5 reasons why Washington State makes the NCAA Tournament and 5 why they don’t
March Madness is a month away and the Washington State Cougars sit squarely on the bubble.
The Washington State Cougars basketball team is on a roll. Winners of five straight WSU upped their record to 14-7 put themselves squarely on the March Madness Bubble. Here are five reasons why the Cougs make it to the Big Dance and five reasons they don’t.
Why Washington State makes the Tournament
NET Ranking
It gets confusing about the criteria the NCAA Selection Committee uses to pick the field of 68. One of their main tools is NET Ranking. Without going into the formula, it measures who a team plays and where the game happened (home, away, neutral).
The Cougs are doing well here. Washington State currently ranks 36th out of 358 NCAA Division 1 schools. Depending on how many conference tournament upsets there are, especially among mid-majors, it’s a decent position to be in.
KenPom
KenPom is a ranking system from Ken Pomeroy that measures adjusted efficiency margin. That’s the difference between adjusted offensive efficiency and adjusted defensive efficiency. His goal is to rank how Division 1 schools would do against each other per 100 positions. According to KenPom, the Washington State Cougars rank 33rd in the country.
Remaining Schedule
Washington State has 10 regular-season games plus the Pac-12 Tournament left. With 14 wins in hand, they could conceivably win 21 games in 2021-22. Not many Power 5 schools with that many wins get rejected.
Standings
As of February 8, the Cougs are 7-3 on Pac-12 play, which puts them in fourth place with 10 games left. They are one-half game behind UCLA and Oregon for second and one-and-a-half games ahead of 21st ranked UCLA. If the Washington State Cougars can win six, a 13-7 Pac-12 record not only gets them in, but it also has to make them an eight or nine seed (ten at worst).
Momentum
Another area the Selection Committee looks at is how well a team is playing coming into their conference tournament. As mentioned earlier, Wazzu put five straight “W” column. Going back to the last point, if the Cougars can win 60 percent of their remaining games, it gives them an 11-4 record down the stretch, all against the Pac-12.
Why Washington State doesn’t make the Tournament
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, Cougar fans.
Lack of quality wins
Remember the part about NET rankings. Part of that is how a team plays against other good teams. Opponents get broken up into four quadrants, with Q1 as the best and Q4 being the worst. Against teams in Q1 and Q2, Washington State is 2-4 (with no Q1 wins).
Bad Losses
The Cougs have some losses they’d like to give back, and they aren’t South Dakota State or Boise State. Blowing double-digit leads at home to Eastern Washington and New Mexico State could come back to haunt WSU. Winning those two would have made the Cougs 16-5 and bordering Top 25 in the polls.
NET Comparison
Getting back to NET for a sec. BracketResearch has a nifty tool called a Q-Score, which quantifies team records by quadrant wins. Not surprisingly, Auburn has the high score of 2.61. The Cougars come in at 0.38, which indicates a school a little better than average. For comparison, the two teams above them in NET, Boise State (1.32) and Wake Forrest (1.17), as well as the two teams below, Arkansas (1.26) and Seton Hall (1.10). Teams with a similar Q-Score include Witchita State (71st in NET), Seattle U (119), and Norfolk State (166).
RPI
RPI was the Selection Committee’s go-to stat until a few years ago. It’s a measure of how a team’s win and loss record stacks up with their strength of schedule. The RPI isn’t the be-all-to-end-all anymore, but it still gets noticed. According to CBS, Washington State ranks 73rd.
Remaining Schedule
It’s easy to say if the Washington State Cougars win 60 percent of the games. Looking at who those games are against makes pulling that off extremely difficult. They run the gauntlet over the next two weeks. The Cougs host Arizona on Thursday, followed by Arizona State (2/12), and then hit the road for Oregon (2/14), UCLA (2/17), and USC (2/20).
There are no gimmies on that list. ASU is the only game against a team in the lower half of the conference standings, making it a classic trap game. They also finish the regular season on March 5 against Oregon. So winning six games will be very difficult.
Michael Flowers from DEEP! 🎯
@WSUCougarMBB is on 🔥 pic.twitter.com/AstHy5vY0V
— FOX College Hoops (@CBBonFOX) January 31, 2022
Do you think the Washington State Cougars make this year’s NCAA Tournament? Let us know in the comments section below.