The Utah Basketball Rebuild Project Thread: 2013 and after

[DrumNFeather]

We're in a tough spot. We really need to return to the tournament, but all our hope next season is riding on unknown freshmen.

We aren't a tournament worthy team this season. Ever since it became clear that ASU isn't good, we've been hanging our hat on our win over Missouri. Our RPI was enough to keep us on the bubble despite a complete lack of quality wins. So, in that sense, our OCC schedule helped with March Madness. Or, to put it another way, our OCC schedule kept us in the game. It set us up to where all we would need to do is beat Arizona or USC to get in.

We did lose to a lower seed in Vegas, but only 1 game separated Utah and Oregon in the final conference standings.

Yeah - I wouldn't paint ourselves into a corner of "Larry needs to get back to the big dance next year or else!" Truth is, he probably isn't going anywhere. I get the arguments about his salary. Fine. But as has been pointed out here, we need some guys to make big leaps and we need the young guys to come in ready to play. Given Larry's hesitancy to play young guys meaningful minutes (outside of Tillman), it will be interesting to see what he does with his rotation.

As for our OOC, the road losses to Butler and BYU are both fine, I guess. BYU didn't really become a quality loss until they beat St. Mary's in the WCC tourney, vaulting their RPI up quite a bit and making that technically a Q1 loss. And, let's be honest, that was a loss 18 months or whatever in the making. Ole Miss (136) and Utah St. (158) as neutral site wins gave us next to nothing in the quadrant formula (Q3). UNLV (122) as a neutral site loss falls into the Q3 category as well. As you point out, Missouri is our best win OOC and because it was a home game, and they fall just outside the RPI top 30, it's a Q2 win. The rest of our OOC schedule just doesn't give us very much in terms of the quadrants. Larry seems to rely on the strength of the league, which experts pretty universally said this year was down...so you can't rely on the league for all of your quality wins or losses. Now, you also can't project that Ole Miss is going to be 50+ RPI spots worse than last year, or that BYU would have a relatively down year, or that Xavier would cancel on you, taking away a sure fire Q1 game at home, etc. So some of that is out of their hands, but still, you've just simply got to close the gap on those other OOC games.