Patrick Stevens, also known as D1scourse on Twitter, has been writing about college basketball in the Washington metropolitan area for over a decade. Formerly a college sports reporter for The Washington Times and currently writing for Syracuse.com, Stevens correctly picked all 68 teams to be selected in the NCAA Men’s Tournament for the second year in a row (and correctly seeded 67 out of 68 teams within one line). DCist chatted with Patrick about the upcoming tournament, the rigors of scheduling, and even his favorite places to grab a bite before tipoff in the region.
DCist: First of all, congratulations on correctly predicting all 68 teams in the bracket for the second year in a row. You’ve been getting a lot of national recognition on Twitter considering your 100 percent accuracy rate. How many new followers have you accrued since the brackets were announced?
Patrick: I was at a little over 8,000 followers this weekend, and now the updated number is 14,368. It took five years to get 8,000 and one night to get 6,000 more. The Scott Van Pelt retweet kind of mushroomed things quite a bit from there.
DCist: So let’s get right down to it. The most contentious issue was North Carolina State getting in over University of Wisconsin: Green Bay and Southern Methodist University. You correctly picked N.C. State. Why did the Wolfpack deserve to be included over those two?
Patrick: I think it’s important to realize that this isn’t so much my opinion of how it should be as it is my opinion of what the committee was going to do. There’s a distinction there. The idea is trying to put yourself and think the way that group of people has collectively thought year after year.
According to CBS, SMU played the 295th best non-conference schedule, and they were a borderline team otherwise. They lost to a terrible South Florida team. They didn’t distinguish themselves. Teams that are borderline and have that sort of strength of schedule do not get in. Since 2007, no at-large team has been seeded between ninth and sixteenth and had a non-conference strength of schedule of 250 or worse. And so I knew that if they were going to stick to this, and it’s one of the most consistent things [the committee] has done, that there was no way SMU was going to get in.
So the question became, who was that mystery team going to be? And you look back at the priorities the committee has set, doing well on the road, and you look at the best work that NC State has done: beating Syracuse on a neutral floor, winning at Pittsburgh, and winning at Tennessee. And I thought that was going to distinguish it just enough over Green Bay, which I thought was kind of a wild card in all of this, and in some ways Green Bay losing on its own floor when it mattered most was something that would be costly. N.C. State had good wins on the road, so I just analyzed it and figured they had the best of the rest. I thought there was less bad to their profile than the rest of the borderline teams and that turned out to be the case.
DCist: SMU was ranked in the Top 25, but rankings are meaningless when it comes to comparing the resumes of so many at-large teams.
Patrick: Yeah, it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. One of the important things when working on brackets is that you almost want to limit the outside meaningless information. Because, what’s it doing for you? There’s no evidence to suggest that it is influential in determining the field of 68 and choosing at-large teams. So, why fret about it if the idea is to come up with an accurate projection?
DCist: Another controversial issue was Louisville being seeded at No. 4. Was it their weak strength of schedule, a top-heavy conference, or a combination of factors?
Patrick: First of all, when you watch Louisville play, they play like a No. 2 seed over the course of the season. When you look at their profile, they look like a No. 4 seed. And I wasn’t quite sure what the committee was going to do with that, so I just played it safe and split the difference and seeded them third.
The truth is that it’s a team that is 5-5 against the top 50. It’s a team that plays a non-conference schedule that certainly isn’t overwhelming, 149th according to CBS. It’s a team that virtually played nobody outside the league in that 100-200 RPI sweet spot. They played one team in that range and only three in the 75-200 range. When you look at their non-conference schedule, it probably dragged them down. They got swept by Memphis, beat Connecticut three times, and split with Cincinnati. On paper, if you compare them to everyone else, there are 12 teams with better profiles than Louisville. But if you watch them, you would not believe that there are 12 teams better than Louisville. The committee went with what is on paper rather than what you would see.
DCist: As for the locals, why do you think George Washington got a 9 seed while UMass got a 6 seed given that GW beat them in the Atlantic 10 Tournament and finished ahead of them in the regular season standings?
Patrick: That comes down to quality victories as much as anything else. You look at their profiles: UMass was 7-4 against the Top 50 while GW was 4-5. UMass played a better schedule. UMass was 13-6 on the road and GW was 10-7. There’s enough differentiation there that it’s not a huge surprise. UMass won at GW, beat New Mexico and BYU on neutral floors, while both UMass and GW had the same VCU and St Joseph’s wins. UMass tacked on wins against Providence and Nebraska (on a neutral floor). So that didn’t surprise me at all.
