I read somewhere, but I haven’t validated it yet, not only was it the hardest schedule this year, but KenPom said it was the hardest in the history of college basketball
A lot of this is due to the unexpected strength of the conference. And I appreciate what Nate is trying to do. But it sure would be nice to schedule a few Mississippi Valley States.
This pretty much supports what I've been saying all along about other teams' resumes, and this why I hate the quad system. It's the toughest schedule in the country by a whole point in Kenpom, and we only have 11 quad wins. It should be 13, because Georgia and Mississippi St fell out of the NET top 30, so we lose 2 home wins. Meanwhile, you have teams like Tennessee who got to pad their Q1 wins with low-end road teams, that we typically beat by 20. If our schedule were truly taken into account, we'd be in as a #1 over Houston, given the fact that we beat them H2H. They wouldn't do better than 13-5 in the SEC, but I digress.
That said, I think the gauntlet at the end will only help us in the tournament. We went 1-4 against Florida, Auburn, and Tennessee, and some people look at that and are concerned, but when you keep playing games like that, you eventually find ways to win them, even if you don't win them at first. We did that against Auburn, and Florida is just a bad matchup for us. Even so, we played them step for step until Grand went out, then we just completely fell apart, likely due to fatigue. Fatigue doesn't always show until we lose another player, then it becomes very apparent. We've seen that happeen a few times with Bama in the last 2 years. Kentucky last year and Missouri this year are two more games that come to mind. We lost Wrightsell before Kentucky last year and then Reid before Missouri. In both games, they ran up and down the floor on us. That never happens to
us. We're the ones who are supposed to do that to teams.