Teams OSU wants to avoid in March

On Tuesday we looked at the profiles of teams OSU has lost to this year.

In summary: teams that have great offenses and are better on offense than on defense. The only team OSU has lost to that had a better defense than offense was Kansas.

We know OSU is going to be in the 4/5/6 seed range (a lot depends on how they play in the Big 12 Tournament) so I wanted to look at a few teams in the 11/12/13 range that could give OSU trouble.

We can use any of the bracket projections but for this post let’s use The Bracket Project — a type of groupthink that looks at dozens of different projections and averages them out. Here are the 11/12/13 seeds from that site right now along with Adj. O and Adj. D ranks according to KenPom.

[table id=103 /]

So I’ll rank these matchups for OSU..

Excellent

Stephen F. Austin
Louisiana Tech
Villanova
Bucknell

Good

Akron
Middle Tennessee
Temple
La Salle

Bad

Belmont
Kentucky
Boise State
Virginia

Nightmare

Iowa State
St. Mary’s

Remember, on Tuesday we saw that the average team that has defeated OSU had an Adj. O ranking of 35 so I’m classifying anything better than that here as a bad matchup. Obviously top 12 Adj. O matchups are never a good thing although I doubt the selection committee would pair OSU and Iowa State.

SFA, La. Tech, Villanova, and Bucknell are all thumbs up in my opinion. Although OU somehow managed to lose to SFA in Norman earlier this year.

I know we’re getting way ahead of ourselves with this but I think it’s really important for OSU to get a four seed because they probably aren’t going to see anyone with the offense of, say, St. Mary’s at the 13-seed slot. If OSU was somehow able to win win the Big 12 tournament then they could even find themselves looking at a 3-seed in two weeks.

First things first though, Kansas State on Saturday.