2019 Southwest Basketball Tournament

Monday night, Texas Tech finished runners-up to Virginia in the NCAA Tournament. It was a crushing end to an otherwise exhilarating and historic season for the Tech program.

I propose that we give the Red Raiders another chance at hardware.

After last year's NCAA Tournament, I put together the field for a hypothetical college basketball tournament featuring teams from the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. I had some fun putting it together, and you may have some fun going back to read the post.

I had so much fun that I'm doing a second edition of the Southwest Basketball Tournament. What follows is said second edition.

Before we get to the field though, it's best to review last year's guidelines, so I again invite you to read the post. Those guidelines are mostly the same this year, but I've made some changes.

First, teams are no longer seeded using RPI. Instead, I'm using Ken Pomeroy's rankings. I thought a more advanced ranking system would be better, and KenPom is generally accepted as among the most reputable of such systems. I'm using the rankings from between conference tournaments and the start of the NCAA Tournament so as to seed the teams based on regular-season and conference tournament data, as is done for the NCAA Tournament.

Second, to include more locations, I've lowered the capacity threshold of potential venues from 9,000 to 7,000. There are only so many large arenas in West Texas, New Mexico, and Arkansas, and a lot of the ones in Oklahoma are in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Though it means sending teams to scenic Enid for the Round of 32, I don't want to recycle the same cities and arenas every year.

Additionally, the biggest venues are now reserved for the Final Four. This is also for the sake of variety, but it's also to make it a bigger deal when a team gets to play in a NBA arena.

(Why not put the games on campus until the final rounds, you may ask? Well, that makes the exercise shorter than I want it to be. I like constructing the bracket.)

Here, then, are the sites and their hosts.

South

Play-in, Round of 32

American Bank Center (10,000) – Corpus Christi, TX

Texas A&M-Corpus Christi

Bert Ogden Arena (7,688) – Edinburg, TX

UTRGV

Sweet 16, Elite Eight

Reed Arena (12,989) – College Station, TX

Texas A&M

West

Play-in, Round of 32

Pan American Center (12,482) – Las Cruces, NM

New Mexico State

Strahan Arena (7,200) – San Marcos, TX

Texas State

Sweet 16, Elite Eight

The Pit (15,411) – Albuquerque, NM

New Mexico

North

Play-in, Round of 32

Chisholm Trail Coliseum (8,000) – Enid, OK

Oklahoma

UNT Coliseum (9,797) –  Denton, TX

North Texas

Sweet 16, Elite Eight

Gallagher-Iba Arena (13,611) – Stillwater, OK

Oklahoma State

East

Play-in, Round of 32

Barton Coliseum (7,150) – Little Rock, AR

Arkansas-Little Rock

Rapides Parish Coliseum (8,900) – Alexandria, LA

Northwestern State

Sweet 16, Elite Eight

Pete Maravich Assembly Center (13,215) – Baton Rouge, LA

LSU

Final Four

Smoothie King Center (18,500) – New Orleans, LA

New Orleans/Tulane

I was going to include Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, AR to host the East's Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games, but it holds more people than the Smosothie King Center, my Final Four site. It felt like it didn't make much sense for a team to play in a smaller arena in the Final Four than they did in previous rounds, so I rearranged things a little bit. William R. Johnson Coliseum in Nacogdoches was dropped so the East wouldn't have two sub-8,000-seat arenas and so Arkansas would have a venue in the tournament; and the Pete Maravich Assembly Center became the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight site.

On to the tournament field.

Among the top eight teams, seven made the NCAA Tournament, and another was a high seed in (and eventual champion of) the NIT. LSU, New Mexico State, and Oklahoma are the only of these teams to host any games; they automatically go in the East, West, and North, respectively. Putting Texas Tech in the West and Houston in the South are easy picks; Texas goes in the North as the last remaining No. 1 seed. Baylor has a higher KenPom rank than TCU, so they go in the region of the No. 1 seed with the lower rank (LSU).

Three No. 3 seeds are hosts, so they are placed in their regions automatically, with SMU getting pushed to the West. The No. 4s are the opposite, with only Texas State not being placed by seeding.

Because it's not terribly interesting just going over where each team goes through the rest of the field, I will get to more general things. As the graphs in the embedded spreadsheet show, there are strong correlations between a team's KenPom rank and their opponents' ranks, as well as a team's seed and their opponents' ranks. This is expected and intuitive.

There are not too many issues of bracket integrity. LSU having the hardest path among No. 1s is not ideal, especially considering three No. 2s have easier paths, but these are not significant differences. Because of the field's size and composition, it's likely the Nos. 1 through 3 seeds will make the Elite Eight. LSU, if they play as they should, won't have a major obstacle until facing the winner of the expected Baylor and Arkansas game.

Another unfortunate happening caused by host selections: Baylor, despite being the second No. 2, plays easily the best No. 3 in the Sweet Sixteen. The KenPom gap between Arkansas (57th) and Oklahoma State (89), the best and second-best No. 3s, is greater than the gap between Arkansas and Texas (30th), a No. 1 seed. That is where the drop-off in opponent ability happens; it would be more convenient if it happened between seed tiers.

I have little else to say, so here, like last year, is the spreadsheet with all the work I did.

May Tech win this hypothetical tournament.