The men’s NCAA tournament is down to the Final Four. Auburn will face Virginia and Michigan State will get Texas Tech, with national title game berths on the line.
11 things the Final Four teams do and don’t have in common with their football programs
Auburn playing amid NCAA danger? Sounds right. Virginia moving slowly? Yep. Michigan State being stingy on defense? Yeah. Texas Tech having a good defense? Whoa.
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Maybe you’re a college football fan who just tuned into hoops for the first time all year. Let’s look and see how similar and different these schools’ teams are to their football counterpart.
Auburn
- Auburn’s playing this season under an NCAA cloud, just like it’s done a bunch of times before in football. When the FBI’s college basketball probe became public in September 2017, Auburn was one of a handful of programs directly implicated. So implicated, in fact, that Bruce Pearl’s former assistant, Chuck Person, was one of the four assistants arrested and charged. (Person pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in March.)
It’s possible Auburn wins the national championship but eventually has that discounted by the NCAA. Very fitting for a school that’s played nine bowl-banned football seasons and lost out on one or two national championships because of NCAA postseason bans.
- Auburn thrives on blocks. The basketball team averages 4.7 per game and is fifth in DI in block rate. The football team tied for the FBS lead with seven blocked kicks/punts in 2018.
- Oh, and unlike in football, Auburn’s actually in the final four in this sport. You see, in basketball, having to play Alabama is not a problem.
Virginia
- Imagine that in basketball, every game is like UVA’s most recent football game. Virginia has a top-five national defense this season, and it’s been great in the tournament. It’s basically like if any UVA basketball opponent was just South Carolina in the 2018 Belk Bowl:
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- Both UVA men’s basketball and football have spent years trying and failing to get over specific hurdles. For UVA, it was being unable to get to the Final Four despite having elite teams for years. That’s over now. For football, it continues to be an inability to beat Virginia Tech, which ran its Commonwealth Cup streak to 15 years by beating UVA in painstaking fashion in 2018. If you’re looking for a program that’s tried and tried and tried in the past, with limited success, UVA’s similar in both sports.
- A plodding style of play is a big thing for both. Under former BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall, UVA’s one of the slowest-moving teams in FBS. The Hoos were 125th in Adjusted Pace in 2018, per SB Nation’s Bill Connelly. Meanwhile, hoops coach Tony Bennett coaches a famously slow offense that regularly finishes around 350th in Division I in possessions per game. If you like pace, UVA’s not at all your thing.
Texas Tech
- Well, Texas Tech’s defense is actually good in basketball. Tech is third in scoring defense and No. 1 in Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted efficiency. Coach Chris Beard has made defending like hell the biggest part of the Red Raiders’ basketball identity. As you may know, that’s almost the exact opposite of how it is in football. Although TTU’s defense got better in 2018, it hasn’t ranked in the top 50 in S&P+ since 2009. Before it finished 81st in 2018, Tech was regularly finishing in the 110s or worse, too.
- The offense largely revolves around one guy, much like past air raid Tech quarterbacks. Jarrett Culver averages seven points more per game than anyone else on the basketball team, and he takes more shots than his teammates whenever he’s on the floor (one in every three Tech shots, to be exact). He’s also the team’s No. 1 assists guy. (There’s a reason I picked Culver as my QB when I built a college football team using only March Madness players, folks.) Every offense needs a QB, but think of Tech as running a basketball version the air raid under Kliff Kingsbury or Mike Leach. Culver is basically the Patrick Mahomes, Davis Webb, or Graham Harrell of a Tech offense — one guy factoring into just about everything it does.
Michigan State
- MSU basketball games aren’t miserable to watch, unlike recent Sparty football games. MSU’s Elite Eight victory over Duke was really entertaining, and Sparty ranks the top five in adjusted efficiency on offense. The Spartans shoot really well too, and they’re just a blast to watch.
That’s just about the exact opposite of the football team, which played so many terrible games in 2018 that we ranked them by how ugly they were, as well as ranked specific things from one game by ugliness.
- Both play great interior defense. MSU ranks second in two-point field goal percentage defense, and the football team finished last year second in Rushing S&P+ defense.
- Both head coaches look anguished the vast majority of the time. I mean:
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If you were wondering, here’s the football history between these schools:
- Virginia vs. Auburn: 43-24 Auburn in 2011, 19-0 UVA in 1998, and 28-17 Auburn in 1997.
- Texas Tech vs. Michigan State: 41-31 Tech in the 2010 Alamo Bowl, less than a week after the Red Raiders fired Leach.
- Auburn vs. Michigan State: 6-0 Auburn in 1938
- Texas Tech vs. Auburn: 35-13 Tech in the 1954 Gator Bowl
- Texas Tech vs. Virginia: 31-28 Tech in the 2008 Gator Bowl
Got any other ways these programs are similar or different from the other? Drop ‘em in the comments below!
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