The Morning Commute for Friday, December 20th, 2024.

Welcome to the Morning Commute

SEC Basketball is nuts right now. If you’re paying any attention to college basketball these days you’re probably following this on going story. The SEC is the best league in the country this season, and it’s not particularly close.

These sorts of seasons have happened before, where from top to bottom a league is just better than every other league… but it hasn’t happened with a super league. The Big 12 did it before expanding, when there were 10 or 11 teams! It’s a lot easier to not float some trash at the bottom of your conference when there are fewer spots. But the SEC expanded to 16 teams this year and the depth and quality is so good that the worst team in the conference (South Carolina, per the analytics at 68th in the country) just took down top 25 ranked Clemson at home the other night. Missouri was picked 13th in the preseason and they took down #1 Kansas! Oklahoma was picked 15th preseason and they’re undefeated and just beat top 25 ranked Michigan on a neutral court.

It’s really been an unparalleled run. Here are the conference totals in overall wins-losses and win percentage:

• Home games: 102-2 / 98.08%
• Neutral site games: 41-12 / 77.36%
• True Road games: 13-6 / 68.42%
• TOTAL 156-20 / 88.64%

Now break the games down by KenPom ratings (these were the ratings as of two nights ago post Wednesday nights games)

• 1-25: 14-9 / 60.87%
• 26-50: 14-5 / 73.68%
• 51-75: 8-4 / 66.67%
• 76-100: 18-1 / 94.74%
• 101-150: 20-0 / 100.00%
• 151-200: 14-1 / 93.33%
• 201-300: 33-0 / 100.00%
• 301-368: 35-0 / 100.00%
• Top 100: 54-19 / 73.97%

These are just ridiculous. The lone loss outside of the top 100 is South Carolina’s opening night loss against North Florida. Otherwise the league has been perfect. Last night Georgia 320th ranked Buffalo. And Texas beat 344th New Orleans. But 14-9 against the top 25 is as good as you can expect. Two of the 9 top 25 losses came in true road environments , only one of them came at home (UConn over Texas). The rest were neutral site games.

If the SEC can keep this up with the remaining games, it could set us up for some very interesting math come selection Sunday in March.

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Yesterday at Rock M and Rock M+

Well yesterday was another busy day in the transfer portal!

• ICYMI, Mizzou landed another transfer! This time it was Va. Tech safety Mose Phillips:

It’s the second safety commitment of the window for Mizzou’s defense, following Santana Banner’s commitment earlier this week. Much like Banner, Phillips III followed up a quiet freshman season with a breakout sophomore campaign.

Stay tuned for a reset to tell you all about Phillips. In the meantime you can chat about him with other fans (and the rest of us) on the Forums.

• Speaking of resets, Here’s Nate on new Linebacker Mikai Gbayor:

Gbayor is an inside linebacker through and through. Even while splitting time with fellow Husker linebacker John Bullock, Gbayor still managed to be on the field for 375 snaps and log 48 tackles over 12 games last year which speaks to his ability to find the ball and hit the guy with it. He isn’t a pass rushing linebacker like Tristan Newson or Chuck Hicks (on a good day); rather, he’s more of a guy who can sit in a pass lane but prefers to seek and destroy ball carriers behind the line.

Sounds good!

• And then Dan took a look at one of his favorite guys in the portal this season, Josiah Trotter:

Trotter will arrive on campus and immediately be the starting middle linebacker. Sure, coaches make overtures about earning your spots, and he will need to do so. He will. Mizzou has a lot of snaps to replace at linebacker — Trotter will take a lot of them.

Calling your shot! Hard to completely disagree when someone is that productive, though.

• Nathan takes a stab at picking the first round in Best Bets.
• I really enjoyed this breakdown from Quentin on Drinkwitz and his reaction to the portal:

“I would just caution everybody, including Mizzou Twitter, that it’s really going to be okay,” Drinkwitz said. “We value production over potential, and that’s going to be a key driving force for us and the decisions we make with player acquisition and player development.”

Boy do i have thoughts on this. As someone who’s invested little time in Twitter recently and removed my personal account, it just keeps getting worse. And Mizzou Twitter is a wild place full off weird fan boy accounts named like ‘Tamar Gates’ or ‘Drink’s Dog’ or things like that, tweeting very absurd stuff and acting like they’ve been attacked personally by a kid like Nwaneri transferring. The ‘For You’ page is just awful. I can’t wait for portal season to be over just so I can tune out twitter again.

• Over at Rock M+, we’re talking about the Transfer Portal, obviously. But also what Mizzou might need to do to make the NCAA Tournament, considering the strength of the SEC:

The interesting thing to me is how tightly these teams will be grouped in conference play. Obviously, the conference is elite. The non-con slate and the analytics prove that. However, if you get a handful of teams that are winning 6 or less games, those teams will have virtually no shot at the tournament. If teams 12-14 can hover around that 6-7 win mark, you could theoretically get a historic number of teams in. Which would obviously cap the number of elite records in league play — and subsequent really high NCAA tournament seeds — as well.

If you’re a Mizzou basketball fan, you should be on the RM+ forums. The info the Matts are bringing on a daily basis is just elite.

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