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The Morning Stake | 2018.11.28

The Morning Stake
Seth C

The Morning Stake | 2018.11.28

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Lady Raider Basketball

Texas Tech Basketball

I know that the new NET Ratings are supposed to replace RPI, but the fact that Texas Tech is #1 is weird and probably doesn’t reflect who the best team in the nation is. I know that I shouldn’t complain, but I noticed that FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver tweeted that he’s got some serious problems with these rankings:

These are the worst rankings I’ve ever seen in any sport, ever. NCAA needs to go completely back to the drawing board. The big problem seems to be that only 1 of the 5 components (not sure why there are 5 components instead o 1 cohesive rating) considers strength of schedule. So it rewards team with good records against very poor schedules. Probably won’t get much better as the year goes along. This is incompetently designed. It’s worse than RPI. Worse than the eye test. It could make a total shitshow of the NCAA tourney for a couple years and cost the NCAA millions by devaluing its most valuable franchise. It’s why you never want to design an algorithm by committee.

I tend to agree. Texas Tech has played USC and Nebraska, but they’ve also played a lot of really terrible teams, like really, seriously terrible. Incarnate Word (325), Mississippi Valley State (333), Southeastern Louisiana (281), USC (61), Nebraska (16), and Northern Colorado (154). There’s only 353 total teams to rank, so of the 6 games played thus far, 3 of them are against 3 of the absolute worst teams in the nation. So maybe this was really awesome planning by the staff or dumb luck.

SB Nation’s Ricky O’Donnell has his first mock draft of the year and projects Jarrett Culver to No. 11 to the Spurs:

Culver has been tasked with creating much of the Red Raiders’ half-court offense this year, and he’s been impressive in that capacity. He’s more than doubled his assist rate and cut back on his turnovers, while getting off to a hot start from three-point range (10-of-20 to begin the year) and picking up some tricks to score from mid-range. Culver is hardly a consensus lottery pick at this point, but he’s making major strides as a sophomore and demands your attention as the season goes on.

Texas Tech Football

Patrick Mahomes is wearing Team Luke cleats for this week’s “My Cause, My Cleats” with the NFL!

NFL.com’s Gil Brandt tweeted yesterday that Kliff Kingsbury has two NFL offers and I think I saw yesterday a rumor that Kingsbury was interviewing for the USC offensive coordinator position, so yeah, Kliff is going to be just fine:

The phone of former Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury has been ringing off the hook from NFL teams, including two that have given him firm offers. College offense has infiltrated the NFL and Kingsbury’s superb knowledge of it is in high demand.

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