Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

We’re obviously not a very good men’s basketball team right now.   The causes of this state of affairs are pretty well-understood — essentially, they boil down to extreme inexperience and injuries to AJ Ogilvy — so there’s no need to belabor them.

I’m not worried about the future of this program, although I can imagine this season may not get a lot better.   But among all the predictable ranting on VandySports, by the usual suspects who are frustrated by their own inability to do anything to make the team win, I see a few arguments worth taking seriously about why I should be more worried than I am:

• Florida and Tennessee are young teams too.
• Young teams are supposed to improve, but Vanderbilt hasn’t improved leading up to January 24

Mike Rapp rebutted the first point succinctly: “Their depth is all freshmen, but they aren’t starting freshmen, at least not to the degree we are. Tchiengang started yesterday, guys.”   And ORDore expanded on it:

We hear about how Tennessee has freshmen contributing, Florida has freshmen contributing, so why can’t Vandy be better. Well, of course, the freshmen on those teams are complimentary players - they are built around more experienced players. At Vandy, we have two freshmen playing 30 minutes a game out of necessity, and a few more who are starting to demand more and more playing time.

The second point, about improvement, presumes a fallacy about the nature of how young teams with potential “improve”.   According to this argument, a young team like ours should be improving throughout the course of the season, so the fact that Vanderbilt looked much worse against Florida on Jan. 24 than it did against UMass on Jan. 3 or even at Miss State on Jan. 17 should be troubling.

Well, for one thing Florida is a much better opponent than UMass, so this argument is pretty specious three weeks into a conference season (unless you’re like Memphis or Gonzaga and your conference schedule is easier than your OOC).   Teams playing tougher opponents look like they’re regressing.    That’s just how it works.

But secondly, there’s a huge difference between expecting year-to-year improvement and observing game-to-game improvement.    When freshmen become sophomores, they spend their first off-season completely in the program.   They (ideally) address the shortcomings exposed in their first year of college play, work on their game, and start the next season as better players.   Although some microcosm of this process should happen in the 3-7 days between games in a season, the analogy isn’t strong enough to provoke worry based on short-term improvement.   In other words, just because my team’s freshmen can’t figure out how to play SEC defense from Tuesday to Saturday doesn’t mean they won’t figure it out from 2009 to 2010.

Game-to-game improvement is a smaller sample, hence more susceptible to sample size issues.   If I flip a coin twice and get tails both times, then flip the coin twice more and get heads, that doesn’t mean the coin is “improving” at throwing heads.   It’s just statistical noise.  Likewise, a team may just pull a crappy game or two out of its bag during a season; that doesn’t mean the team’s not improving in the longer term.

(By this, I’m not saying that Tennessee and Florida didn’t reveal very real problems with our team this season.   In fact, I imagine that the magnitude of the score margin and the magnitude of VU’s awfulness was probably due to some variance.   We might play Florida again, make a few layups, see the Gators miss a few of the open looks we gave them, and lose by 12 instead of 25.   Our team would be no better, really, but the panickers wouldn’t be panicking as hard.)

That’s the theory, but there’s a good concrete example.   Going into this season, I reflected on how much our youth resembled Florida’s last year, and the comparison hasn’t been lost on many other VU folks.   This year Florida looks pretty good, at least a borderline NCAA team.   So surely the 2008 Florida team must have given notice of its promise by playing some great ball in February and early March, right?

No.

…[F]rom Feb 1 to Selection Sunday, Florida was 3-8 last year. According to our own gloom and doom crowd, a Gator fan pointing out his own team’s youth last year would be wrong to look forward to the future. You’re only allowed to argue that your team has potential if they improve over EVERY three-week stretch throughout the season, and Florida clearly didn’t improve between Feb. 1 and Mar. 13, 2008.

Ergo Florida this year is hopeless just like Vanderbilt will be next year.

(Cross-posted from my post in the above thread.)

Now, the Gators had a nice three-win run to New York before losing to UMass in the NIT semifinals.    For all I or the gloom-and-doomers know, Vanderbilt may end the 2009 season exactly the same way!    But it’s way too soon to write off the future based on a patch of terrible form against top-half SEC opponents in mid-January.