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WBB: Results of the week - BobK - 12-11-2017

http://www.stanfordfbc.org/

A big loss by UCLA 

Re: WBB: Results of the week - M T - 12-11-2017

Quote:Oregon State, 6-2
Beat San Jose State 110-62.

What? I guess I didn't hear they hired Paul Westhead. ;) 
Nah, can't be, or else the score would have been 110-92.

In half their games, Oregon St. has scored at least 94 points.  (An SEC-style preseason?  The best RealTimeRPI of the 4 teams that they scored at least 94 points against is 317 (out of 349).  Competition is getting tougher though:  their next game is against #314.)  They did come with 5 points of Notre Dame.



Re: WBB: Results of the week - 81alum - 12-11-2017

Sagarin Ratings:

Stanford 31

L Ohio State 12 (twice)
L UConn 1
W UC Riverside 176
W CSU Bakersfield 249
W Kent State 181
W Belmont 42
W USF 155
L Baylor 2

upcoming UNLV 127
upcoming Western Illinois 92
upcoming Tennessee 6
upcoming UC LA 17
upcoming U SC 28

If we beat Western Illinois it becomes out second best win.  Best right now it is Belmont.

Tennessee, UC LA, and even U SC will all be important resume builders, or breakers.  By the turn of the new year we are going to know a lot more about this team.


Re: WBB: Results of the week - oldalum - 12-11-2017

how much does losing to #1 or #2 team hurt us in the RPI?

Re: WBB: Results of the week - 81alum - 12-11-2017

(12-11-2017, 08:56 PM)oldalum link Wrote:how much does losing to #1 or #2 team hurt us in the RPI?
Not much, but the problem is we have no good wins.  We have a bimodal distribution of teams--the very best to which we lost and those that are much, much worse which we won.  "Strong" losses and "weak" wins leaves us where we are--with a mediocre Sagarin ranking. 

That is going to change one way or the other as we get into Pac 12 play.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - TheFarm07 - 12-11-2017

I hope that the two week break is what we need.

I hope McPhee will be back on the court this Saturday against UNLV.

It remains to be seen whether the Baylor disaster was an aberration or a harbinger. Up until that game in Waco, we had been showing decent, if inconsistent improvement. Though we lost to Ohio State for the second time, we were much more competitive and led for most of the game.

From her comments post-Baylor, Tara seems ready to shake things up. I am not sure what she can do at this point, but we definitely need Alanna to avoid foul trouble and Brit to be healthy.

For me, I rather give Kiana and Dodson significant minutes, because I think even though they are going to have freshmen mistakes, they have a higher ceiling for us.



Re: WBB: Results of the week - Langdude - 12-12-2017

How the mighty have fallen.

I know we aren't awful. But it seems we are just north of mediocre. I was an undergrad in the heyday. Can someone who has followed the team more closely than I (who has followed the team casually) explain what has happened? I was used to it being UConn, Stanford, Tennessee, and then a Noter Dame or Baylor every year. Did everyone else just get better? Is this just a weird anomaly?

Please excuse my ignorance.

-m.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - 81alum - 12-12-2017

(12-12-2017, 01:40 AM)Langdude link Wrote:How the mighty have fallen.

I know we aren't awful. But it seems we are just north of mediocre. I was an undergrad in the heyday. Can someone who has followed the team more closely than I (who has followed the team casually) explain what has happened? I was used to it being UConn, Stanford, Tennessee, and then a Noter Dame or Baylor every year. Did everyone else just get better? Is this just a weird anomaly?

Please excuse my ignorance.

-m.
I do not think the sky is falling.  Just last year we beat a favored Not re Dame and ascended to the Final Four.  Our team this year has, in my opinion, more raw talent than the team last year.

What has happened is that we graduated 3 long time starting seniors and we have a relatively small upper class--and the lower class is on average more talented than the upper class.    Tara decided to implement a very different offense that she thinks will maximize the talents of our freshmen, sophomores, and next year's incoming class for years to come--but which is notoriously difficult to learn.  And at the moment we were engaging in such an ambitious transition, we put together a dramatically overly-ambitious schedule.  This was the year for a soft preseason and we got the toughest preseason schedule in years.

