What bracketologists are saying about Mizzou
Outsiders didn’t expect Missouri to be this good; at least not this soon. With the Tigers coming off a 12-21 season, bringing in a new staff and only retaining three players from last year’s roster, it was fair to be unsure about the team. Mizzou was picked 11th in the preseason SEC poll.
Head coach Dennis Gates hasn’t been concerned with what outsiders think. To him, the only ranking that matters this season is who the No. 1 team is on April 3 — the day of the national championship game. But even he might be impressed by how well the Tigers are performing in his first year at the helm.
“No, I don't pay attention to the preseason,” Gates said at the SEC Media Days on Oct. 19. “I just know we're in the infant stages of building the program. It takes a while, it takes time. We have to continue to recruit at a high level, we gotta do a lot of player development to get our players better.”
Mizzou has caught many by surprise going 19-7 overall and 7-6 in conference play so far this year. With five games left in the regular season and Selection Sunday a little more than three weeks away, the Tigers have almost certainly earned themselves a bid to the NCAA tournament, barring a late season collapse. But where Missouri should be seeded has become an increasingly important topic of discussion.
Bracket Project publishes a daily matrix that tracks where each team is seeded in 100 different bracket forecasts and ranks the schools based on their average seed. On Thursday, Mizzou was predicted to make the tournament in all 100 projections and ranked 27th overall with an average seed of 7.51. But the Tigers also had one of the widest ranges of variance, being ranked as high as a No. 4 seed and as low as a No. 10 seed. MU's projections have a standard deviation of 1.2, the third-highest among all teams on the matrix, trailing just Rutgers and Providence.
“I think it's probably a fair reflection,” said Joe Lunardi, who’s been running bracket projections for ESPN since 1995. “The committee as a whole, you know, there's nothing that says to a committee member, 'You have to rely on this or that criteria or this or that piece of data.' Some of them just watch games and they could be basing it purely on observation or qualitative considerations. And you know, maybe there's a committee member or two or a bracket matrix person or two — or 22 — who says, 'Man, I really like them.' And others who go, 'Eh.'”
Seeding teams is a purely subjective process and attempting to duplicate the work of a 12-member committee is virtually impossible. But bracketologists do know the metrics that the committee considers and also have historical knowledge to pull from to try to replicate the process as closely as possible.
Jerry Palm of CBS Sports, who’s been predicting brackets for 30 years, said it comes down to four factors: who did you play, where did you play, who did you beat and who beat you? Mizzou is one of the top teams in the country by those standards. The Tigers are one of six teams in the nation with five wins over ranked teams. Two of the victories — Illinois and Tennessee — were earned away from home. The team also doesn’t have any bad losses. Missouri is 4-7 in Quad 1 games but 15-0 going up against opponents in Quads 2 through 4.
It’s why Palm has been consistently higher on the Tigers than the consensus. He predicted Mizzou to be a No. 7 seed on Thursday but had the team up to a No. 4 seed before its blowout loss to Auburn.
“A team like Missouri has been pretty consistent,” Palm said. “I think it's actually more important to look at kind of the record against teams either already in the bracket or teams that are being considered for the bracket.”
Palm acknowledged he doesn’t really look at other people’s projections — not because he doesn’t respect their work, but because he doesn’t have much time for it and doesn’t want to get caught up in groupthink. But he also noted that he likely doesn’t rely on predictive metrics, such as the NCAA’s NET rankings or Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted efficiency margin or ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI), as much as others might.
Mizzou doesn’t rate nearly as well when judged by the metrics, ranking 50th in NET, 56th on KenPom and 65th in BPI. Dominic Lese, who goes by Bracket Dom on Twitter and runs a tournament projections website called Bracketometry.com, thinks it's one of the biggest reasons there’s so much disagreement on where the Tigers should be seeded.
“There's the result-based metrics, which is kind of like how you were against your schedule. And then the predictive metrics, like KenPom or BPI that really tell you more just how good a team actually is,” Lese said. “And they have a massive gulf between the two.”
