How to Pick Big Dance Upsets
In order from most important to least important are the eight factors that we think matter most when it comes to determining which mid and low-majors can win Big Dance games. With props to Pete Tiernan of the brilliantly geeky Bracket Science website, blog, and contributor to Basketball Prospectus, we’ve added margin of victory as factor numero nuevo this year.
Here are the Hoops Junkie’s best practices in picking Big Dance Upsets:
1. Guard play typically carries the day in the March so look for Mid and Low-Major teams that have senior guards. This year that means teams like both the Vikings — Cleveland State and Portland State — Virginia Commonwealth, Siena, Western Kentucky, North Dakota State, Robert Morris, and American; even though they got a nightmare match-up playing Villanova in Philly.
2. Look for teams that hit the road like hobos and played challenging non-league slates. Teams that spent November and December, playing at BCS league gyms, won’t be shocked and awed by how talented their first round opponents are. It’s pretty well known that Gonzaga had a murderous OOC schedule but according to http://www.kenpom.com/rpi.php?s=20“>Ken Pomeroy’s ratings, other teams to keep in mind are Cleveland State (25th in OOC SOS), Siena (34th), Butler (45th), and Cal-State Northridge (50th).
3. Show me a Mid-Major team that has seniors who’ve been to Big Dance as underclassmen and I’ll show you a dangerous team. With so few non-BCS league squads in the field this season, Cornell, Siena, and Western Kentucky are really the only teams that have this type of experience playing on college hoops biggest stage.
4. Teams with distinctive styles have an advantage. The nation’s foremost run-n-gun outfit Virginia Military Institute may not be in this year’s Field of 64 but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other Mid and Low-Majors that play hoops like it’s a footrace. East Tennessee State, CSUN, and Siena probably play the quickest of the non-power conference teams while Portland State, Butler, Western Kentucky, and Akron shoot tons of triples. Tough, defensive-minded teams in this year’s field include the aforementioned Akron Zips, Stephen F. Austin, and my pick for most physical team in the Big Dance, Cleveland State.
5. Teams that can stroke the triple are notoriously tough outs in the Big Dance. That means that Cornell, the best three-point shooting team in the tourney — has a puncher’s chance at knocking off Missouri while Utah State, a team that shoots almost 40% from beyond the arc, has the shooters to win a couple games. If not more.
6. Beware the under-seeded Mid-Major. The aformentioned Utah State Aggies seeded 11th despite the fact they won 30 games. Similarly, Northern Iowa is not a 12 seed, nor are Dayton, or Butler 11 and 9 seeds respectively. They received said seeds only because of the leagues they play in. Put a team with the credentials of the Gaels or Wildcats in a BCS league and they’d be seeded somewhere from 5 to 7.
7. We’re big fans of riding a wave of momentum into the tourney so look for teams that enter the Big Dance with winning streaks. Because of the relative parity that exists throughout mid and low-majordom there aren’t a lot of squads with the type of gaudy 18 and 20-game winning streaks that we’ve seen teams come into the Big Dance with during seasons past. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t teams that haven’t won much more than they’ve lost. Patriot League champs American have won 13-0 in row; North Dakota State is 18-1 in it’s last 19; and Radford is 13-1 in it’s last 14 games.
8. I know lots of folks don’t buy that a single player from a Mid and Low-Major team is good enough to carry his side to victory, but March Madness lore is rife with star-making turns from transcendent talents like Stephen Curry last year and VCU’s Eric Maynor the dance before. Do the names Harold “The Show” Arceneaux and Marc “Showbiz” Brown ring a bell?
A league Player of the Year can provide that much-needed bucket when the favored squad makes its inevitable run. Players who rule their roost in the leagues that almost never get on CBS or ESPN savor the spotlight the Big Dance provides them and excel. Guys like Utah State’s Gary Wilkinson, Portland State’s Jeremiah Dominguez, VCU’s Maynor, Butler’s Matt Howard, and North Dakota State’s Ben Woodside are all capable of game-changing performances.
9. As we said previously, this comes courtesy of Pete Tiernan, who crunched a Mount Kilimanjaro’s worth of data and determined that a lower seed with an average victory margin of >15 PPG is most likely to “overachieve based on it’s seed.” That means find those squads with the gaudy league records and figure out which of them consistently won their league games by double digit margins. This tourney, teams like Siena, Utah State, Cornell, American, and North Dakota State had plenty of games where they handled their bizness against lesser teams by running them out of the gym.
