Wichita State: at Tulsa (02/05/23)

[Kel Varnsen]

Also the "played nobody" argument fails, if "somebody" won't play you.

Which is why WAB/SOR solves for that, adjusting for strength of schedule relative to your record.

[Kung Wu]

Which is why WAB/SOR solves for that, adjusting for strength of schedule relative to your record.

I don't know what those are. How does it solve the fact that Team A can't get high quality teams to play them and has nothing but bad loss potential in their conference, while Team B refused to play strong mid-majors, and has far more high quality chances due to conference affiliation?

[pinstripers]

You can’t hammer a team for having a weak conference but then not let said team in bigger conference.

Well, you certainly can, and it happens a lot

[Kel Varnsen]

I don't know what those are. How does it solve the fact that Team A can't get high quality teams to play them and has nothing but bad loss potential in their conference, while Team B refused to play strong mid-majors, and has far more high quality chances due to conference affiliation?

WAB - Wins Above Bubble
SOR - Strength of Record

It actually does. WAB measures what record a bubble team would predictively have against your schedule given its strength, and judges your record accordingly. So just because you get a bunch of opportunities for wins doesn't necessarily mean you should get in, Rutgers from last year being a pretty good case given that it had some big wins and had a lot of opportunities for them, but should not have been in the tournament if we were using one of those metrics. For the sake of this argument, SOR is similar to WAB.

Basically, it would mean that one or two bad losses doesn't kill your resume so long as you take care of business otherwise. It would also mean that for power conference teams, one or two big wins doesn't guarantee your entrance into the dance. It looks at the totality of your resume, eliminating cherry-picking of one or two games, and judges your team's entire season.