Friday, December 17, 2010

The Season Of Upsets: Louisville, UNLV, Tennessee

There are always a lot of upsets this time of year. The top teams have mostly finished up their quality out-of-conference games, and their players are focused on finals, Christmas and upcoming conference games. Those teams then run into mid-majors desperate for a big win before beginning conference play, and upsets happen. We always have a lot. But this year has been particularly upset-licious. Here are three more big upsets from the past few days:

Drexel 52, #21 Louisville 46
The Colonial Athletic Association has been off to a strong start - a whole bunch of teams have played better than expected. But the most surprising team of all has to be Drexel. Way back in April I thought Drexel would be a quality team (I picked them to finish fourth in the CAA, and to be a borderline bubble team). But in late July disaster struck and they lost two players, including their leading scorer & assist man from last season. I thought their season was over. But with their best scoring punch gone, Bruiser Flint turned his team into a defensive menace. They are 30th in the nation in effective shooting percentage against, and 7th in the nation in defensive rebounding percentage - and they're 314th in the nation in tempo. Louisville learned the hard way that nobody is going to put up a lot of points against this team. In 8 games coming into this one Louisville had averaged 62.8 shots from the field and 25.1 free throw attempts. In this one they got their 25 free throw attempts, but only 47 shots from the field. Drexel is now a soft 7-1. This is by far their best win, and they have a six point loss at Rhode Island that could still end up being an RPI 100+ loss. But it's way better than I expected, and I would no longer be shocked if Drexel works their way onto the bubble. As for Louisville, this is their first loss of the season and they do have wins over UNLV and Butler. They'll hope that this doesn't turn into an RPI 100+ loss, but Louisville still has chances to make up for it even before Big East play begins. They will play at Western Kentucky on Wednesday, and have their rivalry game against Kentucky on December 31st. They begin Big East play on January 5th against Seton Hall.

UC Santa Barbara 68, #22 UNLV 62
UC Santa Barbara played well and collected a good win, but this result had a lot more to do with UNLV's flaws than anything else. I've talked about this before, but this year's UNLV team is very reliant on outside shooting. They do not have a lot of skill in the paint, and they are a streak shooting team. When they hot they get white hot and can beat just about any team in the country. But when they get cold (they shot 6-for-29 behind the arc in this game)? They can lose to almost anybody. UNLV benefits from their tough schedule because they will get to collect some nice scalps. They've already beaten Wisconsin, Virginia Tech and Tulsa, and they'll get a few more nice wins in Mountain West play. They'll win more than 20 games and they'll go Dancing. But they will have some inexplicable losses - this won't be the last. UNLV led in this game 38-37 with about 17 minutes remaining. They proceeded to score 8 points over approximately the next 10 minutes. Their offensive futility was UCSB's gain. The Gauchos move to 5-3, but this is by far their best win, and all of their losses are against likely RPI 100+ teams. But this win is the type that could be the difference between a 13 or 14 or 15 seed should they win the Big West Conference. And right now I view that conference as a three-way race between UCSB, Long Beach State and Pacific.

Charlotte 49, #7 Tennessee 48
I think I've finally figured out Tennessee. Whatever I think is going to happen to them, the opposite happens. There's no other way to explain the way they've played the past couple of seasons. Last year they had four of their best players suspended and had to play for weeks getting key minutes from the last few players on their bench, including walk-ons. And all of this happened less than two weeks after an embarrassing 22 point loss to a mediocre USC team. At the time I talked about how dire the situation looked. Naturally they came out and knocked off Kansas, the consensus best team in the nation, and played their best ball of the season over the next couple of weeks. They came into this season with all sorts of worries, including a coach under fire and an exhibition loss to a Division-II squad. So naturally they won their first 7 games of the season, including wins over Pitt, Villanova and Missouri State - making their way up to 7th in the polls. Then they came out this week and lost to Oakland. Thankfully if there was a team to bounce back against it was a Charlotte team that came in 4-6 and was rated outside the Top 200 in the nation by Sagarin and was playing their first game since kicking their best player (Shamari Spears) off the team. Motivated by that Oakland loss there was no way they could possibly lose this one, right? Naturally. So at this point the best way to project Tennessee's future is to try to come up with the most educated guess, and then to assume that the exact opposite will happen.

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