According to Bracket Project, Lese’s forecasts have been the second-most accurate over the past five years. He has Missouri as one of the lower No. 8 seeds after the loss to Auburn. He pointed out that a team’s resume often determines whether or not it gets into the tournament, but that the predictive metrics are often used to determine how high the team should be seeded. Palm said that if MU is still 50th in the NET by Selection Sunday, the school would have no chance at earning a No. 4 seed.
Lunardi also has the Tigers as a No. 8 seed but gives a little more credit to the resume. He said he tries to focus in on how a team performs against its own conference. As he puts it, a school with a poor record and a high predictive metric has only proved it can lose to good teams. Mizzou ranks 19th in strength of record, which reflects how well a typical 25th-ranked team would fare given a team’s schedule.
Rocco Miller, who runs Bracketeer.org, contributes to Field of 68 and has put out projections since 2010, had the Tigers as a No. 7 seed before the loss at Auburn. He included them on his Big Board on Friday, in which he sorts contending schools into eight different tiers, as the No. 31 overall team and safely in the tournament. Miller thought Missouri checked a big box by defeating No. 6 Tennessee, picking up its first true road win over a likely tournament team. He likes the Tigers for many of the same reasons as Lese, Lunardi and Palm — they’ve got quality wins and no bad losses.
But to take his process a step further, Miller teams up with mock selection committees to get a feel for the variety of opinions that only comes from working with other people. This year, Miller is part of a committee that features several other bracketologists, put on by Tim Kreuger of Stadium, and will live-stream its meetings on a YouTube channel called “Mock Selection Committee.” Miller said they’ll try to mirror the actual selection committee as closely as possible.
“The way that the committee will actually do it is they'll take a batch of eight teams at a time that you vote on. And that's how the process starts,” Miller said. “So they'll basically pick you know, a general consensus of the top eight and they'll have all the committee members vote for their top four. And then out of those four, there's another voting process to rank them one through four. And that's how you actually get your top No. 1 seeds across the bracket and in what order.”
There are still a few weeks for Missouri to nail down its place in the seedings, with home games against Texas A&M, Mississippi State and Ole Miss and road games against Georgia and LSU still on the slate. None of the teams rank highly enough to significantly improve the Tigers’ place in the rankings. But Lese said the games are still important because it gives Mizzou the opportunity to end the year with a blemish-free resume. A Quad 2 win wouldn’t move the needle up much, but a Quad 2 loss would undoubtedly move it down.
There’s also the SEC tournament, which could help the Tigers pick up a few more neutral site wins. But all four bracketologists agreed that conference tournaments are beginning to matter less and less. Palm said that committee members don’t give tournament games any extra value — they’re just one extra game on the resume. Lunardi thinks that games in March with added stakes should mean more than non-conference contests in November, but said there is little evidence of that being the case.
Last year's Texas A&M team was often cited as an example of how little weight the selection committee thinks postseason games hold. The Aggies entered the 2022 SEC tournament firmly on the bubble at 20-11 overall and 9-9 in league play, then rattled off three consecutive wins before falling to Tennessee in the conference final. Despite nearly every bracketologist predicting Texas A&M to hear its name called on Selection Sunday, the Aggies were snubbed of a tournament berth.
“What became very clear to me was the NCAA was done with their work by Saturday morning, maybe even before that,” Miller said. “But I think in general, the timing is really, really difficult in the SEC because you have your championship game on Sunday, your semis on Saturday. And if you're a team, maybe like a Texas A&M or Mississippi State or Kentucky this year with work to do, I think the advice I would be giving is to get all your work done before that week starts. Because I think the voting and all of the process, that keeps on happening earlier so they have a nice clean bracket ready to go on Sunday.
“And the sad thing is, you know, if you're listening to this and you want to tune into those games, I'm sorry to tell you, a lot of times they don't have a lot on the line unless it's a team stealing a bid.”
The 2023 SEC tournament begins in Nashville on March 8. Selection Sunday takes place on CBS at 5 p.m. CT on March 12. Mizzou will keep making its case in the meantime.
“Barring a complete collapse, they're going to make the tournament and I don't think a lot of people saw that coming,” Lunardi said. “And not only that, they should be seeded well enough to be no worse than in a 50/50 game in the first round, if not favored … They're — I don't want to say a lock at this point — but you know, they're 90% in. And that is a hugely successful season no matter what happens from this point out.”
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