The curious case of South Carolina

The preferred team of Al Davis in 2024

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Last week I looked at the curious case of Michigan State, or what happens when teams accumulate a lofty KenPom ranking but don’t have the W-L record to go with it. (Spoiler: they generally win a game, but not much more than said game.) This week’s curious case is arguably more compelling.

Go to hoop-explorer.com, if you will, and you’ll be led to a leaderboard that you can rig any which way you want. For the purposes of this experiment, sort it to 80% W-L, 20% efficiency. What you’ll pull up is a more or less fairly reasonable run through the current top 16 teams in the nation, at least by how they’ll be seeded in a bracket. Most of these teams also possess pretty good efficiency metrics. Of the top 15 teams listed here, the lowest on KenPom is Kansas, who sits 17th. And then there is the 16th-place team.

South Carolina has risen to a specific mountaintop of the college basketball world this year. The Gamecocks are 24-5, 12-4 in at worst the third-best conference in America, and have a wildly impressive 10-3 record against Quadrants 1 & 2. Only 13 teams have more wins, and very few of those 13 are in the same stratosphere in terms of win percentage against the best of the best.

This is a relatively unusual case: a team that has a top-15 resume and sub-40 metrics. In fact, it’s one of three cases ever. 2012-13 Butler was 14th in WAB and 48th by KenPom, while 2021-22 Providence was 14th and 49th. Both of those teams won at least one game, but I feel like there’s more to it. And so: maybe there is.