{"id":30,"date":"2016-03-07T15:54:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T21:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/2016-southland-tournament-preview\/"},"modified":"2016-03-07T15:54:56","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T21:54:56","slug":"2016-southland-tournament-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2016-southland-tournament-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 Southland tournament preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Southland Conference<br \/>\nMarch 8-12. All games at Katy, Texas.<br \/>\nkPOY: Thomas Walkup, Stephen F. Austin.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Southland tournament gets underway on Wednesday with two first-round games at the Merrell Center.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen F. Austin is the biggest favorite in any tournament this March. Part of it is the Jacks&#8217; dominance of the league &#8211; they were the only team in the land to finish with a perfect conference record &#8211; and part of it is the bracket in which the top two seeds only have to win two games to claim a title. Just twice did SFA win a conference game by single digits, and the program has gone 57-1 against Southland teams over the past three seasons, so it\u2019s tough to envision a scenario involving an upset. But Holy Cross made the Patriot League final by winning three road games after it didn\u2019t win a conference road game all season, so don\u2019t get too carried away with applying logic to tournament basketball.<\/p>\n<p>Congrats to SFA senior Thomas Walkup, who took kPOY honors with a stellar 131 offensive rating while using 27 percent of the Lumberjacks\u2019 possessions. Walkup actually posted a 138 offensive rating in conference games. But given the strength of the Southland, don&#8217;t expect him to reproduce that kind of super-human efficiency against whatever NCAA tournament foe Stephen F. Austin may face.<\/p>\n<pre>                           Qtrs Semis Final Champ\n 1 Stephen F. Austin        100   100  93.6  76.4\n 2 Texas A&amp;M Corpus Christi 100   100  67.8  16.7\n 3 Sam Houston St.          100  79.8  29.6   5.1\n 4 Houston Baptist          100  62.7   4.7   1.3\n 8 New Orleans             52.1  19.9   0.9   0.2\n 5 Southeastern Louisiana  47.9  17.4   0.8   0.1\n 6 McNeese St.             50.5  10.3   1.3   0.09\n 7 Nicholls St.            49.5   9.9   1.3   0.07\n\n<\/pre>\n<p><u><strong>Southland tourney records (since 1999)<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n<pre>Northwestern St.        19- 9\nLamar                   11- 6\nTexas A&amp;M Corpus Christi 6- 4\nStephen F. Austin       16-11\nSam Houston St.         17-13\nMcNeese St.             13-13\nNew Orleans              1- 1\nSoutheastern Louisiana   7-10\nNicholls St.             2-10\nCentral Arkansas         0- 1\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Southland Conference March 8-12. All games at Katy, Texas. kPOY: Thomas Walkup, Stephen F. Austin. The Southland tournament gets underway on Wednesday with two first-round games at the Merrell Center. Stephen F. Austin is the biggest favorite in any tournament this March. Part of it is the Jacks&#8217; dominance of the league &#8211; they were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}