We will become very, very good again--probably "final four good"--by the time this transition is finished.  The talent and coaching is there.  But as fans we are wondering how long is this going to take, and how painful is it going to be?  Some of us hope that we will show signs of improvement prior to Pac 12 play.  If we beat Tennessee or UC LA we will know we are making good progress.  But if we don't, will we see it over the course of the league?  Or will we not become elite again until the Pac 12 tournament?  Will it not happen this year at all?  Will we set the bad kind of records for Stanford WBB in the Tara era along the way?  Records for losses, records for offensive futility, breaking our streak of NCAA appearances, etc?  Or will all the pieces of the puzzle come together in time to see this team flourish this year?

So, the longer run is very hopeful.  But we nervous fans are wondering how long is the long run?  I have learned never to bet against Tara.  I think we are going to see some very good things before this year is over.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - TheFarm07 - 12-12-2017

Just curious, we talked a lot about Tara implementing a new offensive system because of the players we have, but I'm wondering whether other top programs, like UConn, Baylor, N.D., have specific types of offenses themselves and/or has Geno, Kim, Muffett changed their offensive philosophy over the years? For example, Brittney Griner was such a unique player because of her height, did Baylor alter their playing style to focus it around her and change it after she graduated?

Re: WBB: Results of the week - BostonCard - 12-12-2017

(12-12-2017, 01:40 AM)Langdude link Wrote:How the mighty have fallen.

I know we aren't awful. But it seems we are just north of mediocre. I was an undergrad in the heyday. Can someone who has followed the team more closely than I (who has followed the team casually) explain what has happened? I was used to it being UConn, Stanford, Tennessee, and then a Noter Dame or Baylor every year. Did everyone else just get better? Is this just a weird anomaly?

Please excuse my ignorance.

-m.

Since 2010, we have gone to the Final Four five times in eight years (2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2017); in 2016 we made it to the Elite Eight, and we have not failed to reach the Sweet Sixteen since 2010.  We have won the Pac-12 in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and the Pac-12 championship in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017.

This is a down year (at least so far), but there is nothing to suggest that there is a structural problem with the program (beyond structural problems in women's college basketball due to UConn dominance).

BC

Re: WBB: Results of the week - BobK - 12-12-2017

Thank you BC.  Sad that mediocre is final four 7 of the past 10 years

Our best player is hurt, McPhee, hopefully back Saturday.    We have 2 Srs.    We have 6 McD all Americans all Frosh or soph

Men’s soccer national championships despite losing 2 early to lesser teams

Btw Baylor’s current post is 6-7

Re: WBB: Results of the week - CTcard - 12-12-2017

(12-11-2017, 09:35 PM)81alum link Wrote:[quote author=oldalum link=topic=18345.msg218002#msg218002 date=1513051005]
how much does losing to #1 or #2 team hurt us in the RPI?
Not much, but the problem is we have no good wins.  [/quote]


RPI doesn't really work like that (and those were #1 and #2 in Sagarin, Baylor is #21 in RPI right now).

RPI doesn't explicitly consider good wins or bad losses or anything like that. It is a pretty simple, overly simple, mathematical sum of won-loss records with a focus more on a team's opponents.

It is:
25% your own win-loss percentage.
50% your opponents' win-loss percentage.
25% your opponents' opponents' win-loss percentage.

And win-loss is adjusted for home-away, I think it is still the formula that home game counts as 0.6 of a game, a road game as 1.4, and a neutral site game as 1. Perhaps the exact numbers have been updated.

-----
So, if both were at the same venue, beating UConn and losing to CSU Bakersfield would give you the exact same RPI as beating CSU Bakersfield and losing to UConn.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - qwerty49 - 12-12-2017

We may not be mediocre in the context of the last 10 years but we don’t look very good at this moment and at this rate will struggle to reach the postseason for the first time in many years.

With Stanford I believe it always comes down to recruiting - not necessarily closing on the best recruits, but the fact that the pool of admissible recruits is microscopic. It seems there are simply no more than about 2 dozen “difference makers” each year, and maybe only 3-5 have a shot of being admitted. Thus Tara rarely has the luxury of filling holes by position - she needs to get the best available athletes and then build her scheme around what she has. Thus when we were deep in bigs we ran the triangle, now without dominant bigs we are trying to run something else (allegedly Princeton).

