{"id":41,"date":"2016-03-03T12:47:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T18:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/2016-socon-tournament-preview\/"},"modified":"2016-03-03T12:47:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T18:47:00","slug":"2016-socon-tournament-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2016-socon-tournament-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"2016 SoCon tournament preview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Southern Conference<br \/>\nMarch 4-7. All games at Asheville.<br \/>\nkPOY: Stephen Croone, Furman.<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nThe SoCon gets underway on Friday with two first-round games in Asheville. <\/p>\n<p>The Southern Conference ranked as the 20th-best in the country, which was its best ranking since 2011 when the league was home to Charleston and Davidson. Chattanooga won the league by a game over East Tennessee State and lost five games all season. The Mocs got road wins over Dayton, Georgia, and Illinois along the way. But the conference has a total of seven teams ranked in the top 200 (compared to just three last season) so a tournament title will be well-earned, and in fact the field is the smart pick here. <\/p>\n<p>The defending champ is Wofford who went 11-7, but the Terriers most impressive achievement was hitting 44% of their three-point attempts in conference play, a figure bested only by Michigan State across the country. This was boosted by one of the best single-game performances on record, a 17-for-21 effort in a <a href=\"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/box.php?g=4180\">92-60 drubbing of VMI<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot of balance in the following table. Seven teams have at least a 7% of winning the title.<\/p>\n<pre>                       Qtrs Semis Final Champ\n 1 Chattanooga          100  80.2  56.8  38.3\n 2 East Tennessee St.   100  61.2  34.7  16.1\n 3 Furman               100  55.1  27.0  11.3\n 4 Wofford              100  52.1  19.0   9.0\n 5 Western Carolina     100  47.9  16.6   7.6\n 6 UNC Greensboro       100  44.9  19.6   7.4\n 7 Mercer              79.0  35.0  17.9   7.3\n 9 Samford             68.9  16.1   6.8   2.6\n 8 VMI                 31.1   3.7   0.9   0.2\n10 The Citadel         21.0   3.7   0.9   0.2\n\n<\/pre>\n<p><u><strong>SoCon tourney records (since 1999)<\/strong><\/u><\/p>\n<pre>East Tennessee St. 9- 6\nWofford           17-13\nChattanooga       18-15\nMercer             1- 1\nFurman            15-17\nUNC Greensboro    14-16\nWestern Carolina  13-17\nSamford            3- 7\nVMI                2- 6\nThe Citadel        4-17\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Southern Conference March 4-7. All games at Asheville. kPOY: Stephen Croone, Furman. The SoCon gets underway on Friday with two first-round games in Asheville. The Southern Conference ranked as the 20th-best in the country, which was its best ranking since 2011 when the league was home to Charleston and Davidson. Chattanooga won the league by [&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\/41"}],"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=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}