Teams like the Texas A&M Aggies are why I got into the business of quantifying all Division-I college basketball teams. We power-ranked teams across all professional sports, but your numbers rarely stand out significantly with smaller team fields.
By season’s end, did you have the Eagles ranked second or fourth? How about the Raiders, did you slot them 27th or 29th? In the NBA, the tiers are even more distinct, and in the order in which you rank them, we all gravitate toward a pretty consistent mean.
College sports? There is no mean. That comes by the nature of the athletes (volatile 18-22 year olds) and the randomness of the postseason set-up.
It seems that anything can happen in March, and that’s largely true, so if you have a process, stick to it and let the chips fall where they may.
That’s a long way to say that bold takes are more acceptable/justifiable for this event than for anything else we have. I am higher on many teams than you (Gonzaga and Creighton’s articles are posted—there’s even more as you comb through my content this week), and I’ll battle for those squads.
Texas A&M, friends, is not one of those teams.
Texas A&M: A Major Threat To Disappoint
The Aggies have been a top-25 team all season long, and next week, they will crack my top-125 March Madness profile. This season will be the first.
I’m willing to admit that my numbers are a little harsh, but they are designed to highlight teams positioned best to succeed this time of year based on historical data, and they fuel my passion for picking against them.
A season-opening loss at UCF was less than ideal for Texas A&M supporters, but by winning 13 of their next 14 games, they solidified themselves as a poll-worthy team. In my humble opinion, the late-season swoon wasn’t a flash in the pan as much as it was a sign of things to come.
The thing about my numbers is that they don’t see the results of games. The brutal month of February resulted in this team falling just seven spots in my overall rankings. Not my ranking against this field (68 teams where a seven-spot drop represents a 10.3% fall), my rankings against all of D-I (364 teams where a seven-spot drop represents a 1.9% fall). That’s nothing.
So, my desire to fade this team has nothing to do with limited recent results. I will start on a granular basis and work my way out to get you on my side of this debate.
Wade Taylor IV is the Aggie most likely to take over a game, and we’ve seen him do it. The senior has north of 135 games in his collegiate career and, over his past 100 contests, is averaging north of 15 points per game. While he is capable, betting on the variance that comes with him in these low-possession games is all sorts of dangerous.
Case in point – he lit up South Carolina for 25 points on Feb.1, guiding them to a four-point road win despite his fellow starters scoring just 36 points (one 3PM) in 113 total minutes. Taylor looked great, but we couldn’t have seen it coming (four games prior: 13-of-45 from the field, 28.9%), and you lost money if you bet on it sustaining (next four games: 17-of-52 from the field, 32.7%). Entering this season, 52.5% of his career shots had come from downtown, but this year, his rate is well north of 60%, and with that, especially in a slow offense, comes an ugly floor.
The frontcourt can bang with anyone in the league, but if a team can handle their physical nature, this strength has the potential to turn into a weakness rather quickly. None of the bigs on this roster shoot free throws with confidence, another flaw that has the potential to be magnified in an environment with limited offensive opportunities. Pharrel Payne came to College Station after two years in Minnesota. While his minutes have been valuable, he’s a coin toss from the stripe, allowing opponents to negate his offensive rebounding savvy by wrapping him up.
Let’s parlay a player take into a more significant concern. Zhuric Phelps came over from SMU, and while his traditional numbers (from FG% to average PRA) are similar, the turnovers have gone from an annoyance to a crippling flaw. Multiple TO games have been a near lock this season from the tall guard, while four-plus turnover occurrences with way too much frequency for a player that doesn’t dish out assists at a high rate: I can swallow a high turnover percentage on the hardwood the same way I can handle a high interception rate for my quarterback if it comes with upside when those risks pay off, but that’s not the case here, and that’s essentially the case for this team as a whole.
Texas A&M Rankings Against The March Madness Field
- Assist rate: 63rd
- Assist-to-turnover rate: 62nd
- Free throw percentage: 59th
If you need a snapshot of the risk that comes with this outlook, look no further than the last time we saw the Aggies lace’em up (Thursday vs. Texas).
How do you lose a game where you’re +13 on the glass (+11 in terms of offensive rebounds) and make 12 triples on 38.7% shooting from deep?
- Five fewer assists than your opponent
- Seven more turnovers than your opponent
- Leave 13 points at the FT line (67.5%)
No team will have a perfect resume, but this profile is worrisome, given the expectations that come with this seed line. Since 2021, teams that have ranked in the bottom quarter of the field in assist-to-turnover rate average 0.43 victories.
Now, that’s a skewed stat. Relax. I’m getting there.
The average seed for those abovementioned teams was 11.4. Yes, bad teams generally rank poorly and rarely win games. That all tracks, but what if we stripped away those “bad” teams?
There’s no perfect way to do that, but let’s try to give the committee some credit and pencil in the better seeds to advance in every game. That never happens, but it’s a consistent way to assign win expectancy year-over-year without getting too into the weeds.
By going this path, we expect all teams seeded eight or better to win at least one regional game. For clarity, 5-6-7-8 seeds are all expected to win once, three seeds twice, two seeds three times, and one seed to represent the region with a four-game sweep.
In that vein, if we only look at the teams with expectations (eight-seed or better) that ranked in the bottom quarter of the field in assist-to-turnover rate, qualified teams have, since 2021, averaged 0.84 wins per tournament—a number that is 38.5% below the win expectancy using the above logic.
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I am underachieving in a big way, and that’s where I’m headed, for better or worse, with the Aggies this season. I noted the struggles from Texas A&M in specific spots early, so it’s worth noting that teams who entered the tourney ranked in the bottom quarter of participants in assist-to-turnover rate AND free throw percentage – 24 qualifiers and seven total wins (0.29 per team).
Be careful. Very careful.
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