A first glance at Texas A&M.
Tyler Davis is wondering if the back of those jerseys says FORM
This team is not that team. Texas A&M's season is split into two halves: a rip-roaring nonconference schedule that saw them rise to #5 in the polls and #4 on Kenpom, and a 9-9 SEC season. A&M beat WVU, Oklahoma State, Penn State, and USC away from home and fell narrowly to Arizona in a virtual road game. Then they hit the skids.
The #1 reason for this is the loss of their point guard, Marquette grad transfer Duane Wilson. Wilson went down with an injury after the SEC opener against Alabama; he missed three games, returned as a shadow of himself for nine games in which his eFG was 33%, and finally went out for the season on February 13th.
Per Bart Torvik's system, A&M was the #14 team in the country before Wilson went out the first time and #35 after, largely because of a drop in defensive efficiency. In the nine-game sample since Wilson went out for the second and final time they're 82nd, and their offense is also languishing in that precise spot. This includes their hamblasting of UNC.
A&M had a brief section of the season where a spate of injuries took down Wilson, DJ Hogg, and Admon Gilder for 3-6 game stretches but they've been healthy outside of the Wilson injury for a couple months now and their performance has been iffy.
Starks is the rare 30 usage, 90 ORTG guy
Maybe try a man bun? In Wilson's absence A&M has turned to freshman TJ Starks, the aforementioned Dollar Store Rob Gray. Like Gray, Starks is a 6'2" PG with 30 percent usage and a healthy assist rate. There the comparisons stop. Starks has a TO rate higher than his assist rate and is shooting 43/33 from the floor with a mediocre free-throw rate. He's had at least 4 TOs in 10 of his last 11 games and aside from one anomaly against Vanderbilt hasn't gotten his ORTG above 106 during that span. On the season he's at 88, and there is no recent upward trend.
Starks is completely bonkers, and I have the stat to prove it. Despite spending much of the year as a backup he leads A&M with 92 transition attempts. eFG on those? 41%. IE, worse than his half court offense.
A&M's highest usage guy is by far their least efficient. Not a great combination.
Large, though. This team is even bigger than the SDSU team that veritably loomed as a potential second-round matchup. A&M's 6th in the country in effective height because they roll out three 6'10" guys and a 6'9" guy. The 6'9" guy, Hogg, would be a stretch four in a normal line up—he's hitting 38% on 167 threes. He is A&M's small forward by necessity.
The 6'10" guys are pure posts without much stretch to them. Tonny Trocha-Morelos gets up about 2 3PA per game and hits at 31%; other than that threes from the bigs are bad-idea shots that occasionally go up anyway. Trocha-Morelos is a dunk-on-dish guy at the rim; Tyler Davis and Robert Williams both have significant post-up game. I'd expect a bunch of Duncan Robinson post D events. Ditto Wagner.
As you might expect, this old-school approach leads to a lot of backboard volleyball. A&M is 30th in OREBs and near 300th in both 3PA/FGA and 3P%.
A&M runs. Per Synergy, 19% of A&M possessions are in transition and while they're not great (58th percentile) they are a ton better than they are in the half court, where they score just 0.84 points per possession against man to man D—22nd percentile.
By contrast, just 11% of opponent shots against Michigan are in transition and Michigan is the best team in the country at defending even the small number of runouts that they endure.
And they D up. A&M doesn't have any real weaknesses on defense. The worst aspect of their D is that about 26% of opposition shots are spot-ups and they're only a little bit above average at defending those. Everything else is very good to excellent. There is a glaring issue on Kenpom, as A&M is in the 300s at forcing turnovers, but they're so good at everything else it doesn't really matter. As you might imagine, they block a lot of shots—8th nationally.
The Aggies are mostly a man team but do run out a 2-3 zone on about a fifth of their possessions. Michigan is definitely going to get some of that early and possibly a lot of it if Michigan bogs down against it. With traditional bigs at the 4 and 5 chasing around Wagner, Robinson, and Livers it might be A&M's plan from the drop.
tfw you're shooting 6% from 3
What happened against North Carolina? A perfect storm of three point luck. UNC started out the game 1/17, A&M started 7/17. By the time the game ended those numbers had expanded to 6/31 and 10/24. A&M's three point defense is good enough to assume that some of it is real skill, but nobody's got true skill to hold UNC to 19%, and anyone who watched that game can tell you that most of UNC's looks were high quality.
Meanwhile, A&M hit 42% and launched 40% of their shots from three.
The two point stats are also slanted heavily in A&M's favor but that was in large part because the three point shooting had sunk UNC so far down that they started getting desperate with 10+ minutes left. UNC threw up a ton of quick, bad shots; they pressed to open up a bunch of A&M dunks.
It looks like just one of those things, a ruthless run of bad luck on both ends of the court for the Tarheels. I would not expect one part of that—A&M's mad bombing—to continue against a team like Michigan that just shut down catch-and-shoot threes against Houston and is top ten at preventing launches on the season. Unfortunately, it is easy to project Michigan building a mighty wall of bricks, since it seems like they do about every other game even when they're not facing a team of huge dudes.
General shape of game. This is going to be another slugfest. A&M is going to dump it in to their big guys and dare Michigan not to double them, both because they're excellent at posting and Michigan has weak post defense and because they might get a foul on Wagner that would limit his ability to stretch A&M's defense out of shape.
Not to offer Luke Yaklich advice but I might be inclined to double much harder than Michigan has to date. Anything that forces Starks to create is probably better for M than post-ups despite the latter's inherent inefficiency. None of the A&M bigs have much in the way of an assist rate. And keeping Wagner on the floor should be a major priority given the issues A&M's defense presents.
When Michigan has the ball I'd expect a brief period of chasing Robinson off screens and trying to deal with pick and pop with Wagner before A&M settles in and plays a 2-3 zone for most of the game. Who hates that idea? This guy.
Michigan should have an edge in shot volume since A&M is pretty bad in all TO departments and Michigan's been proficient on the defensive boards; they should have a big edge in 3PAs. It'll come down to how much Michigan's defense is hurt by a couple of very legit post-up bigs versus Michigan hitting an acceptable number of threes.
