Updated rankings for the Never Been Kissed conference (through Friday’s games):

• Harvard, one of last year’s NBK hopefuls, is in the spoiler role this year.  They upset Princeton on Friday night 73-71, putting Yale back in the driver’s seat in the Ivy
• Meanwhile, Yale beat Cornell handily on Friday, setting up a crucial finale at Columbia today.  A win, the they’re in.
• Elsewhere across the league, Monmouth and Iona both won their quarterfinals, and appear on a collision course in the MAAC final on Monday
• Akron closed out their regular season by winning its third straight, and took the top seed in the MAC Tournament

A big weekend approaches for those seeking their first Sweet Sixteen ever, or at least since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1995.

Here are the top contenders in the Never Been Kissed fake conference:

* Because South Dakota St shared the Summit League conference regular season title, and IPFW won both meetings and thus the tiebreaker, Joey Brackets lists IPFW as a 15-seed. Since SD St has the higher KenPom ranking, we favor them in this space, putting us at risk of being on the business end of an IPFWFU or even an IUPUI
** Television network listed is for the conference tournament’s Championship game only
*** KenPom Log5 refers to the simulations run by Ken Pomeroy and published in his daily blogs, projecting likelihood of the team winning their conference tournament.  If you love college basketball and have not yet subscribed to KenPom.com, do so now.  I’ll wait.

Friday Afternoon Notes:

• St. Bonaventure, previously among the “First 4 Out”, is now among “Last 4 In” per Joey Brackets.  We moved them up quite a bit in the NBK rankings.  The NBK Selection Committee will see the Bonnies in person when they take on SLU tomorrow night.  While the Committee is sure to administer variations of the Eye Test, the Sniff Test, and the Five Second Rule, we are confident if the Bonnies fall to the Billies, their at-large goose will be cooked.
• Oregon St. stunk things up a bit this week, falling Wednesday night at USC 81-70, but they remain in Joey Brackets’ current field nonetheless
• Big games tonight and tomorrow for Yale and Princeton.  Both hit the road for a pair, with Yale facing the tougher test on Saturday at Columbia to close out their regular season.  KenPom projects a Columbia 1-point win.  So Princeton could emerge from the weekend needing only a home win against #294 Penn on Tuesday to clinch the Ivy title and the automatic bid
• Stony Brook got by UMBC on Wednesday to advance to the semifinals of the America East tourney
• Monmouth and the CAA trio kick off their action Friday
• CBS has an excellent site with Conference Tournament brackets. Pick a conference and off you go.

Buckle up and pucker up.  It should be a great weekend of basketball.

Notes:

• Ken Pomeroy is now blogstreaming his Log5 Conference tournament odds, which factor into the NBK rankings
• St. Bonaventure is the most-upwardly-mobile of teams in today’s NBK rankings, with a huge game against A-10 leader St. Joseph’s on Tuesday night
• As the Ivy sorts out and the Colonial start conference tournament play, these one-bid leagues will yield spots to other conference tournament contenders with medium-sized dreams

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.

Well it was a rough opening round for the Never Been Kissed conference.  Four member teams made the tournament; only one — Georgia St — survived to the weekend.

Manhattan was the first to bow out, as the Jaspers were upset in the play-in game by fellow 16-seed Hampton.  Next up was our best hope, but 6-seed SMU was also upset by the 11-seed UCLA Bruins.  The Mustangs were in control and seemingly assured of victory and a favorable second round matchup with 14-seed UAB, when all kinds of craziness and mayhem turned the game in favor of UCLA.  A hoop stat nerd Mustang fan will look at this win probability graph and weep.

Harvard, a 13-seed then lost a close one to 4-seed North Carolina.  The Tar Heels were in control most of the game, before the Crimson chipped away and took a brief 65-63 with less than two minutes remaining after a four-point play by Siyani Chambers.  Justin Jackson then took over for the Heels, scoring the next four to send UNC on to the Second Round.

On the bright side, 14-seed Georgia St shocked the world and broke our collective bracket by knocking off the 3-seed Baylor Bears.  My hope is that coaches sitting on barstools and sporting casual wear becomes a new thing.

