a better than .500 mark may be necessary for teams to get in. There are many factors that get weighed and considered differently.
Of course numerous big wins or no big wins can make that same record look different. For the Big Ten it is 9-9 or the step down is 8-10 which seems much worse.