We’re now through two weeks of Pac-12 play and Washington sits alone atop the conference with a 3-0 record. USC, Oregon State and Oregon are the next three teams, with only one loss. Teams among the conference favorites – for example, Arizona and Utah – sit with sub-.500 records. And Arizona State, a team expected to be in the mix somewhere in the middle of the conference race, is sitting alone in last place with an 0-3 record. Sure, given that teams have only played a fraction of the conference schedule, most of this is meaningless. But here are some more relevant facts. At halfway through the college basketball regular season, 11 of the 12 conference teams are ranked among the KenPom top 100 — only Washington State sits out at #122. If RPI is more your thing (for some reason), those 11 teams rank among the top 75 of that metric. If you want to throw out Stanford and Washington, the top nine teams in the conference rank among the top 66 in KenPom and the top 48 in RPI. The conference is listed as the #2 strongest collection of teams in the land by RPI, while KenPom puts the league third. Oregon is rated highest in RPI (#11), while Arizona tops KenPom at #16.
Two Weeks Into Conference Play, One Thing Is Clear: It’s Going To Be A Wild One (Gary A. Vasquez, USA Today)
Enough numbers for now; the important question is what do they all mean? To begin with, this is a conference that runs deep with good teams. In a season seeming to lack great teams on a national level, the Pac-12 will again be expected to extend its streak of seasons without a Final Four entrant to eight. However, because of that lack of dominant team on the national landscape, if this NCAA Tournament tends towards wild upsets (as sometimes happens), the Pac-12 has some teams in that next tier of strength that could either be the upsetter or take advantage of brackets thinned out by upsets.
The other idea is that road wins against the good teams in this conference are going to be very hard to come by. In the first 20 games of conference play this season, there have been six road wins. The teams that have lost at home (Washington State twice, Arizona State, Stanford, Oregon State and Colorado) are not the elite teams in the conference. And those road wins have come by an average of 6.3 points per game, with an overtime, a one-point and a two-point game mixed in. In other words, even if you’re Arizona or Oregon or California or Utah (considered the best four teams in the conference in the preseason), don’t expect to waltz into an opposing arena in this conference and come away with a comfortable win. Arizona learned that lesson the hard way this weekend when the Wildcats came away from the Los Angeles trip without much success. Cal looked excellent at home last week before going on the road to the Oregon schools and falling back to earth. Utah started off the season with three straight road games and only some late-game heroics at Colorado saved the Utes from an oh-fer start. USC may look like the best team in the conference, but when they went on the road to Washington, the combination of an untimely injury and a raucous home crowd resulted in a loss. It all boils down to this: There isn’t a ton of separation between most of the teams in this conference on the floor, so what little separation that happens in the standings will be created on the basis of road wins.
So, who’s out in front of the game? There’s this old simple calculation about conference play that I have no idea who to credit for. You get a point for a road win and subtract a point for a home loss. Road losses and home wins net you nothing, because in a vacuum, they’re expected. Using that scoring system, here’s what we’ve currently got:
Don’t those standings make a whole lot more sense and are more in line with what we’ve actually seen? Arizona left Los Angeles with a loss on a three-pointer with a second left and a four-overtime classic. Neither of those things should be a negative in January, while their road win at Arizona State last weekend was a clear positive. Washington defended its home court against the Los Angeles schools and got a point for taking down the easiest road scalp in the league, something that USC can relate to. And Utah’s also in the money after a road win at Colorado. Just a few short strides into the Pac-12 season, those are the four teams who have made inroads towards a conference title, but there is still a lot of basketball left to be played.