Jon Rothstein, who despite being hyperbolic and easy to parody is as plugged in to the committee's thinking as anyone, called yesterday's loss "as surprising a league result" as he's seen covering college basketball. Yes, you can cite St. John's upsetting Villanova as a larger underdog as recently as last week, but when you consider the necessity of the win, the home-court advantage PC typically enjoys, and the sheer magnitude of the defeat (DePaul was >98% win probability by the U16 timeout), it's not a crazy statement.
Zooming out a bit, the loss dropped the Friar's NCAA tournament odds to 48% from 76% according to TeamRankings.com. Here's the remaining schedule with KenPom win %s:
- vs. Nova (18%)
- @ Butler (21%)
- vs. Seton Hall (48%)
- @ G'Town (46%)
- @ Xavier (15%)
- vs. St. John's (62%)
At 7-5 in conference, PC needs to go 3-3 to even be in tournament conversation, given the softness of their OOC resume and the blight of this DePaul loss. It's going to be tough: Seton Hall is a bad match-up and both Georgetown and St. John's are trending up. Even at 10-8, the Friars might need a Big East tournament win to lock in their 5th straight March Madness trip.
Ken Farrahar had a really good take on the state of Friartown basketball:
Nonchalant Effort Puts Friars in Tough Spot. The tl;dr, reading between the lines, is that these seniors have had a pretty charmed career so far, yet there doesn't seem to be quite the sense of urgency we might expect from a team that's on the brink. You can only want the team to succeed as much as the players want it, but I would have to think a strong senior class doesn't want an otherwise extremely successful chapter in Providence basketball to end this way.