Yes, Indiana State should be in the NCAA Tournament
A "debate" is only a debate if you let it be one
It begins. Every year, a few days before Selection Sunday, the groundwork begins to get laid. This team - typically a team with a gaudy W-L from a non-Big Six conference - loses their conference championship. On occasion, it’s an early dip from a conference tournament by a Mountain West or Big East team or something, but usually, it’s a mid-major. This year, it’s Indiana State, owners of a gaudy 28-6 record.
Indiana State’s most recent performance was a close loss, therefore it is imperative they belong in the field. Everyone from your average media member to your average viewer tends to agree.
Every year, we get a week-long test case of a fun team who, for a variety of reasons, absolutely cannot be left out of the field to make room for someone who went 19-14 in a Big Six conference. The does/doesn’t get in track record is pretty hit or miss.
2023: Utah State, 25-8 (in, 10 seed)
2022: Wyoming, 24-8 (in, 12 seed); North Texas, 22-6 (out)
2019: UNC Greensboro, 26-6 (out); Belmont, 25-5 (in, 11 seed); Lipscomb, 25-7 (out)
2018: St. Bonaventure, 25-7 (in, 11 seed); Saint Mary’s, 28-5 (out)
2017: Illinois State, 26-6 (out); Monmouth, 27-6 (out)
2016: Wichita State, 25-8 (11 seed); Saint Mary’s, 27-5 (out)
Squint and you can see the committee becoming progressively more accepting of these types over the years, which is great for the diversity of the game but may not always result in the ‘best’ teams making the field. Belmont rated 54th in KenPom on Selection Sunday, while future NIT sides Clemson (29th), Texas (30th), NC State (33rd), and Nebraska (39th) were all left out. #58 Wyoming was the third-lowest ranked at-large in the field and got in over a Texas A&M team that won 22 games in a better conference.
None of this is easy; it never is. Except it is now, because every single person calling for Indiana State to make the field of 68 is right. For one of these bubble teams, they’ve got nearly everything one could want.
1. They are legitimately good. Like, obviously. You watched them. But even if you didn’t, you can go to KenPom dot com and see that they’re #43 in his ratings at the time of writing. That’s the equivalent of an 11 seed. You want to know who isn’t ahead of them? South Carolina, Washington State, Seton Hall, and Virginia, four teams currently in the projected Bracket Matrix field. Even if you want to place New Mexico and Villanova ahead of them, as they are in KenPom, it would still place ISU at a net #41…which is inside the cutline and an 11 seed.
2. They were legitimately good against good competition. At barttorvik.com, a place where you can sort the stats, you can sort the nation by how they played in games against top-150 competition, adjusted for venue. Indiana State ranks 24th-best in efficiency, 30th-best in Wins Above Bubble, and went 11-5 with all but two of those wins coming away from home.
3. The W-L record works just fine. An underlying factor for teams like this that get left out is generally one of two things: they either play in a bad conference or played a bad schedule. Indiana State’s conference is 9th-best in the nation, per the NET, and the schedule itself ranks 129th. The non-conferences SOS: 188th. I think that’s useful to know. Of the 10 teams surveyed above in the last five years, Indiana State’s overall SOS would rank 3rd-best, their non-con 4th. They have more in common with Belmont or the Bonnies than they do Monmouth or UNCG.
4. The W-L record works just fine, part two. The biggest combativeness with Indiana State is the lack of a ‘best’ win and a 1-4 record against Quadrant 1. Good, fine, whatever. This probably isn’t the place to point how absurd it is that in the quadrant system, a win over Houston at home is just as good as a win over Memphis on the road, but sure, you can have that.
I think it would be extremely stupid to write them off for that. Wins Above Bubble, a far superior metric, analyzes your schedule and sees how many more wins you picked up against it than the average bubble team (roughly the 50th-best team in a given year) would have produced. Indiana State sits 26th in Wins Above Bubble at +2.2. They went 28-6 against a schedule that Villanova or Iowa or whoever would have most likely gone 26-8 or worse against. That should matter.
5. Also, all of the actual metrics are good too. And that is where this post really begins.
Here’s a list of Indiana State’s teamsheet metrics, as stated by the committee’s criteria for selection.
NET: 29th
KPI (resume metric): 41st
Strength of Record: 38th
BPI (regrettably a metric metric): 40th
KenPom: 43rd
Wins Above Bubble is not on that list, but the thing I notice is that Indiana State is IN THE FIELD in every single metric listed. Every one of them! Even Strength of Record, which takes a schedule into account, looks at Indiana State and says “10 seed.” The quadrant records are here.
