It's time for one of our greatest annual traditions: naming the fifth annual Donell and Ronell Taylor All-Giant Killers Team.
As loyal readers will surely remember, the Taylor twins played for UAB a decade ago, when the Blazers became the first Killers to slay Giants in back-to-back seasons. In 2004, UAB, a 9-seed, upset top-seeded Kentucky, and then returned to take down LSU in an 11-6 matchup in 2005. Those Blazers out-stole their opponents by an incredible margin of almost two to one, and you can see them here, where a leaping Ronnell forced a turnover and heaved a nearly telepathic, two-handed, 60-foot pass over the back of his head to Donnell. In honor of their Killertastic play, we named the All-GK Team after the Taylors in 2011.
With so many players stepping up at key moments in upsets this year, we are naming first- and second-team All-GK squads. As always, we have tried to cover all the schools involved. And while All-GK teams are usually heavy on guards -- Omar Samhans are few and far between -- we've tried to stock various positions, too.
First Team
SG Aaron Harrison, Kentucky: When you hit game-winning bombs against Louisville, Michigan and Wisconsin in three straight games, you not only make the All-GK team, you get to be captain.
PG Shabazz Napier, Connecticut: You may have heard a little about him by now. He's shooting 47.1 percent on 3s (16-for-34) in the tournament.
SG Desmond Haymon, Stephen F. Austin: "I shot it with confidence, [JeQuan] Lewis closed on me kind of hard, and I stayed there with my follow-through and he knocked me down." That's how Haymon described the 3-point shot that turned into a game-tying four-point play against VCU. And after an overtime in which Haymon nailed a 3 that gave the Lumberjacks a lead they never relinquished, the Rams went home, Briante Weber couldn't be our Top Mongoose (see below), and Stephen F. Austin, one of our favorite 2014 Killers since we first popped open our spreadsheets last winter, was on its way to the round of 32.
SF Dyshawn Pierre, Dayton: Pierre was the leading vote-getter for the All-GK team among fans, including Jake A. from Washington, D.C., who notes the Flyers "had one of the toughest roads to the Elite Eight" of any team in the tournament. Pierre didn't miss a shot against Ohio State, and 10 of his 12 points gave Dayton the lead in what turned out to be a one-point win. Against Syracuse, he was the guy the Orange fouled down the stretch, and he made enough free throws to seal a two-point victory -- a classic upset by a slow-paced, high-rebounding, shoot-3s-when-you-need-'em Killer over a Jim Boeheim Giant.
PF Jarnell Stokes, Tennessee: "My poor man's Kenneth Faried award," writes longtime correspondent Zach Richardson, and he's right: Stokes averaged 18 points and 12.8 rebounds in four tournament games, and scored a career-high 26 in the Vols' giant-killing demolition of UMass.
Second Team
SF Laurent Rivard, Harvard: His teammates Siyani Chambers and Wesley Saunders are just as deserving, but we're recognizing Rivard because his 3-point shooting (5-for-10 in two games) typified the higher-risk/higher-reward play Harvard brought to the Big Dance. And because Jay Bilas said if Rivard played for Michigan State, his name would be Larry Rivers.
PF Jakob Gollon, Mercer: His 20 points helped sink Duke in a round of 64 upset that maybe shouldn't have been such a surprise. Inspirational quote: "We've always been a big execution team, we have like 400 set plays and can't even remember half of them."
PG Lawrence Alexander, North Dakota State: He hit from everywhere (6-for-8 inside, 4-for-7 outside, 4-for-4 on free throws) against Oklahoma. He was the best player on the floor in the Bison's upset of the Sooners, and he was on the floor for 45 minutes.
PG Chasson Randle, Stanford: Strong All-GK support from readers, including Shawn from Detroit, who awesomely proposed a team of all "wounded assassins." Randle had just 13 points and three rebounds when the Cardinal upended Kansas, but his six steals were huge.
SG Vee Sanford, Dayton: Sanford had only one great moment, but that was a layup off the glass that sent Ohio State packing on the opening Thursday of the tournament.
Top Mongoose: If Giant Killers are like snakes, slithering around and lying in wait for Giants, players who can neutralize them are like the mongoose. So we launched this award in 2012 for the top Giant Killer-killer. This year, Scottie Wilbekin is our Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. When Dayton was within a point of Florida in their Elite Eight matchup, Wilbekin made a jumper, a layup and two free throws, and suddenly the Gators were up by 11. And then, with time expiring, Wilbekin drained a 3 that truly deflated the Flyers fans for the first time all tournament. The Indian gray mongoose couldn't have struck any more lethally. Unfortunately for Florida, Saturday night brought a tougher opponent in the form of the UConn Huskies.
Finally, friend of Giant Killers Phil Hopkins suggests Bob Hoffman of Mercer as coach of the All-GK team. Hopkins, of course, coached the Western Carolina Catamounts to a 73-71 loss against Purdue in the 1996 tournament -- the closest a 16-seed has ever come to beating a No. 1. He now coaches middle school hoops in Walhalla, S.C., and keeps an eye on NCAA teams trying to pull off big upsets. About Hoffman, he writes: "He may have just won one game, but what a big game. He is a basketball lifer and has paid his dues. He is not from any famous basketball coaching tree. Take a look at all of his stops along the way. I can only imagine how many miles he has logged along the way, and I don’t mean sky miles."
The man has a point: Hoffman's head-coaching stints have included gigs at Oklahoma Baptist and Texas-Pan American, not to mention Southern Nazarene's women's team, the NBA D-League and the semi-pro ABA. Along the way, he learned enough to figure out how to beat Duke.
We're hoping by next year, we can say the same thing about our spreadsheets.
