Florida Basketball: Gators still in play for NCAA Tournament at-large bid

Florida Basketball knocked off Tennessee to boost their NCAA Tournament resumé. What do they need to do to make the Big Dance in March?

As so many teams do, Florida Basketball has failed to meet some fairly high preseason expectations up to this point. That’s not to say that they can’t get there, but some people had some expectations that the Gators could be a top-25 team in year one under Todd Golden. With a little over a month to go in the season, Florida is on the outside looking in. However, there are plenty of opportunities to reverse that.

How does Florida stack up with other conference foes?

Florida is ahead of some of the other bubble teams in the SEC standings, but those don’t matter when it comes to what teams will make the NCAA Tournament. Specifically, I want to look at how the Gators’ overall body of work looks compared to Mizzou, Kentucky, and Texas A&M. Let’s look at some key metrics:

Quad One Wins

The Gators have two quad one wins with the second coming on Wednesday against Tennessee. They trail Mizzou who has three, but is ahead of Kentucky and tied with Texas A&M.

Bad losses

This, combined with the quad-one wins is why Mizzou is comfortably in the tournament right now. The Tigers have no losses against quads three or four let alone quad two. Kentucky has a quad-four loss and Texas A&M has both a quad-four and quad-three. The Gators have avoided the super bad losses which is one of the reasons they are still in the NCAA Tournament picture with nine losses.

NET Rankings

Whether or not the NET Rankings are actually a good measure of how good teams are is irrelevant. We are led to believe that the Selection Committee uses them, therefore they are important. The order of the four teams is Kentucky, Florida, Mizzou, Texas A&M. The NET currently projects the Gators in the field and has them eight spots above the cutoff line.

Predictive Metrics

Florida is currently 38th in KenPom and 39th in Torvik. The two rankings are actually pretty contradictory of each other as Florida is above Mizzou and Texas A&M on KenPom, but only above Kentucky on Torvik. Regardless, both rankings indicate that Florida is good enough to be an NCAA Tournament team.

Why the Gators currently stand on the outside

While a lot of the metrics I discussed point to Florida being good enough to be a tournament team, the reason they’re not in is pretty simple. Mizzou has five losses, Kentucky has seven, Texas A&M has seven and Florida has nine. While Florida’s Strength of Schedule according to KenPom is way higher than the other three teams, having nine losses on February 3rd matters.

What Florida needs to do to get in

It’s important when judging a team’s resumé to compare them to similar teams and what the committee has done with them. Michigan, for example, was 17-14 last season and avoided playing in Dayton. Michigan last year went into the tournament at 34 in NET, with five quad one wins and one quad three loss.

Looking at Florida’s remaining schedule, the Gators have three more quad-one opportunities (all on the road). They also have three more quad two opportunities and three more quad three games. Getting to the five quad one wins that Michigan has is probably out of the question unless they go on a run in the SEC Tournament.

What will be important is winning all the quad two and quad three games. If Florida can finish with four quad ones including the SEC Tournament and avoid any bad losses, with the predictive rankings they have, getting into the tourney should be no problem.