Vols/Michigan previews.

Getting hyped for the game, so gotta get some discussion going. The mgoblog guy is a kenpom fanboy, but this is pretty good about how schizo you guys are.

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So about that Kenpom rank. The good news for Michigan is that they've drawn an 11-seed in the Sweet 16. The bad news for Michigan is that they've drawn the incredibly rare team to have a Kenpom ranking well above their seed line—after their three-game run they are all the way up to sixth(!) in that rating system.

We talk a lot about Kenpom around these parts, but one of the things that's always seemed a little off about his rankings is how lopsided games have a disproportionate impact. Tennessee has had a lot of those. They've also lost 7 SEC games. They are 23-12. Is Tennessee really the sixth-best team in the country, or 11th as they were at the beginning of the tournament? Probably not. Ask Kenpom himself:

I'm not foolish enough to believe the Vols are the 11th-best team in the land (the Sagarin and Massey predictive systems both have Tennessee ranked in the mid-20s). But it's clear Tennessee, coached by Cuonzo Martin, is better than the typical No. 11 seed. It's also obvious the Vols are very difficult to evaluate based on the limited information available to us.

Tennessee is a weird team. It takes a weird team to blow out Virginia and outscore the SEC by 0.14 points a possession—Michigan, 15-3 Big Ten champ, only managed 0.09—and end up one of the last teams in the field because it went 11-7 in a conference that was fifth-best nationally and only had one team seeded above an 8.

When computers run up against weird teams, weird things get spit out. Kenpom's got an algorithm and he only changes it when he can find something that makes it more accurate over the ten seasons of data he's got, as he did when he tried out reducing the influence of blowouts in mismatches. (IE, he mitigated The Wisconsin Problem.) But there's not much you can do with a team that has a set of results as bizarre as the Vols.

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Another mgoblog guy.

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Tennessee is such a strange team—capable of beating Virginia by 35 or getting swept by Texas A&M—that a look at a game or two of film seemed like a potentially huge waste of time. Instead, I went through the box scores and available highlights of each of the Volunteers's 12 losses in an effort to find some common threads. Without further ado, here's the breakdown of each game, with a Michigan-centric overview at the end of the post.

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The Chaos Team: Examining Tennessee's Losses.

Brad Evans of Yahoo is on the Vols.
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I am with Evans. Lack of D and inside depth finally gets to Michigan. Trey A. should be more positive than me. VerlanderBeast and HailHail tend to be self-hating Wolverines.