Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

It’s the time of year where I totally lose sight of any priorities and post round the clock on VandySports.com. That should be where a blog (even a dying one) comes in handy, as I can collect my thought, post one long ramble instead of scattershot responses, and sort of get my impressions of the game ahead on record.

So, the first very legitimate question is: How good is Murray State? I don’t think anyone knows. On one hand virtually all the quantitative models tracked by Massey seem to believe they’re somewhere between the 45th and 75th team in the nation, and that Vanderbilt is somewhere between 20th and 35th. That’s a real edge, but not an overwhelming one. Plugging Pomeroy’s numbers into the log5 formula suggests we win 59% of the time, which is an awful lot of room for disappointment. Sagarin’s “predictor” is a two digit number with a two-digit decimal, so I’m not sure if I can log5 it by moving the decimal left two places — but if so, those numbers say we’re 57%.

Is Murray State that good?

What stands out as one looks at there schedule is that they’ve beaten absolutely nobody. California is their best opponent, and they lost by 5 on the road. Their best wins are two out of three against Morehead State (Pomeroy #96), the home one by 30 points! After that, looks like their best win is ETSU (Pomeroy #142). In six games against the Pomeroy top 130, they’re 2-4. So basically their efficiency rating suggests that they execute extremely well when beating up on bad teams. Even if I think Vanderbilt fans should take efficiency-based projections seriously, I can’t blame Vanderbilt fans for thinking Murray State hasn’t beaten anyone in the same echelon as Vanderbilt. They haven’t. (Doesn’t imply they absolutely can’t, of course.) By comparison, Siena had a great win over Stanford in 2008, even though Stanford had explanations for playing less than its best at a noon Eastern tipoff in Albany.

I’ll throw out one more quantitative way to look at this. I’m fascinated by a model presented by David Hess on The Audacity of Hoops attempting to use finer-grained stats to predict upsets. On the first two criteria, TO% margin (24.6 - 21.5) and Off Reb% margin (39.5 - 32.7), the Racers look scary indeed. But then I see that he filters out all those teams with an SoS of 150 or better, roughly the top half of all Division I schedules. The Racers are 289th. Interestingly, their sched is even easier when they play out of the dreadful OVC.

So what to make of it all? I’m open-minded that Murray State could be a tougher-than-normal 13-seed, and I certainly think if Vanderbilt doesn’t show up to play, we’ll get embarrassed. Of course without me knowing the psychological states of each team, it’s equally likely that the Racers don’t show up to play and we get another 77-44 win. Far more likely is an outcome somewhere in between there. I’m tempted to give VU a few points just because I think Stallings is great at outscheming the competition on limited preparation time. I realize that you have to be careful, that it could be a familiarity bias here, that Racers fans expect Billy Kennedy to outscheme every opponent. And I also realize that it’s awfully easy to excuse the outliers — Siena won because that squad of Commodores didn’t show up, not because of any systematic flaw in Stallings’ and the staff’s preparation. It’s convenient to believe that, but I really do believe it.

So for me the most likely outcome is that Vanderbilt beats the spread by several points, but not enough to satisfy those who smell blood in the water. Let’s say Vanderbilt 74, Murray State 65.

And then we can turn around and agonize anew over Butler or (slightly less likely) UTEP.