On The Bubble: What Pittsburgh Must Do To Secure A Tournament Bid

March 4, 2014 - by Jordan Sperber

The focus on Pittsburgh for much of this season has been their lack of quality wins. In short, Pitt had beaten the teams they were supposed to beat and lost to the teams they were supposed to lose to. If every team did that, college basketball would bore you to death.

Now with Pittsburgh’s 74-67 home loss to North Carolina State yesterday, the Panthers are on the bubble. According to our NCAA tournament bracketology projections, Pittsburgh entered yesterday’s game with an 82.7% chance of making the tourney. Those odds now have plummeted to just above a coin flip, at 56.1%.

Does Pitt deserve to make the NCAA tournament?

There’s no arguing that Pitt’s lack of quality wins makes them far from a lock to make the 2014 NCAA tournament. However, determining Pitt’s actual team quality isn’t quite so simple.

Although they didn’t beat any great teams in non-conference play, the Panthers were impressive. Pittsburgh finished non-conference play with 12 blowout wins and a one-point loss to Cincinnati at Madison Square Garden.

Despite Pitt’s weak schedule, objective measures were optimistic about Pittsburgh heading into conference play. On January 4, Pitt ranked #11 in the nation in our NCAAB predictive power ratings. Senior Lamar Patterson was emerging as possibly the most underrated player in the NCAA. The team looked like a dark horse to make a Final Four run, and started ACC play 4-0 against the bottom of the conference.

Five games later, Pitt was 6-3 in the ACC with losses to the top three teams: Syracuse, Duke, and Virginia. At that point, the Panthers were 0-4 against top 25 teams, but their overall profile — including stats like margins of victory which tend to be strong predictors — was still indicative of a team capable of making a run in the NCAA bracket. In fact, even after the fourth loss, Pitt had actually moved UP one place to #10 in our predictive rankings, as of February 3.

(Quick tutorial: A team’s predictive ranking is largely impacted by both its schedule-adjusted margins of victory and how other teams in the system are performing. So losing close games to good teams can still move you up in the rankings, for example, if the teams that were ahead of you simultaneously lose big to bad teams.)

Since then, though, a 4-4 record has turned the focus from a potential NCAA tournament run to simply a potential NCAA tournament bid. Pitt has now lost back to back home games against fellow bubble teams, Florida State and NC State. Even the Panthers’ recent wins have been underwhelming (and fairly lucky); three out of their last four victories have come in overtime.

Put all that together, and our New Ratings show Pittsburgh ranked just 83rd in the country over the last 10 games. Ten games isn’t a big sample size, but we only have 30 games to consider, and that’s a significant drop in performance.

What does Pitt have to do to get in the 2014 bracket?

With one regular season game left at Clemson, Pitt’s margin for error is now extremely small when it comes to landing an NCAA tournament berth in 2014. Take a look at Pittsburgh’s NCAA tournament bid odds by win total:

Pitt would have to make a fairly improbable ACC tournament run to get completely off the bracket bubble, but two wins between now and Selection Sunday would go a long way in solidifying a spot. As either a five or six seed in the ACC tournament, the Panthers will get a team well under .500 in their first game. Taking care of business in that game would set up a quarterfinal matchup probably with either UNC or Duke.

Winning at Clemson is by no means easy (the Tigers are 12-2 at home this season), but a Pittsburgh loss on Saturday would create a potential must-win situation for the Panthers in the ACC quarterfinals. That would certainly be a convenient time for Jamie Dixon and Pitt to finally get a high quality win.