The current bracket is available here, with all the results from the round of 64. I've tabulated this by seeding to give a sense about favorites winning vs upsets. No doubt point spread in the game matters too, but that was more data collection than I wanted to do. Here are the results, just based on the seeding. (Note that in this round the seeding of a team and its opponent sum to 17.
The seeding gives an ordinal ranking of the teams. The higher ranked team should be more likely to win. For how much more likely, you need a cardinal ranking. Also, it is possible that teams are not ranked correctly. For example, Yale, which lost pretty handily to Purdue, was a 14th seed. The Ivy League is not known for its basketball. Should Yale have been a 16th seed, so that Purdue would have faced sterner competition in that round? Who knows? My sense of things is that the ordinal rankings are pretty much correct and there is a sharp difference in quality between the number 16 seeds and the number 1 seeds. But then there is a large plateau that rises between the number 15 seeds and the number 2 seeds. Both the 11 and 12 seeds did pretty well, which is some indicator of that plateau.
Now let me turn to the team I root for, Illinois. They won, but just barely. They played pretty terribly. Something the announcers didn't comment on is that Jacob Grandison, who had been a starter most of the year, came off the bench and got very few minutes. This was because of injury. It was the first game back for him since he was injured. Having a starter out like that upsets the the team play and the the individual performance of other players. A second point that the announcers didn't make is that when André Curbelo wasn't playing much, Trent Frazier was the point guard and was playing at a high level. As Curbelo has gotten more minutes, he has become the point guard, and in my mind dribbles the ball more than he should, as he waits for an opportunity to open up. So Frazier has become another wing player. As a point guard, his three point shooting was quite good. But his shooting has deteriorated in this new role.
If Illinois has good three-point shooting, we are a top-level team. If not, we are pretty mediocre. We can grind, which we did against Chattanooga. That will keep the game reasonably close. But we won't win that way against better opposition.
Now let me talk about the relatively new additions to the lineup, both Curbelo and Coleman Hawkins. While Curbelo has been coming off the bench, Hawkins has been starting recently. Both have big upsides, but both are high variance and make quite a few mistakes in every game they play. Some of that is just sloppy play. Another part is that each shoots the ball from the outside too much, in my opinion. They should be looking to pass, sometimes to other wing players, but hardly did that in yesterday's game.
Our three point shooters are much more accurate off the pass than they are off the dribble. (Plummer may be an exception after he has made his first three and starts to feel it.) Since teams will be having multiple players guard the paint, to be ready to double team and even triple team Kofi Cockburn when he gets the ball, other wing players should be in good shooting position and should be ready for the ream to pass it to them. Feeding Kofi is off course necessary to do, but there needs to be some variety to how the team goes about things.
Let's hope we can move the ball better against Memphis and play well in that game, rather than simply grind things out. But one wonders how much the quality of play can change from one game to the next. We'll see.
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