Monthly Archives: November 2004

Ohio University opened its season last night by hosting San Francisco, becoming the last team to play a real game. Ohio usually is one of the last teams to tip-off their season. This is because they are on a wacky quarter system where exams fall on the week before Thanksgiving. For you youngsters out there, […]

There are a couple of questions I have after the long weekend. Question #1) When did Arizona morph into Temple? I was expecting the Arizona/Wake Forest game to be played in the 90s, but instead it was an ugly 63-60 win for the Deacs. Arizona has proven that they are a lot more responsible on […]

I’m not going to do a real post today. After Thanksgiving break, I will take my little free throw project in a different direction and show exactly how success or failure in all sorts of other statistical categories produces winning or losing basketball. There’s bound to be a few mildly interesting nuggets in there. If […]

So as a follow up to my unsubstantiated claim last Friday that a team’s volume of free throw attempts is more important than their free throw percentage, I decided to run some tests on last season’s data. I took the top 30 and bottom 30 teams in various categories and computed their total winning percentage. […]

For those who got tired of hearing about how good the ACC was last season, early indications are that you’ll get more of the same this year. With Virginia’s 78-60 rout of Arizona on Sunday, you had a team that isn’t expected to finish in the top five of the ACC beat a team that […]

NC State, who led the nation in free throw shooting at around 80% last season, has started out this year 20 for 34 (59%) from the line in two games. If State kept up this pace they would be vying for national basement honors by March. But even if that did happen, it shouldn’t be […]

Because my readership currently is at the same levels as last February and March, I feel compelled to post more often, and not just wait until something interesting pops into my head. I’m going to remove some of the filtering that occurs between my head and cyberspace. Since people are taking the time to stop […]

Wake Forest got out of the gates about as well as they could have, beating an experienced George Washington team soundly tonight, 97-76. More importantly, two lingering questions – defense and Danelius – recieved strong responses. Wake’s defense was solid: GW committed 25 turnovers, shot 40% from the field, and was held to less than […]

Last year the ranks of Division 1 decreased by one when Morris Brown lost its accreditation. But this season, D1 continues it regularly expanding ways with four new teams: Northern Colorado, Utah Valley State, Cal Davis, and Longwood. All of these programs have huge challenges ahead of them, because while those teams will be playing […]

When I looked at the stats of Princeton and Air Force last season, I got the impression that Tigers coach John Thompson III was playing Princeton-lite ball. Air Force played at a pace about 5-10% slower than the Tigers, and relied on the 3 pointer more. This resulted in a few games with freakishly low […]