So we now have all our NBK eggs in the Panthers’ basket.  KenPom gives Georgia St only a 33% chance of winning against 6-seed Xavier.   Taking a glance at the Four Factors it looks like this one is likely to come down to Turnovers:  the Panthers need to turn the Musketeers over, then turn them over again and again like a pastry.   Back on Feb 18, Cincinnati was able to turn Xavier over 18 times while only coughing it up 6 times themselves.  But the Muskys drained 10 of 17 from three to make up for it and squeak out a 59-57 win.

Best of luck to the Hunters and barstools and the NBK and America, by golly.

Before the tournament starts — or technically between the First Four and the Second Round — let’s examine the odds of teams who have never before been to the Sweet Sixteen of advancing there for the first time.

We at WAB have been tracking 16 of these teams all years in the fictional coalition-of-the-unwilling Never Been Kissed conference.  NBK membership is granted and reviewed on an annual basis.

Buffalo looks most likely to jump the queue and advance without even making the NBK watchlist, with Stephen F. Austin not far behind.  Having watched both in their conference tournament championships, we at WAB will be surprised if either wins twice.   Perhaps Bobby Hurley’s continuing hatred of Christian Laettner will be enough to propel Buffalo.

Manhattan bowed out even before things officially started, falling to Hampton in the First Four.  Only three NBK squads remain in the hunt for history.

Sweet Sixteen historical data from the Washington Post database.  Odds of advancing from KenPom.com.

* NBK members for 2014-15

The NCAA tournament has begun, and 4 of our 16 teams who have never made the Sweet Sixteen, who have Never Been Kissed, made the tournament this year.

Manhattan was first up and also first down, as they were eliminated by Hampton in the opening game of the tournament.  Derrick Chievous’ son had 15 points, 13 rebounds and 2 sprained ankles.

Of the remaining NBKers, SMU has the best chance of advancing, as they will be favored in their first game.  Harvard has that horseshoe going for them, as they fought their way into the coveted 4/5 upset-rich environment.  If Georgia St can solve the Baylor 2-3 zone, they have a favorable matchup with Briante-Weber-less VCU.

Never Been Kissed update from late Thursday night.  Five more NBKers bowed out on Thursday, and only Montana advanced.  The Grizz won on their home floor Thursday night over Weber St to move on to the final four of the Big Sky.

Old Dominion was done in by their 8-19 scattershot from the free throw line, as Richard Ross and Javonte Douglas combined (conjoined?) to go 2-9.

• IN: 2 (SMU, Manhattan)
• STILL FIGHTING: 3 (Georgia St, Harvard, Montana)
• OUT: 9 (Indiana St, Southern Miss, Nebraska, New Mexico, SLU, Colorado, Creighton, Northwestern, Fordham)
• PUCKERED: 2 (Murray St, Old Dominion)

Updated standings by Kissibility.

* The Ivy League does not conduct a conference tournament, so here we use their KenPom chances of winning the one-game playoff with Yale on Saturday at the Palestra in Philly

More NBKers bowed out on Wednesday.  SLU bombed a few threes to make it interesting and entertaining but ultimately fell to Duquesne in the A-10 Tournament, while fellow callow NBK squad Fordham got by George Mason to earn a crack at VCU on Thursday.

Montana moved out of the play-in game in ESPN Bracketology, but Manhattan remains in that field.

• IN: 2 (SMU, Manhattan)
• OUT: 5 (Indiana St, Southern Miss, Nebraska, New Mexico, SLU)
• STILL FIGHTING: 8
• PUCKERED: 1 (Murray St)

* The Ivy League does not conduct a conference tournament, so here we use their KenPom chances of winning the one-game playoff with Yale on Saturday at the Palestra in Philly

Good luck to all the NBKers opening their conference tournaments today.  And congratulations to Manhattan for making the field of 68 and keeping their Sweet Sixteen hopes alive for another week.

• IN: 2 (SMU, Manhattan)
• OUT: 2 (Indiana St, Southern Miss)
• STILL FIGHTING: 11
• PUCKERED: 1 (Murray St)

KenPom compiled the remainder of his Log5 tournament odds, updated in the table below.

Enjoy Championship Week!

* The Ivy League does not conduct a conference tournament, so here we use their KenPom chances of winning the one-game playoff with Yale on Saturday at the Palestra in Philly