Last Saturday was the best day of the year for college football. The schedule was filled with a bunch of rivalry games. Reflexively, college basketball took the day off. At least when it came to matchups of top teams.
However, the day wasn’t without some quiet drama. For a while it looked as though it might be the highest-scoring day in modern history. A few low-scoring games late in the day ended that dream, but it still ended up as the 12th-highest scoring day among 758 days with at least 60 games since the 1997 season. That’s in the 98th percentile!
But also, the biggest upset of the season occurred. (It’s been brought to my attention this actually happened on Friday.) At least if you count halftime upsets. Southern Indiana - #335 in my ratings prior to the game and itself a team that trailed at halftime to Tiffin College, a team that went 15-14 in D-II last year - actually won the first half against Duke, taking a 35-31 into intermission after leading by as many as ten.
Not surprisingly, Duke won the second half fairly easily, winning 80-62. But in a game where the Blue Devils were favored by 36, was this a notable result?
I have halftime scores going back to the 2011 season. The Duke “loss” was the ninth time since then that a team has been at least a 30-point favorite in my model and trailed at the half:
None of these teams did anything noteworthy. Most of them made the tournament, but none of them received high seeds. And you might have spotted the ominous cases of ‘23 Villanova and ‘20 North Carolina who missed the tournament completely.1
The biggest success story on this list is last season’s TCU team, who lost the first half to Arkansas-Pine Bluff in their season opener, then lost the entire game to Northwestern State a week later. The Horned Frogs would immediately reel off 11 straight wins and eventually go 9-9 in the buzzsaw that was and forever will be the Big 12. That mark included road wins over Baylor and Kansas. They’d earn a six-seed in the NCAA tournament.
But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a six-seed would be a disappointing season for Duke. For whatever reason, Duke established itself as Media Darlings in the preseason, ranking higher in the AP poll than all but two of 21 computer rankings. Heading into the week, the AP ranked Duke seventh, which still places the Blue Devils higher than all but five of 25 computer rankings.2 They’re expected to do much more than just get to the tournament.
Of course, we don’t know how good Southern Indiana really is. I mean, they haven’t won a D-I game yet, but they actually tied the second half against Michigan State earlier this season. And they finished 285th last season in their first year making the transition to D-I. As Jim Rome once said to Jim Everett, “we’ve got a long way to go”. We may look back in March and realize that the Screaming Eagles were much better than we thought.
So let’s look at the best case scenarios. There have been five teams that have made it as far as the Elite Eight while losing a first half to a team that finished outside the top 250, a condition that Southern Indiana should meet even with some improvement.
I’m not sure the cases of Oregon State and Loyola Chicago are relevant to Duke, but nonetheless, it’s possible to win three games in the NCAA tournament after a catastrophic halftime loss. Heck, Duke could be the next UConn, who lost a first half to the other team from Durham and went on to win a national title that was improbable on many levels.
A different way of looking at it is that there have been two cases since 2011 of a team getting a one-seed after losing a first-half to a team at home that finished outside of the top 250: Kansas in 2013, who lost the first half to #310 Chattanooga and ultimately lost in the Sweet 16, and Wichita State in 2014 who lost the first half to #288 Tennessee State and ended up losing in the second round.3
There have been another 3 cases of a team getting a two-seed under these conditions and a total of 13 cases of a team getting a top-four seed. That’s about once a year, which isn’t bad. But the future is much more murky for teams that suffered a halftime loss to a team that finished outside the top 300. There have been just 3 cases of a team getting a top-four seed in that case.
So if Southern Indiana is not a top 300 team, then Duke is probably not a top-ten team, either. It’s certainly possible they buck history and validate their Media Darling status. But even though they won on Saturday in near obscurity, what happened in the first half to Southern Indiana wasn’t nothing.
In some respects, we do still have a long way to go. But when Jim Rome uttered those words on the infamous April 6, 1994 episode of ESPN2’s evening interview show Talk2, he was so very wrong. His show ended 21 seconds later. The college hoops season is longer than that, but not long enough that we can ignore 20 minutes of bad basketball, especially if it turns out it was against a bad team.
Or, in North Carolina’s case, would have missed if there had been a tournament.
Miami jumped Duke as Media Darlings heading into this week, ranking higher in the AP poll (8th) than all but 2 computers.
There is a third case of a one-seed losing a first half (and the game!) to a team that finished outside the top 250, but that happened in the NCAA tournament itself.