Oklahoma State Played Five of the Final 12 Teams in the NCAA Tournament Which Proves … What Exactly?

There are 12 teams left in the 2018 NCAA Tournament. After tonight’s games, there will be eight. As of the time I’m writing this — Friday morning — Oklahoma State played five of those 12 teams this season and beat four of them a total of five times.

A world exists in which Oklahoma State could have four wins against the four Final Four teams this year. But tell me more about Pepperdine and Charlotte!

The NCAA Tournament is neither a good validator of your regular season body of work nor a predictor of any sort of future success because 40 minutes between two “randomly selected” teams is not necessarily enough time to determine which is better.

So if Kansas wins it all, saying “Oklahoma State was really the best team in the country because they went 2-1 against Kansas!” is abject silliness. However, I don’t think it’s outrageous to note that a specific subset of teams playing their way into the Elite 8 (or Final Four) is a function of a larger subset of teams putting themselves in position to do so in the first place.

That is, Oklahoma State’s overall performance in the Big 12 and beyond is not validated because FSU is two halves from the Final Four. Oklahoma State’s overall performance in the Big 12 and beyond, however, is validated by the fact that they played so many NCAA Tournament teams to begin with (that a few of those teams sneaked into the second weekend is simply the manifestation of this).

This is a drum PFB Nate has been pounding for the last month, and it crystallized for me when I saw how many of Oklahoma State’s opponents made the Sweet 16. Again, making the Sweet 16 is sort of random (Kansas State got UMBC in Round 2 instead of Virginia), but the more Tournament teams you play (and beat!), the better your odds are of teams on your schedule making it deep into March.

Number of tournament opponents in non conference:
K State – 1
OU – 3
OSU – 4
Syracuse – 3
St Bonaventure – 3
Arizona State – 4

But sure, OK https://t.co/ii0s7CnDUe

— PFB_Nate (@PFB_Nate) March 12, 2018

OU ended up with 6 wins over tourney teams. OSU had 8. Again, zero reasons they should be in over OSU

— PFB_Nate (@PFB_Nate) March 11, 2018

What does this tell us about Oklahoma State? Not a lot, probably. They were a middle class Power 5 team that was circuitously average. They, somewhat oddly, won a lot of games they shouldn’t have won and didn’t win games they probably should have.

What it does tell us, though, is that there should be more emphasis on your 18-game (or whatever) conference schedule than these 3-4 games you played in the non-conference against interchangeable teams. I feel like we heard way too much about how OSU should have scheduled Villanova instead of Pepperdine and not nearly enough about how they had to play 12 games away from home against NCAA Tournament teams. Twelve!

Those teams: Texas A&M, Arkansas, Florida State, Kansas (twice), OU (twice), Texas, TCU, Kansas State, Texas Tech and West Virginia.

Rasmussen: "I think a message that a lot of people are seeing is we like to see teams that schedule, especially in the nonconference, that schedule games that allow the committee to take a look at whether or not they’re worthy of consideration." #okstate

— Mark Cooper (@mark_cooperjr) March 12, 2018

I am biased of course — some might call me crooked media — but what was posited all year about the Big 12 was actually true, and it played out in a way I did not expect. There were no truly elite Big 12 teams, but they sent enough to the NCAA Tournament that a few slipped through into the Sweet 16. Two of OSU’s four best non-conference teams (A&M and Florida State) did, too.

I don’t know that OSU will bring death to the RPI or other ridiculous metrics used to sort NCAA Tournament teams in the same way it did with the BCS. But I do know that to comply with the selection committee, Oklahoma State will almost certainly try and beef up its schedule in upcoming years. It’s a shame they have to because, as this year’s event has shown, it was already pretty dang tough.