Weekly Inside the Numbers for Basketball

615dawg

All-Conference
Jun 4, 2007
6,628
3,577
113
Its early in the SEC season, but the men's basketball win over Texas was pretty big. It not only gave us a Quad 1 win (now 1-2), it moved us nearly 30 spots up in the NET.

We moved to 96th in the NET rankings, well below the top 40 we need to be in to feel safe about an NCAA bid, but a big move in the right direction. We have two Top 50 NET teams on the schedule this week - at home against Oklahoma and on the road at Kentucky. Interestingly enough, we have a higher RPI than both those teams, but NET is where its at nowadays, and we have significant work to do.

On the women's side, we are 36th in the NET, which translates to the 8/9 seed line in the NCAA Tournament. We are 0-2 against Quad 1 but have two opportunities at Quad 1 wins this week against Tennessee and at Ole Miss.

A 1-1 split for both the men and women this week would be great. The women are a solid NCAA team, they just have to stay .500 or better. The men likely have to go 12-6 (and 5-0 against Missouri, Ole Miss and South Carolina - cannot afford another Q3 loss)
 
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TPIPER36

Senior
May 19, 2023
688
834
93
Huge game on Wed. If we win this one and Kentucky we maybe back in the NCAAT discussions I would imagine
 

MSUDC11-2.0

Heisman
Sep 29, 2022
8,784
13,671
113
I think it’s probably going to take 10 or 11 SEC wins for the men to make the NCAAT. We just didn’t get anything out of the noncon portion. There are 2-3 games I feel like we will really wish we had back in a couple of months (New Mexico, SMU, San Francisco). All of them we had late leads and couldn’t close it.

We’re still a good ways off the bubble so it will be about stacking a bunch of wins, not just a big win here and there like SEC play last year ended up being. We were nearly a double digit underdog in Austin, and we will likely be underdogs in the majority of our remaining games. Going to need to do some exceeding expectations. I think we may be a slight favorite at home on Wednesday and will probably be favored against OM at home next Saturday, but beyond that yeah we will be going into almost every game as an underdog.