DCist: Do you think American has any shot advancing over Wisconsin? They were the biggest surprise of the D.C. area teams considering they were projected to finish second to last in the Patriot League.
Patrick: American is really well coached, they know who they are and they deserve a ton of credit for the season they’ve had. But to get sent to Milwaukee and play Wisconsin, that’s a tough deal. They gave Ohio State a really good run in November in Columbus, but I think it might be too big of a task to ask of them. It would not surprise me if you looked up at the score at halftime and you see Wisconsin leading 23-21 or something like that. I can definitely see that being a grinding, low-scoring game that takes awhile for Wisconsin to fully put them away. Wisconsin’s defense will really give them an edge. They’re just really, really good at that. American has four guys playing just a ton of minutes and Wisconsin is the sort of team that can wear them down a little bit better than a Patriot League team could.
DCist: How detrimental to Maryland’s resume were those home losses to Oregon State and Boston University? Would they have been on the bubble if they won those, or needed more wins to be in tournament consideration?
Patrick: They would have needed a little more than that. I think there’s even enough evidence of them not making the [National Invitation Tournament] to suggest that would be the case. Those weren’t abysmal losses all things considered. Oregon State finished 100th in RPI while Boston U was 84th. Maryland went 11-0 against teams outside the top 100. They beat everybody they were realistically supposed to beat. They just didn’t beat enough good teams. And if you look at the number of times they were close to doing that — at Duke, home against Syracuse, GW in the BB&T Classic, against Connecticut in Brooklyn, even the ACC Tournament game against Florida State. The real dagger was losing at N.C. State when T.J. Warren was hurt back in January. You can flip two of those games and maybe you start hearing Maryland a little more in the conversation. Let’s flip those two and suddenly they’re a 19-13 team, and while they’re in the conversation, they look a whole lot like Minnesota.
Maryland had the 10th hardest overall schedule, 13th non-conference. If you look at their schedule, they did not play anybody worse than 270 in the RPI. They only played three teams worse than 109 out of conference (Morgan State, Marist, Florida Atlantic). Tulsa, Ohio State, GW, NC Central, Connecticut — all tournament teams. The reality is that they expected to have Seth Allen for a full season and probably feel like a couple of those early games could have swung their way if they had an extra guard to work with.
DCist: Georgetown actually had a top 20 strength of schedule but simply didn’t win the games they were supposed to. What do they need to do next year to make the tournament?
Patrick: They had so much roster flux this year. They had Josh Smith coming and then going. They had the [Jabril] Trawick injury. They were never quite stable for too long a period of time. For what they have next year I’m curious because they won’t have Markel Starks. The thing that always gave Georgetown a shot was they had two guards that can do a whole lot of damage in Starks and [D’Vauntes] Smith-Rivera. They’re going to have to find some scoring and a little more consistency inside. They didn’t have that passing big man that could so much damage. I’m not sure they had that with any level of consistency this year. Finding that guy might be as important as replacing Starks. Where’s the scoring going to come without Starks? And can they have that dynamic passing big man that makes their offense work so well? If they have those two things, they’re going to be able to rebound just nicely like they normally do. If they don’t, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see them have a similar season as they did this year.
Brett: You used to have a “Best of the ACC Eats” column back in the day. What would those places be if you had a “Best of the District Hoops Eats” column?
Patrick: I’m due to revive “Best of the ACC Eats” eventually. I have a phone full of photos that I need to put to use. For the teams in the area:
University of Maryland (College Park, Md.): Marathon Deli, Fishnet, Franklin’s Restaurant (in Hyattsville), RJ Bentley’s, and Ledo’s.
Georgetown (Gallery Place): There are so many restaurants in that area, but there’s a Thai place by the Verizon Center that’s really good but its name escapes me.
George Washington (Foggy Bottom): Tonic. I had something called a grilled cheese cheeseburger before the VCU game. I’m fairly certain it took three weeks off of my life.
George Mason (Fairfax): The classic option there is Brion’s Grille across the street from the Patriot Center.
American (Tenleytown): There’s not much near there, but Booeymonger in Friendship Heights is pretty solid.
DCist: One final question: How many Division I college basketball arenas have you been to?
Patrick: 39 different arenas: Temple, UMBC, 14 of the 15 ACC teams (haven’t been to Notre Dame yet), St. John’s, Villanova, Georgetown, Virginia Commonwealth, George Washington, Richmond, La Salle, George Mason, Illinois, Indiana, Northwestern, Towson, Drexel, Old Dominion, Penn, Coppin State, Morgan State, Howard, Mount St. Mary’s, Tennessee, American, Loyola, and Navy.