So we have little margin of error in recruiting, and we are at the mercy of the pool itself in terms of who we do sign. For example, the Hull twins look to me at like perimeter players in the McPhee mold but one can argue our greatest needs next year are at the 2 and the 5.

Sour grapes, still: We might have had a shot at the NC had we managed to lure Skykar Diggins out of her hometown in South Bend. And we’d be a better shooting team for sure had we managed to keep the Stanford tradition going with the youngest Samuelson.

But to answer your question, I think our recruiting has fallen off a bit recently. I don’t fault our staff - I think this is just the nature of our unique recruiting pool.

(12-12-2017, 01:40 AM)Langdude link Wrote:How the mighty have fallen.

I know we aren't awful. But it seems we are just north of mediocre. I was an undergrad in the heyday. Can someone who has followed the team more closely than I (who has followed the team casually) explain what has happened? I was used to it being UConn, Stanford, Tennessee, and then a Noter Dame or Baylor every year. Did everyone else just get better? Is this just a weird anomaly?

Please excuse my ignorance.

-m.


Re: WBB: Results of the week - 2006alum - 12-12-2017

Agree with much of what has already been said, but just wanted to add two more things:

1. Recruiting. This has been rehashed to death, but we haven't had a top 5 recruit since Chiney. I have no idea what recruiting was like in the early 90s, but starting in the early 2000s we had a series of top 5 recruits (I know Wiggins, Appel, Pedersen, Nneka and Chiney were all around top 5; I think Powell was right around 5 too?).

Given the lopsided nature of the women's game, one or two top-5 recruits can be the difference maker. It's notable that UConn's brief "down" period in the early 2010s was at the end of the Moore era and and before the start of the Stewwie/Mo/Tuck era when UConn had its weakest recruiting classes it's had in well over a decade - after Delle Donne transferred, UConn had no top ten recruits in the 2008 or 2009 classes, and, no surprise, UConn failed to take home the national title when those classes were upperclassmen in 2011 and 2012. Armed with three top 6 recruits, UConn then ran off 4 titles in a row.

We've had a few close to top ten (I think McCall was 11, and Beebe was around 11 also but never got to play), but this year we got our first top ten recruit since Chiney in Williams, and Dodson is so close (11) as to be the same. Still, they aren't yet contributing the way Megan Walker (no. 1) at Uconn and Evina Westbrook (no. 2) at Tennessee are.

2. We don't have our star player. McPhee is our leading scorer, go-to playmaker, and was on the regional final all-tournament team and the All-Pac-12 last spring. She's arguably more instrumental to our team than any single player since Cheney, given our lack of upperclass scoring. We've been the lower seed against UConn, Ohio State (x2) and Baylor, and without McPhee, there's even less reason to think we should win those games, all away from home. That doesn't fully explain some soft performances against midling competition, but I think we underestimate her absence.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - BobK - 12-12-2017

brobdingnagian recruiting plus is 6 McD all Americans in the Frosh and soph class

Minus no top 5 recruits presently at Stanford. 

Iffy I’d thstvSmith is damn good but not American so Hard to rank

Re: WBB: Results of the week - TheFarm07 - 12-12-2017

(12-12-2017, 02:50 PM)2006alum link Wrote:Agree with much of what has already been said, but just wanted to add two more things:

1. Recruiting. This has been rehashed to death, but we haven't had a top 5 recruit since Chiney. I have no idea what recruiting was like in the early 90s, but starting in the early 2000s we had a series of top 5 recruits (I know Wiggins, Appel, Pedersen, Nneka and Chiney were all around top 5; I think Powell was right around 5 too?).

Given the lopsided nature of the women's game, one or two top-5 recruits can be the difference maker. It's notable that UConn's brief "down" period in the early 2010s was at the end of the Moore era and and before the start of the Stewwie/Mo/Tuck era when UConn had its weakest recruiting classes it's had in well over a decade - after Delle Donne transferred, UConn had no top ten recruits in the 2008 or 2009 classes, and, no surprise, UConn failed to take home the national title when those classes were upperclassmen in 2011 and 2012. Armed with three top 6 recruits, UConn then ran off 4 titles in a row.

