NCAA Matchups of Doom: 2010 Edition

Thought I would do this again this year: it's just a slightly-better-than-arbitrary way to try and pick out the teams that would be among the most difficult matchups for Clemson in the first round. I described the "methodology" last year, but basically I pick a couple of statistical areas that I think gave us match-up problems over the course of the season and apply a weighted ranking of teams that are strong in those areas. This year I chose the ability of a team to avoid the turnover and their ability to limit a team's effective FG%. The reasoning: the former takes away our primary strength on defense which has essentially driven our relatively high defensive ranking and the latter renders an already weak offense completely punchless. I weighted the former twice as much as the latter. Here's the list of teams I'm hoping won't align opposite Clemson on Selection Sunday:

Some names of teams that we struggled against are up there: Duke, Maryland, Virginia Tech. Also some interesting names that I've seen bandied about as potential 7-10 seeds (the seed we'll likey be facing): Missouri, UTEP, Utah State, Richmond, St. Mary's, UNLV, Northern Iowa. Based on this, I'd say Richmond would be the worst/most plausible matchup of doom for 2010.

Clemson's NCAA matchups of doom

I'm going to try and pretend like the GT loss never happened by working on and uploading a post I've been kicking around for a week or so, and its got to come out before selection time on Sunday.

The concept is simple: knowing the kind of teams Clemson struggles with and the general reasons why, we should be able to infer which teams across the NCAA are most likely to pose serious matchup difficulties for Clemson--"matchups of doom". Last week I simply collected the top-ranked teams in defensive efficiency, average effective height, and average height from Kenpom.com and then did a re-ranked them by weighting these three factors equally. Then I took the top twenty and removed any teams that have no shot at making the NCAA tourney (sorry UTEP--it doesn't matter how tall you are if you don't have an offense or a defense). That leaves us with about 12 teams:





Its good to see Wake Forest and FSU at the top of the list, and Illinois (another team that gave us all we could handle)--it confirms that the list contains teams with similarities to WF/FSU. For what it's worth, GT was somewhere around 15 on the list. Now, we won't end up playing WF or FSU early on (thank goodness) due to rules the selection committee follows, but there but there are a few intriguing teams that we could see in the earlier rounds: Utah, Missouri, Gonzaga, USC (the real USC, of course--although I admit its a bit of a stretch to expect them to make the tournament at this point). There's also some completely unsurprising teams on the list like Memphis and UConn, teams that would be hard to beat anyway.

This is the list that I'll have handy come Sunday, hoping the names are as far away from our part of the bracket as possible--thought I would share it with anyone interested.

GO TIGERS!!!!!!!!!!