State of the Spreadsheets
For the first time, two Giant Killers will face off for the national championship -- but we have to admit, as crazy as the NCAA tournament has been this year, GK Central isn't exactly buzzing with the happy vibe of the carefree underdog. Three years ago, VCU made the Final Four as an 11-seed out of the CAA, and Butler advanced to the title game as an 8 from the Horizon League. This time around, even though Monday night's contest will feature the highest combination of seeds ever to play for all the marbles, it won’t just pit the 2012 national champions against the 2011 national champions, but two seriously underseeded teams against each other.
Connecticut and Kentucky have employed some familiar giant-killing strategies to pull off their upsets and earn their title shots, but both play at an overall level higher than most Killers can hope to attain. UConn shut down Michigan State inside and Florida outside, and has benefited from strong shooting by DeAndre Daniels. In Shabazz Napier, they also happen to have the best player on the court in every game they play. The Wildcats crash the boards to generate extra possessions, and grab offensive rebounds on a whopping 42.3 percent of missed shots (ranking second in the NCAA). But to outscore Wisconsin by 13 on second-chance points, it helps considerably to have the tallest team in the country (average height: 79.4 inches). Our basic power rankings rate Kentucky and Connecticut as the 15th- and 23rd-best teams in the country; BPI has them No. 7 and No. 18; Ken Pomeroy ranks them No. 9 and No. 10. These are programs that just didn't deserve 7- and 8-seeds.
So, to close out our Giant Killers project this season, let's break down the tournament's madness in 2014 and ask: Just how much came from deep underdogs performing like Killers, and how much was the product of the NCAA's dartboard seeding?
Here's the average strength of the teams that played as Giants (teams seeded five lines or better than their opponent) in the round of 64 this year, compared with equivalent seeds in our database, which goes back to 2007. Strength is expressed in points above average, per 100 possessions:
Seed: 2014 | 2007-2013
No. 1: 27.92 | 31.06
No. 2: 25.84 | 26.39
No. 3: 24.03 | 23.76
No. 4: 26.27 | 23.07
No. 5: 20.04 | 20.79
No. 6: 20.84 | 19.72
You can see that this year's 1-seeds were much worse than usual, while 2-seeds were a bit worse, and 4-seeds, as plenty of analysts noted, were considerably better. Those differences were somewhat muted in the round of 64, however, because of how the Killers rated:
Seed: 2014 | 2007-2013
No. 11: 17.51 | 15.78
No. 12: 13.05 | 14.32
No. 13: 7.26 | 9.62
No. 14: 6.79 | 8.27
No. 15: 2.56 | 2.51
No. 16: -3.95 | -2.27
As we have argued strenuously, when smaller conferences award their NCAA bids to the teams that win their tournaments, rather than their regular-season champions, they can dramatically weaken the lowest brackets. This year was a classic example, where 13 sub-major conferences failed to send their best team to the NCAA tournament, according to our basic power rankings, and as a result, nearly every batch of seeds from 12 to 16 was worse than its historical counterparts.
Three 12-seeds came through anyway by amping up their Killer tactics at the Big Dance. We need to credit Harvard, North Dakota State and Stephen F. Austin with playing like classic Killers.
But an outsized leap in quality came at the 11-line, where Dayton and Tennessee landed and went on to post half a dozen tournament wins. The Vols in particular were extremely underseeded. And now take a look at the entire bracket for 2014, including the middle teams, who couldn't play in Killer vs. Giant games until the third round:
Seed: 2014
No. 1: 27.92
No. 2: 25.84
No. 3: 24.03
No. 4: 26.27
No. 5: 20.04
No. 6: 20.84
No. 7: 19.04
No. 8: 19.24
No. 9: 19.91
No. 10: 16.09
No. 11: 17.51
No. 12: 13.05
No. 13: 7.26
No. 14: 6.79
No. 15: 2.56
No. 16: -3.95
There's almost no drop-off at all from this year's 5-seeds to the 9-line! So while the differences between the top-seeded teams and their round of 64 opponents were pretty normal in 2014 -- both groups were a little weaker than usual -- those gaps shrank dramatically in the round of 32. There's usually a spread of nearly 14 points per 100 possessions between the average 1-seed and the average 9-seed, but this year, it was just eight points.
Clearly, the NCAA selection committee didn't know what to do with power-conference teams that were obviously strong but had racked up double-digit losses, such as Kentucky, Oklahoma State, Pittsburgh and Stanford, not to mention Tennessee. By sprinkling them among the 7- to 11-seeds -- and also by finding it hard to evaluate the new American Athletic Conference, and underseeding its teams, too -- the committee created the perfect environment for a Villanova or Wichita State to lose early, and for a Kentucky or UConn to keep winning as an "underdog." We have called the latter squads "wounded assassins" from the start, and they accounted for more than half (seven of 13) of this tournament's upsets. And until the selection honchos get a better grip on analytics, we will keep tracking them as an emerging group of Killers.
Overall, teams we called "Best Bets" went 3-1, and, happily, our statistical model correctly called the games it saw as having the best chances for an upset in each region of the country. The deep underdogs we evaluated went 1-2 in games we said were "worth a long look," 2-5 in contests whose upset chances we termed "not completely crazy," and 0-10 where we told you to "stay away."
We have lots of subjects for further research, such as probing the differences between classic Killers and wounded assassins, seeing whether the vulnerability of Giants affects outcomes more than the strength of Killers and trying to account more fully for player experience. We are very proud that Giant Killers has loyal readers, and are always interested in your feedback and ideas as we keep looking for ways to strengthen the model.
Thanks to Liz Bouzarth, Kevin Harris and John Hutson of Furman University for research assistance.