RSSBot
News Junkie
Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports
Breaking down the Buffs’ resume.
The Colorado Buffaloes remain firmly on the bubble with a strange resume come Selection Sunday. The ball is in the Buffs’ court, as they have three winnable games and the Pac-12 Tournament in the next sixteen days.
As of this writing, the Buffs are 19-9 overall and 10-7 in Pac-12 play. They have upcoming games against Stanford at home and Oregon and Oregon State on the road. After that, they have the Pac-12 Tournament where they will likely be a 3- or 4-seed. This looks like a team that will finish with 21 or 22 wins.
Usually 22ish wins and a top-4 finish in the Pac-12 would be an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament, but the conference final year has been unusual. There’s one great team (Arizona), two good teams (Washington State and Colorado) and the rest are capable of winning or losing any contest. Every game is competitive and usually the home team wins. Only the ‘Cats and Cougs have had any sustained win streaks and the leaguewide parity has watered down any quality wins.
The Buffs represent this better than anyone else in the conference. Colorado is 15-1 at home, 1-8 on the road and 2-1 in neutral games. They’re winning every game they should win and nothing more — meaning they have no quality wins. None of their losses look bad either, even if the games against Florida State, Arizona State and Cal felt heavier than the one before. This team has somehow built a tournament resume that has neither quality wins or bad losses, making them strangely difficult to assess moving forward.
Virtually every media outlet has the Buffs as one of the last teams in or out of the NCAA Tournament field. They’re competing for spots with the second-tier teams from the Big East and Mountain West, whose Lobos and Friars and so on have picked up better wins (and worse losses) in top-heavy conferences. (As to why Utah is even on the bubble is beyond me. The road win over Saint Mary’s is great, but have looked thoroughly NIT and are below-.500 in Pac-12 play.)
The Buffs are a good team whose win-loss record pay not accurately reflect their quality. They’re ranked 30th in NET and 31st on KenPom — in both cases ahead of teams that are considered ‘tournament locks’ such as Florida Atlantic, Washington State and Colorado State. Even if this team is maddingly inconsistent, there’s reason to believe their best basketball is ahead of them once the seven-man rotation is all healthy at the same time. (I would also argue the mid-season slump, specifically the losses to ASU and Cal, corresponded to the worst of the injury crisis.)
Now if the Buffs are as good as they could be, they should take care of business and walk into the NCAA Tournament. They’re heavy favorites against Stanford and should beat Oregon State in Corvallis, even if the Gill Coliseum has been a house of horrors at times. Win those two and they hold steady. Beating Oregon in Eugene should secure their place in the NCAA Tournament. The Buffs are the better team and shredded them in Boulder.
(If the Buffs beat the Cardinal and Beavers, the game in Eugene would likely decide who is the 3- and 4-seed in the Pac-12 Tournament. Maybe I’m taking the Cougs lightly but it would be a big win to be on their side of the bracket, as opposed to Arizona.)
If the Buffs lose to Stanford or Oregon State, that’s where things get tricky. The Buffs would have to beat Oregon to make up for that bad loss, or go on a deep run in the Pac-12 Tournament. CU would be a 4-seed in the tournament who would have to beat the 5/12 winner, then knock off the 1-seed (Arizona, presumably) on their way to the conference title game. That doesn’t seem likely.
TL;DR: The Buffs need to beat Stanford and Oregon State to stay on the bubble, then winning at Oregon and/or making the Pac-12 semifinals should secure an at-large berth.
by Sam Metivier
Continue reading...