I've been thinking this before -- and winning with Bertsch scoring zero made me ponder it again -- I wonder if Coach Gross would ever consider a strategic redshirt on one of the current juniors in order to try to extend the success to a third year?

Like if you redshirt say Rachel Nagel then you still get 4 of the 5 starters back next year -- more than any team can reasonably hope for in a given year -- and then you get 3 of the current 5 starters back the year after.

The flip side is that it weakens next year's possible tournament run in exchange for a higher seed the following year. I don't know which one is better in the long run.

I feel bad about saying this, especially after Friday, but if there was ever a time to run up the score it would be at WSU's house. The committee screwed up and I hope the Ags can make them painfully aware of it.

That said, wins are wins! Great job Aggies in surviving a tough out!

Normally I do think that the women can get the short end of the stick when it comes to recognition -- considering they outperform the men a lot of the time -- but I have give a bit of a pass to the media this year.

Remember, this all happened in a whirlwind. 10 days ago I would not have guessed that the women would bow out in their first BWCT game and the men would go on to win a NCAAT game. Campus PR and local media had to quickly gear up for the biggest flux of interest the university has seen in years and it's not surprising that something fell through the cracks.

Hopefully some of the excitement and attention carries over to their WNIT run. They're a very strong team and while I don't know much about the competition I think CSU at least is quite beatable.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=uc%20davis

Search volume for "uc davis" on Google is the highest it's been since you-know-what. It was already on the upswing due to admissions letters on Friday but when this is all said and done it'll be a clear local maximum.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The amount and type of ESPN games are determined by the conference's TV deal, and that's not going to change just because one team won a play-in game.

There's like 2-5 ESPNU games and a single ESPN2 game to be distributed among the all teams. We get priority for those games because we're not part of the Socal ESPN3/Fox deal, but even then that's just one or two broadcasts per year. I think we just penciled ourselves in for next year but that's the most we could hope for on the national scale for now.

More doable, maybe, is to improve our Big West TV broadcasts and get them on local TV like some BWC schools do. It would be great to get on Comcast Sports Net but if not maybe a local Sacramento station like Sacramento Republic does.

I think NCAA recommends an even split. It's a way to enforce parity so that the best teams in the power conferences who make the tournament each year (like, well, Kansas) don't hoard all the resources from their bottomfeeders. I haven't seen anything from the Big West forums to suggest our conference breaks from the recommendations.

20k/year isn't much on its own, but remember we're still getting payouts from Cal Poly's win and Hawaii's win. That's 60k a year, which is funding for a full scholarship or an assistant's salary. If the Big West can consistently win play-ins or pull off middling upsets then that actually starts to make a difference.

According to 538, predictive statistics show a 1-seed really should have lost by now -- and essentially they have, in the sense that several games were so close that they were decided by luck. There's still tremendous odds against any particular 16-seed making the upset, but it's fair to guess that it will happen at some point. So no reason to feel hopeless (yet).

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-no-16-seed-will-win-but-dont-bet-on-it/

My research led me to believe it's paid over 6 years, with 1.6M being an estimate including expected growth in payouts. Divide it 9 ways and you get our average annual payout, not counting for inflation.

No idea where it goes; I think it would be fair for bball to get it but who knows.

I'm not so sure about the town being the biggest initial draw. Some people outside of Norcal actually do think Davis is in the middle of nowhere. Additionally I don't have the numbers but I suspect that the share of our applicant pool coming from cities will grow due to economic and population trends.

I think it's more of a "come for the connections and prestige; stay for the wonderful town" thing. There might be some merit to portraying UCD as a hip, connected campus near an up-and-coming city and letting students fall in love with the town when they visit or enroll.

I think that while critics of the play-in game are trying to be empathetic towards low-majors, at the end of the day they're still stuck approaching it from a power-school perspective. Just getting to play in a game that's nominally part of "March Madness" is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for some schools. Winning any game, whether against a 16 or a 1, doubles the revenue some conferences get from the tournament.

Or to look at it another way, UC Davis is ranked in the 100-200 range by pretty much any system. Getting a bid to a tourney supposedly representing the 68 best teams in the country is definitely not an unfair slight against us. I would go so far to say that the tournament's setup with automatic bids and play-in games is very fair to the low-majors -- the folks who should feel slighted are the Wichita States and Illinois States out there, who get underseeded or ignored in favor of middling p5 teams.

I assume Utah is a higher seed than us. If we knock them off, would we possibly get a home game round 2?

And we're still getting $$$ from Cal Poly's play-in win three years ago. Maybe even wins more than that; the 6-year time range stretches back to before I knew what "Big West" meant.

My understanding and calculations put the figure about at that as well. Winning the play-in game ~ funding half a scholarship for the next six years. (Assuming it stays with the basketball program.)

Joined! Thanks for putting this together!

Hmm... apparently ESPN's database has us listed as "California-Davis", because that's the only way UCD and UCLA could be in between Butler and Cincinnati on their list.

The committee ranks every single team from 1-68, in addition to the regional distributions. The last 4 teams get play-in games for 16-seeds; we were #65, 4th from worst, so we're the home team at our game.

The 11-seed play-in games represent the last four at-large teams.

KenPom has them at 152, better than 218 for the Ags but worse than 138 for Irvine. Totally winnable by the standards of March Madness games.

The seed list from the March Madness Twitter has us as the 65-seed, ahead of NCC and the best 16th-seed play-in team.
https://twitter.com/marchmadness/status/841051821279989762

That was Hawaii and yes they did. UCI got something like a 12 seed the year before.

Let's not kid ourselves: by the numbers the conference is somewhat worse than previous years, and this UCD team is not as good as the one from a couple of years ago. Davis and Irvine were pretty much the only teams that didn't have anything particularly wrong with them, but we're not a good team from a national perspective and a play-in game is very fair.

We were going to face a juggernaut anyway, I say better to build momentum with an even matchup first and rake in money for the conference before that.

Same disappointment happened to me 2 years ago when I was watching hoping for an at-large.