A Look Back At Preseason Prognostications

With the Final Four now set without Marquette's participation, we're forced to look back at the season and attempt to figure out what went well and what could have gone better.

We will start with looking back at the preseason polls. No, not the Fancy Dan Associated Press & USA Today polls. We're going to look at the polls we posted here on our blog to see if our readers form a high quality prognosticating Hive Mind.

Hit the jump and we'll get to it!

Non-Conference Record: Marquette ended up at 11-2 in the non-conference schedule with losses to LSU and Vanderbilt. That matches right up with what the voting said with 35% picking 11-2. Props to Mr. Kensington for identifying LSU as a game that could jump up and bite MU in the butt.

Big East Record: Here's where Marquette started outperforming expectations. MU was 14-4 in Big East play, two full games better than the 12-6 record that 24% of voters expected back in November. 8% of voters correctly predicted MU's record.

Big East Standings: 41% of the votes had Marquette finishing in 4th place. A heavy majority of the record vote had Marquette between 5 and 7 losses, so I'm guessing that this ended up being a prediction of an overall down year for the Big East. Just 1% of the vote correctly had Marquette in second place, which is actually less than the total that had Marquette winning the whole thing (5%).

NCAA Tournament Seeding: If Marquette had lost two more conference games as the voting expected, I'm guessing that the 36% of respondents that had Marquette as a 5 seed would have been correct. As it stands, 17% of voters correctly predicted a 3 seed for Marquette.

Season Finale: 36% of the votes unfortunately correctly predicted Marquette's exit in the Sweet 16. The down side is that a majority of the votes had Marquette going further than that. Should Marquette have gone further? Maybe. We'll never know.