Houston, Auburn Lock In Top Seed Battle Royal at Final Four
Win/Covers over Tennessee/Sparty Confirm Cream at the Top
An anticlimactic weekend when it was all said and done. The first game was as thrill ride with Florida having to rally to beat Texas Tech. Otherwise, form held with Duke, Houston, and Auburn winning and covering to complete the Final Four.
Before crunching Sunday’s numbers, let’s update our estimated “market” Power Ratings based on early point spreads of Duke -4.5 vs. Houston, and Florida -2.5. vs. Auburn.
Final Four
92: Duke
90: Florida
87.5: Auburn, Houston
Normally l round down when a line settles on a half-point. No need to do that with just four teams. The ratings would look very messy if I was doing a 16 or 32-team league with half-points everywhere. But, with four, easy-peasy.
Those suggest Duke would be -2 vs. Florida in a possible final, or -4.5 vs. Auburn (though the Tigers might rise more from beating Florida than Duke would from beating Houston). Florida would be a slight favorite over Houston in a final. Auburn vs. Houston would be close to a toss-up depending on how bettors reacted to two Saturday upsets.
Margin for error still about a point in either direction. I’s possible that Duke’s a 93 and Houston’s 88.5. I wouldn’t be shocked if the market had Florida at 91, or at 89. Just a good faith effort to represent what the market is probably thinking in a Power Rating format.
Let’s see what we can learn about Sunday’s survivors from key box score stats…
*Houston (-3) beat Tennessee 69-50
What happened with Treys?
Houston 9/25 (36%), Tennessee 5/29 (17%)
Disaster for Tennessee. Houston’s been doing a good job of hitting about this many every game. Let me look it up….holy crap….10-8-9-9 in the Dance, 8-10-9 in the Big 12 tournament. If you’re hitting 8-10 every game, then you’re never suffering through a 5/25 debacle that gets you sent home. Media has talked a lot about Houston being better from behind the arc this season. Looks like CONSISTENCY needs to be emphasized more. Cougars won scoring here by 12 in a game it won by 19. So, the whole blowout wasn’t treys.
What happened with everything else?
Trey-Less Efficiency: Houston .84, Tennessee .65
Houston won two-point shooting 46-44%, rebounds 42-35, and turnovers 9-5. Tennessee won free throws 15/20 to 4/4. As we saw with Texas Tech’s games against Florida and Arkansas…the physical Big 10 team got called for more fouls in a way that let the SEC entry win FTs. Didn’t matter in this case because Houston won everything else. Super-sharp Cougars only turned the ball over 5 times. Yes, it was a super-slow 59-possession game (as expected), but that’s still almost pristine. And, Tennessee had a bunch of “virtual TOs” with all of those 3-point misses. Just 30% offensive rebounds for the game. So, we can make a rough guess that about 17 of those 24 Tennessee trey misses landed in Houston’s hands.
Houston’s had a few games in this range…where Trey-less efficiency didn’t knock your socks off offensively…but made treys and overall defense were strong enough to get the job done. I’m going to run postseason numbers for the Final Four some time this week (probably sooner than later because I don’t want to forget to do it). Possible that Houston NEEDS 8-10 treys per game to upset Duke and beat an SEC Power next Monday night.