Not singling you out since this has been brought up a lot. There's context missing with wins and losses for a lot of teams this year. We shot ourselves in the foot the first two games because it was a decision we made. Who knows if the committee will be less forgiving there when compared to the brutal stretch where we were at a competitive disadvantage @ Louisville, for example.
Many teams are clamoring for context. Some examples that haven't really hit us (fingers crossed):
- Teams coming off of Covid pauses and getting blasted is not something we had to deal with. We did well off our lone Covid pause, in part because there seemed to be no lingering affects and we could practice before playing a meaningful game. That's not been the case for all teams.
- How about beating others without a full roster? We played Miami who had 6 scholarship players. That's happening everywhere, maybe not to that extreme, due to injuries and Covid/contact tracing. We've been fortunate to not lose guys for a significant period of time.
- Same goes for teams that lost out on quad 1 opportunities or had a schedule imbalance that was entirely out of their control. Lot of teams in that category.
Feels like we've been lucky on the Covid side of things, so that puts us in a theoretical competitive advantage category for some games. Does that counterbalance our disadvantage during the first two and during our crazy stretch of 1-day off contests? I have no freaking clue but could offer a biased opinion and say minimally the context of the first two should be heavily considered, particularly since it was the beginning of the season and we can argue the decision was made for player safety.
Almost impossible to quantify the magnitude of the variations this season across the country and I guarantee the committee will catch borderline unprecedented grief no matter their decision.
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