{"id":33,"date":"2016-03-07T11:19:51","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T17:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/2016-conference-usa-tournament-preview\/"},"modified":"2016-03-07T11:19:51","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T17:19:51","slug":"2016-conference-usa-tournament-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2016-conference-usa-tournament-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 Conference USA tournament preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Conference USA<br \/>\nMarch 8-12. All games at Birmingham.<br \/>\nkPOY: Alex Hamilton, Louisiana Tech.<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nConference USA gets underway Tuesday afternoon with a first-round game at Bartow Arena.<\/p>\n<p>UAB rolled through Conference USA with a 16-2 record, finishing the season 26-5 overall. However, the Blazers didn\u2019t play a single game against Tier A competition and they are the lowest-rated of the seven five-loss teams in the country as of this writing. Nonetheless, that\u2019s good enough to be the best team in this conference, and being able to play the conference in its backyard makes UAB the clear favorite in this event.<\/p>\n<p>C-USA has a decent group of teams that could cause problems for Jerod Haase&#8217;s club. This writer wouldn\u2019t mind seeing Marshall pull off the upset, mainly because head coach Dan D\u2019Antoni could stick it to all the people who criticized his hiring two seasons ago. At 16-15, the Thundering Herd aren\u2019t catching anyone\u2019s eye right now, but they were 12-6 in conference play and had the best per-possession offense in Conference USA. <\/p>\n<pre>                      Rd1  Qtrs Semis Final Champ\n 1 UAB                100   100  78.7  53.4  37.8\n 2 Middle Tennessee   100   100  67.3  38.4  16.0\n 3 Marshall           100   100  68.5  37.0  15.1\n 4 Louisiana Tech     100   100  52.3  19.7  10.5\n 5 Old Dominion       100  86.3  45.6  18.4  10.3\n 8 Western Kentucky   100  75.0  18.8   7.8   3.6\n 7 Charlotte          100  66.9  25.1  11.2   3.5\n11 FIU                100  50.6  16.1   5.7   1.4\n 6 UTEP               100  49.4  15.4   5.5   1.3\n10 Rice               100  33.1   7.6   2.2   0.4\n 9 North Texas        100  25.0   2.5   0.5   0.1\n12 Florida Atlantic  61.0   9.5   1.6   0.2   0.04\n13 UTSA              39.0   4.2   0.5   0.04  0.006\n\n<\/pre>\n<p><u><strong>Conference USA tourney records (since 1999)<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n<pre>Middle Tennessee  4- 2\nCharlotte        12- 7\nLouisiana Tech    3- 2\nUTEP             11-10\nSouthern Miss    14-14\nFIU               1- 1\nWestern Kentucky  1- 1\nUAB              15-16\nMarshall          6-10\nNorth Texas       1- 2\nOld Dominion      1- 2\nRice              5-10\nFlorida Atlantic  0- 1\nUTSA              0- 2\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Conference USA March 8-12. All games at Birmingham. kPOY: Alex Hamilton, Louisiana Tech. Conference USA gets underway Tuesday afternoon with a first-round game at Bartow Arena. UAB rolled through Conference USA with a 16-2 record, finishing the season 26-5 overall. However, the Blazers didn\u2019t play a single game against Tier A competition and they are [&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\/33"}],"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=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}