This week in college basketball, the surprising Saint Joseph’s Hawks — in search of a signature win as well as a share of the Atlantic 10 lead — host conference leaders the Dayton Flyers. VCU and Saint Joseph’s are tied at 10-2, both one game behind Dayton at 11-1. Dayton has wins over #3 Iowa and #27 Vanderbilt this season (all rankings from kenpom.com through 2/13) and VCU won at #37 Saint Joseph’s in their only regular-season meeting this year. The Hawks best win to-date, over #58 Princeton, will rise in value if the Tigers can somehow beat Ivy leader Yale this Friday, but is more likely to be viewed as a small-font marquee win as the NCAA Basketball Selection Committee begins it deliberations next month.
So it’s a big week for Saint Joseph’s. Kanye West releases a new record this week. More on why that matters later.
Jesuit Conference Update
The big week for Saint Joseph’s seems like a good excuse to check in on the Jesuit Conference to find out who’s been Ignation, and who’s been an Abomination. If you need a refresher on the origins of the JesuCon click here.
The short version: Last year, we Joeymandered the Jesuit Basketball Conference (or JesuCon) as an homage to Joe Lunardi, ESPN Bracketologist and full-throated Saint Joseph’s enthusiast. Joey Brackets had proclaimed a theoretical (theological?) Jesuit conference would be Third Best in all the land, and we did some digital gymnastics in order to make his dreams come true.
This year we are going to take a more logical approach to the composition of our fake conference. We will establish a defined membership number, and see which eligible schools qualify for selection.
What is a reasonable number of teams in a conference? Football-oriented conferences want 12+ teams and the payday of a lucrative conference championship game. However, Jesuits stink at football. We prefer the rich potential of a basketball double-round with a nice round membership of 10. There are 20 Division I teams fielded by Jesuit schools, so half will be in, half will be out.
Here’s how the JesuCon stands today, through games of Saturday 2/13/16.
You can see there is an epic battle raging for the 10th and final spot. Fairfield is on top by a rosary bead, but a late surge by San Francisco could relegate the Stags to the gray depths of excommunication.
NCAA Tournament Hopes
As for hopes of Jesuit Conference schools going to the Big Dance, Joey Buckets currently draws the line after our top three. Xavier projects as a 3-seed; Gonzaga as an 8-seed. Xavier’s resume is rock solid, and Gonzaga’s reasonably firm. Joey B’s own Saint Joseph’s Hawks are hanging on with the Last Four In. Once again, BIG game on Wednesday night vs the Flyers. Creighton is on the backside of the bubble among the Next Four Out, and for Georgetown to get in probably takes a winning streak PLUS a win in the finale at #1 Villanova PLUS an extra year of Patrick Ewing. Highly unlikely.
Conference Ratings
So where does this year’s Jesuit Conference stack up against the rest of the nation?
The JesuCon matches up well with the (remaining) Big East on offense, but could stand to hunker down on defense to fend off the American for 7th place.
Yeezy Does It
I mentioned earlier that Kanye West has a new album coming out soon, or it may already be out. Maybe it is called Season 3, or perhaps it is The Life of Pablo. In one night, he hosted a listening party for the new album at Madison Square Garden, included a fashion show in the middle of it, and returned to Twitter with a vengeance. Read more about it here.
All this activity has me wondering: what if Kanye West had a basketball conference? What would it look like? What would they wear?
Before going further, we need a name for this conference. KimYe Fake Conference (KFC)? The Big Kan? Hoops by Design? After little to no deliberation, we are going to go with YeezyCon.
In order to determine the membership of this fake conference, we need some selection criteria. Kanye is from Chicago, so we could assemble DePaul and UIC and the like and call it a day. But the Blue Demons are on about a 30 year rebuilding effort and UIC has nothing to hang their hats on. So forget Chicago.
What about footwear? Important in the world of basketball as well as the world of West. We could go exclusively with Adidas schools and see how they fare against Nike. I am holding out hope that Yeezy will come up with a high-top of his own making, so footwear is out for now.
What’s in a Name?
After much deliberation, I settled on a selection criteria for a YeezyCon school: it’s all in the name. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian have a son they named North and a daughter they named Saint. Perfect. A school is hereby eligible for inclusion in YeezyCon if their school name contains any of the following:
- Kanye
- Kim
- West
- Kardashian
- North
- Saint
- Kimye
- Yeezy
- Yesus
- Mr. By His Self He So Impressed
Once we fed this criteria into the WAB Supercomputer, it was able to assemble an impressive list of candidate schools:
Very strong at the top, with West Virginia and North Carolina leading the way. NorthWestern is obviously the flagship school for the conference, and should they ever make the tournament I can only imagine the pandemonium at the West residence. Just like the JesuCon, it looks likely that YeezyCon will send three teams to the Big Dance.
You may be wondering why Saint Joseph’s is purpled out. Saint Joseph’s, a Jesuit school and the home of Joey Brackets, contains Saint in its name so is also eligible for YeezyCon. It could be a member of YeezyCon and JesuCon, or both. The fake bylaws of JesuCon state that in such cases ties must be ruled in favor of JesuCon, else both fake conferences are dissolved herewith.
Putting it all together
So what would the college basketball landscape look like with BOTH fake conferences? Again, we extract the teams from their secular conferences and re-calculate.
YeezyCon is a strong sixth place, breathing hellfire down the necks of the Big 10, and with an outside chance of catching the SEC. This on the strength of its #3 Adjusted Offensive Efficiency (AdjO), counter-balanced by indifferent defense (#10 in AdjD).
JesuCon is unlikely to catch the Big East for seventh, and instead needs to continue to fend off the challenge from the American.
Conclusion
If you have read this far into this nonsense, you are probably a little nuts, and we love you for it. Happy Valentine’s Day everybody.