Re: Is tomorrow a must win for us?

_usffl

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Jan 12, 2018, 10:42 AM

I would yes because of the schedule. One point i continue to make is that we've only done the minimum to this point to be considered for a tourney bid. This 4-seed stuff in bracketology right now seems pretty silly to me given the schedule. We had to go 3-1 to open the year and get one of the road games. We accomplished that. This gives us a very clear and doable path to get tourney eligible, however losing to Miami would shake that up a bit.

At 3-1 we need to hold serve at home outside of Duke and UNC. That means beating Miami, ND, Pitt, GT, and FSU. We need to go at least 5-2 in the remaining 7 home games and those 5 are the most likely wins at this point. I know UNC and Duke are struggling, but it's hard to count on those as wins.
The remaining road schedule is fairly brutal. UNC, UVa, GT, Wake, FSU, VT and Cuse. I think at this point you have to assume losses at UNC, Uva, FSU, and Cuse as all those teams are better or as good as the NCSU team we lost to last night on their home floors. That leaves GT, Wake and VT as winnable road games. At best you're looking at 2-5 on the road.

So that's a likely and very achievable 7-7 for the balance of the ACC schedule. That puts you at 10-8 in the ACC and a lock for a tourney bid. However if you lose the Miami game that makes either the UNC or Duke home games MUST WIN games. Or it means you have to find 3 road wins. All of this makes the path more narrow and difficult to get to 10 ACC wins. So while it may seem early to start declaring games as must win games, this one is pretty close to being on.

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If we go 9-9 we may have to worry about how some of our wins look to the committee. Of our projected wins

Right now OSU, L'Ville, and Florida are tourney teams with top 50 RPI ratings.

The temple loss doesn't look as good as they aren't in the projected field with an RPI of 44 so that's 3-1 against RPI top 50 with 2 wins against RPI top 25. Miami and ND are excellent opportunities to get 2 more RPI top 50 wins at home. But if you lose them it's hard to replace them with road wins vs medicore teams. A road win at VT or GT isn't going to help you as much as the home win vs the RPI top 50.

So while our schedule probably gets us in at 9-9, if OSU or L'ville drop out of the RPI top 25 or even top 50 and we don't pick up the home RPI to 50 wins, our resume looks a bit less impressive. Id rather just go 7-7 from here on out and not have anything to worry about.

As for the assumptions of "at best". If you can't beat NCSU on the road, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect wins at UVA, Cuse, FSU, or UNC. That's a tall order for any team. We struggle at GT and VT historically so projecting 2-1 in the remaining road games seems pretty reasonable if not optimistic. Also assuming a 5-2 home record when 5 of the remaining teams are currently in the RPI top 35 seems pretty reasonable to me as well.

This is going to be a grind just to get to 7-7 in my opinion.

Is tomorrow a must win for us?

Not do or die, but @unc will be tough (as well as most road acc games) ,so losing any home game