We've had a few close to top ten (I think McCall was 11, and Beebe was around 11 also but never got to play), but this year we got our first top ten recruit since Chiney in Williams, and Dodson is so close (11) as to be the same. Still, they aren't yet contributing the way Megan Walker (no. 1) at Uconn and Evina Westbrook (no. 2) at Tennessee are.

2. We don't have our star player. McPhee is our leading scorer, go-to playmaker, and was on the regional final all-tournament team and the All-Pac-12 last spring. She's arguably more instrumental to our team than any single player since Cheney, given our lack of upperclass scoring. We've been the lower seed against UConn, Ohio State (x2) and Baylor, and without McPhee, there's even less reason to think we should win those games, all away from home. That doesn't fully explain some soft performances against midling competition, but I think we underestimate her absence.

We've had this conversation before in previous threads, so I won't rehash everything, but for me, it's disappointing that our success in the Appel to Ogwumike years hasn't translated into HS girls' basketball players being inspired to want to play for Tara and excel in high school to get the grades and qualifications to be admitted. We have seen how Harbaugh's transformation of the football program has enticed more HS football players to want to play for Stanford. Because of our strict academic requirements, we will always have a smaller pool to work with, no matter how successful our programs are, but from my perspective, there wasn't even a noticeable increase in interest after our remarkable period of dominance (second only to UConn in the late '00s and early '10s) in the women's team.

Though Erica and Maya were on the cusp of top-10 rankings, Kiana was our first Top-10 recruit in SEVEN years since Chiney chose us. We came close to Katie Lou and I wonder how different our season would be this year if we had her leading the team and taking some heat off of our younger players (though it might have been a repeat of the '12-13 season, where it was Chiney and not much else). Most years, not one top-10 recruit usually has us on their short list.

I'm not trying to diminish the still awesome recruits we have (having multiple HS McDonald's All-Americans at the same time is no small feat) and our talent level is still above most other schools, but as my post in the other thread shows, it seems like you need multiple Top-10 recruits to legitimately compete for a national crown.

I think the difference the last few years too is that we are also much more vulnerable to losing to teams we would have handedly beat during the Appel-Ogwumike years (Gonzaga, Santa Clara, Arizona...)

Re: WBB: Results of the week - Langdude - 12-13-2017

Thanks, all.

Yes, BobK, I am aware of our historical success re: Final Fours. I was referring to this year.

My larger question was if my impression was correct that our overall slope since Chiney has been negative, but I may be wrong.

I know it is very hard to win a NC, especially in the age of UConn. But it has now been 25 years (10 teams have won those 25; six points to whomever can name them without looking), and so I wonder if we are no longer considered one of the national powers, so that could contribute to difficulties in recruiting. If in 1992 you had asked how many NCs Tara would win over the next quarter century, I am guessing no one in the NCAA would have said zero.

Thanks, Qwerty. That was helpful.

-m.

Re: WBB: Results of the week - TheFarm07 - 12-13-2017

(12-13-2017, 02:45 PM)Langdude link Wrote:Thanks, all.

Yes, BobK, I am aware of our historical success re: Final Fours. I was referring to this year.

My larger question was if my impression was correct that our overall slope since Chiney has been negative, but I may be wrong.

I know it is very hard to win a NC, especially in the age of UConn. But it has now been 25 years (10 teams have won those 25; six points to whomever can name them without looking), and so I wonder if we are no longer considered one of the national powers, so that could contribute to difficulties in recruiting. If in 1992 you had asked me how many NCs Tara would win over the next quarter century, I am guessing no one in the NCAA would have said zero.

Thanks, Qwerty. That was helpful.

-m.

Besides the normal East Coast bias, I think that Stanford is still a highly respected program. Witness the couple of high pre-season rankings we had despite graduating 3 seniors. We are still top-20 despite a 5-4 record as well. Tara is a legend of the game and I believe there is the assumption that she will able to work her magic by the end of the season (even if us fans are not as optimistic right now) and provide a decent postseason run, if not a return trip to the Final Four.


(12-13-2017, 02:45 PM)Langdude link Wrote:I know it is very hard to win a NC, especially in the age of UConn. But it has now been 25 years (10 teams have won those 25; six points to whomever can name them without looking),

Without looking, I can name a few since we lost won the national title in 1992: UConn, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Baylor, Maryland, N.D.