Quadrant 1-A: 0-2
Quadrant 1: 1-4
Quadrant 2: 4-1
Quadrant 3: 10-0
Quadrant 4: 12-1
Or, simplified:
Quadrants 1 & 2: 5-5
Quadrants 3 & 4: 22-1
It’s time for us to talk about this. The NCAA selection committee will look at this, see that Indiana State only played ten games against top-100ish competition, and probably be a little disappointed. Not incorrectly, of course, but it’s worth remembering the struggle that good mid-major programs face every single offseason in getting teams to put them on the schedule. (As a Tennessee writer of sorts, I can tell you for a fact that Tennessee has turned down Belmont for this exact reason for years across several coaching staffs.)
Then again, you don’t need to look far in the future field to find teams that have the same problems.
Quadrant 1-A: Indiana State went 0-2 against the two top-25 teams they played. Did you know that Dayton, a projected 6 seed, is 0-1? Or that future 4 seed Alabama went 1-8? If you gave Indiana State nine hacks at it like Alabama gets, are you sure they don’t find a win somewhere?
Quadrant 1: Wanna know who else has one Quadrant 1 win? 4 seed Auburn, who is 1-7. Maybe you can ponder fellow bubble team New Mexico, who is 2-7. Or look at fellow bubble team Wake Forest, who went 2-5. Maybe 2-5 Colorado hammers it in for you. Or 2-6 Virginia.
Quadrant 2: A 4-1 record! For shame! Only it’s the same 4-1 record that Baylor, Texas Tech, and Utah State all accumulated.
Quadrant 1 & 2: A 5-5 record probably doesn’t pop to the average viewer. Then again, neither would Gonzaga going 6-6 against Q1 and Q2, Dayton going 7-6, or supposedly-in-the-field Mississippi State going 6-11. Or, you know, Michigan State having 13 losses to these groups.
Quadrant 3: A perfect 10-0 record against Quadrant 3 is not an easy thing to accomplish. Among the current 1-6 seeds, those teams went 130-10, or had a 92.8% win percentage. By going 10-for-10, Indiana State outperformed the average 1-6 seed. If only South Carolina (5-2) and Clemson (6-2) had done so. Also, they didn’t even play the most games against Quadrant 3 competition of anyone inside the current field. That would be Dayton, who went 11-0.
Quadrant 4: This is the big one. Indiana State went 12-1 against Quadrant 4. The only other teams in the at-large field with any Q4 losses at all are Florida Atlantic (2), Northwestern (1), and Mississippi State (1). More importantly, they played 13 games against Quadrant 4 competition. Supposedly, this should be disqualifying.
If so, should we disqualify Gonzaga (12 games) and Saint Mary’s (12)? Are you bold enough to kick out Nevada (10)? Probably not. Even if you combine Q3 and Q4 for the 23 games it represents, it isn’t as outlandish as you think. That represents 70% of Indiana State’s schedule. Q3 and Q4 represent 60% of Dayton’s and they’re a 6 seed. Is adding 10% more enough to bump you out? I don’t think it should be, particularly since in 23 tries they screwed up once.
Really, against Quadrants 2-4, they screwed up just twice, going 26-2. That’s fewer losses than Virginia (20-3), Colorado (20-4), Pitt (19-4), Wake Forest (17-7), and many, many other teams. The expected record of a top-25 team against Indiana State’s schedule, per Torvik, would be 28-6. Guess what Indiana State went.
But above all else, above any one stat, it’s the sum of the parts themselves. Let’s bring all of the stats into focus.
NET: 29th
KPI (resume metric): 41st
Strength of Record: 38th
BPI (regrettably a metric metric): 40th
KenPom: 43rd
Quad 1 wins: 1
Quad 1 & 2 wins: 5
Quad 3 & 4 losses: 1
Here is the full list of non-Big Six teams, from 2008 to present, with a NET (or NET equivalent, using Torvik) of 35 or better, a WAB of 40 or better as our Strength of Record representative, a KenPom of 50 or better, 1-3 Quad 1 wins, at least 5 Quad 1 & 2 wins, 10+ games over .500, and no more than one Q3/Q4 loss.
The resume doesn’t match up beautifully, I’ll admit. But look what you could be missing out on: multiple Sweet Sixteen runs, a 7-4 Round of 64 record, and a whole lot of fun.
Heck, want to run some averages? I’ll do it. By the NET, Indiana State is a top-30 team. By an average of KPI and SOR - the two resume metrics used on the teamsheet - Indiana State is 38th, or a 10 seed. They’re ahead of five teams currently inside the field as at-larges and own a superior SOR to Colorado, Colorado State, Mississippi State, St. John’s, Texas A&M, Villanova, etc.
By average quality from BPI and KenPom, Indiana State is 41st, or the highest 11 seed. It might actually be wrong to even put them in the First Four. Why shouldn’t they be already in the field, not having to go to Dayton?
Do not overthink this one. Indiana State belongs. Just like 2014-15 Dayton belonged, just like 2018-19 Belmont did, just like so many others have and will continue to do. After all, it was 13 years ago this month that a team from the 13th-best league in America snuck into the First Four, then made the Final Four. Can you say definitively Indiana State will do that? No. I also cannot definitively say they won’t. Let them in.