We are a Top 50-60 team. Out of 362. That’s well over twice as many teams as football, so it’s the equivalent of football being Top 20-25. Now, take this with a grain of salt because if basketball rankings were done the same as football, it would be a Top 50 that would matter. The Top 25 rankings in hoops would be the same as if football only started ranking the Top 12 playoff teams. That why it’s so hard to get there. But similar to football, we have mostly beaten teams that are not as good as us and mostly lost to teams that are better than us, given the venue we have played them. Road/neutral plays a part as well. We’ve also been unlucky as to who we have played, where we played them and when we played them. So, let’s look at the losses for VT, not the wins, because that’s what ESPN wants ACC message boarders do: We’ve lost 7 of our 9 games to Quad 1 opponents. FAU, South Carolina on neutral courts (both tournament teams) Duke at home (one tournament team) and Auburn, Wake Forest, UVA and Miami on the road. (One Top 10-ish team & all three of the ACC bubble teams). Literally, the three ACC teams that are on the bubble and we have already played all of them on the road and one at home in the one game our best player didn’t play. Unlucky. The only real “inexcusable” loss among those 7 Quad 1 losses might be at Miami, given the lead we had at halftime. Fans will think the South Carolina loss is bad because of their perception of South Carolina before the season started. But South Carolina is far better than last year and a solid NCAAt team. VT has lost two Quad 2 games. @FSU and home vs Miami. That is the one game without Cattoor and then @FSU, which has become a place of horrors for VT. VT has zero “bad losses” vs Quads 3 or 4. Now, we may very well go and lose games to ND, Louisville, home games vs UVA, Wake Forest, FSU, @Pitt, etc…, but we haven’t played those games. None of them. We haven’t played very many of the more winnable ACC games on our schedule. Aside from @UNC, we have just finished up with virtually all of the most losable games on our schedule, packed into the first half of the ACC schedule. We’ve honestly played a beast of a schedule so far. And we have 4 quality wins. Quad 1 non conference wins vs Iowa St and Boise St (now ranked NET 35) and Quad 2 wins over Clemson and @NCST. We would have killed for this November - January resume in the last few years come bubble time. If our name was Michigan State and you gave the Spartans the same record and results, they’d be projected as a 9 or 10 seed, because that’s the whole purpose of ESPN and CBS bracketologists and selection committees. Get the teams in they want to get in. Go look at the NET rankings and Quad wins for Providence, Florida, Nebraska, Villanova, and more. Always listed in the field or First Four out. But their results are similar to VT. VT fans never hear of anything good VT basketball has done this year because ESPN and CBS dont want that. They’ve killed the PAC 12 through the same “This conference stinks” narrative, now they are coming for the ACC. So, like football, we have beaten the teams we should beat, lost to most of the teams we should have lost to, and here we sit, a pretty good team without brand recognition or conference media backing to prop us up. And thus, VT is in a position where it has to win every game to force the media to say we are good, and isn’t doing so. So the fans have no alternative but to talk about how bad we are. And this isn’t meant to make excuses. No, we aren’t a NCAA tournament team. We have 7 players and Mike Young has to constantly field a lineup where 2 out of the 5 on the court are zero threat from long range. That doesn’t really work well with his system. Yes, he picked those players. But he is now limited with the amount of time he can develop them. But even though, we are still a pretty good team. But we are in a conference where pretty good is pretty bad. ** Edited by hokieZ71 at 2/4/2024, 8:59:55 AM