Two Big East teams with different margins for error…<\/p>\n
First, there’s West Virginia. WVU is a team that wins with quality three point shooting and great defense. The dependence on the jumper makes them a quality team prone to intermittent bouts of incompetence. That’s how they can validate a win over George Washington with a win at NC State, then follow that<\/em> up with a 38 point loss to Villanova. Last night, the Mountaineers lost 59-55 to a 2-10 Marshall squad thanks to a 13 to 3 deficit in made three pointers. Marshall was<\/em> the best two-loss team in America entering the game, and it is a rivalry game that means more to the Herd than the Mountaineers, but you have to find a way to win that game. When the committee is splitting hairs over the final at-large bids, this will be an easy to put WVU on the wrong side of the fence.<\/p>\n Then there’s Villanova, who rebounds and gets to the line very well. Thus they can shoot 39% to their opponents’ (Providence) 49% and still get a 83-78 OT win. Thirty turnovers by the home-standing Friars also helped. Playing without leading-scorer Curtis Sumpter (knee) until sometime in February will hurt the Wildcats over the coming weeks. But if he comes back healthy, this is a team that will make noise down the stretch in the conference race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two Big East teams with different margins for error… First, there’s West Virginia. WVU is a team that wins with quality three point shooting and great defense. The dependence on the jumper makes them a quality team prone to intermittent bouts of incompetence. That’s how they can validate a win over George Washington with a […]<\/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\/858"}],"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=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}