How did Saturday’s loss affect New Mexico’s at-large chances?

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, it’s been a chaotic last six days across men’s basketball in the Mountain West.

The Colorado State Rams suffered yet another loss as a top-25 team Saturday to UNLV, moving to 7-7 in such games this season. But wait, it gets even better! There were two crazy banked-in buzzer-beaters on Tuesday. Utah State’s Darius Brown II (who’s been on a tear) sunk a game-tying 35-foot 3-pointer as time expired against Fresno State Tuesday, forcing overtime.

That was soon followed up by Nevada’s Jarod Lucas, who made one of the craziest buzzer-beaters you will see all season from beyond the half-court after Colorado State’s Isaiah Stevens tied it at 74 with 2.5 seconds left.

Not to mention, outside of Utah State’s eventual overtime victory, UNLV went on to win a 75-69 overtime battle on the road against Wyoming. Plus, SDSU kept their 20-game home win streak alive—the third-longest in program history—surviving a near-scare against San Jose State with a 72-64 win.

Though still maybe the most shocking storyline of the week—and maybe the MW season—was New Mexico’s 78-77 loss at home to Air Force on Saturday inside The Pit.

It was a historic loss by the Lobos, given where each team was placed amongst KenPom’s metrics entering the game. Per Lobos beat writer Geoff Grammer of the Albuquerque Journal:

“Saturday was the second biggest differential in KenPom.com rankings of any UNM Lobo loss in the 25-year Mountain West era. The worst loss was when Rice, a team ranked 284 in KenPom, beat Craig Neal’s No. 44 UNM Lobos 90-89 in the Pit on Dec. 19, 2015 — marking a 240-spot difference in national rankings between the two teams.”

According to Grammer, the two teams had a KenPom differential of 236 spots entering the game—that gap has since closed to 228 (AFA - 263; UNM - 35) over the last five days. It marked Air Force’s second conference win this season, the other also coming away from home in a 32-point blowout on the road against UNLV in late January.

Saturday also marked New Mexico’s first Quad 4 loss of the season, previously going 9-0 in those games. The question remains: How much did Saturday’s loss affect New Mexico’s NCAA Tournament chances, if at all? Let’s examine.

The Lobos have lost four of their last seven games with two of those three wins being against Nevada and CSU, both Quad 1 foes. They own the fewest Quad 1 wins (3) and Quad 1 or 2 wins (5) among the top-7. But in reality, Saturday’s loss didn’t affect them that much.

A Quad 4 loss is never something any team wants on their resume, especially if they’re fighting for a sought-after at-large bid. As a result, New Mexico dropped six spots in the NET from No. 20 to 26, but has since elevated back into the top-25. Current NET Rankings don’t necessarily matter in the long-term, though if the season ended today and it left out of the field, would become the first team ranked inside the top-30 in NET to miss the dance.

At the time of this publishing, there are three other teams in the top-50 in NET with at least Quad 4 loss: Indiana State (28), Mississippi State (31), Florida Atlantic (37) and Northwestern (48). Zooming out to the top-75, there are seven other teams: McNeese State (55), Grand Canyon (57), Bradley (58), UCF (66), St. Bonaventure (67), Appalachian State (72) and VCU (73).

FAU, St. Bonaventure and VCU are the only team in the bunch with at least two Quad 4 losses. Regardless, 10 percent of the top-50 and roughly 17 percent of the top-75 in NET own one Quad 4 loss.

There was admittedly more parity last year: Seven who finished in the top-50 (pre-NCAA Tournament) and 15 across the top-75 had at least one Quad 4 loss. But that’s also with a bigger sample of games where chaos can matriculate throughout the final few regular season games plus the conference tournaments. Even the Mountain West’s very own Utah State, who finished No. 18 in NET, had two Quad 4 losses; Texas A&M, who finished No. 19, had finished with two Q4 losses apiece.

Both those aforementioned programs had twice as many Quad 1-2 wins (USU - 11; T&M - 12) as New Mexico does right now, but the Lobos still have a chance to snag a pair of Quad 1 wins to close the regular season plus at least 2-3 more if they make a deep run in the MW Tournament.

Nine teams—tripled from the previous high—who suffered at least Quad 4 loss made the Tournament as an at-large last season. That figure was three in 2021-22, zero in 2020-21 (COVID-shortened with mostly conference games) and two in 2018-19, the first year the NEt was introduced.

Not all Quad 1 or 2 wins are created equal, but the majority of those teams had similar or better resumes than the Lobos currently do by the time conference tournaments concluded.

Nevertheless, there’s still a clear runway for New Mexico to advance as an at-large—even if it’s as a First Four squad.

According to the latest Bracket Matrix projections (Feb. 28), 110 of the 114 brackets have UNM making the field with an average seed of 10.1. A total of 42 (38.2 percent) pegged them as a First Four squad; 46 have it as a No. 9-10 with the remaining four as a No. 8 seed.

Saturday’s loss was incredibly disappointing—and, to Grammer’s point, historically bad—but it’s not the end for UNM, barring an unforeseen collapse down the stretch. There’s still time to make amends ... while there’s equally enough time to crater.

It’s almost March! The chaos is only beginning—for better or worse!!