Yearly Archives: 2010

You might be surprised to hear this, but I’m a big fan of the pre-season AP poll. There is no doubt poll participants have their biases in the pre-season. They may tend to over-estimate the importance of the previous postseason, especially when a team needed more than its fair share of luck to advance. But […]

I have a lot of respect for anyone that compiles a pre-season ranking. For that reason, I rarely make judgments (at least publicly) on the many lists that start popping up around now. It is pretty easy to defend a wide variety of opinions on any one team. At this time last season, if you […]

The Big Ten appears to be winning the pre-season campaign for the mostly-meaningless title of “best conference” this season. They are expected to have a strong upper tier and even in terms of overall conference strength, the Big Ten may reign supreme. The conference figures to have a weak back end, but the perennial champ […]

The following is a list of transfers eligible for the upcoming season. These only include transfers whose most recent school was D-I. Thanks to kenpom.com head researcher Nic Reiner-Parra for putting this together. Drop me a line if someone needs to be added, removed, or changed. Name Pos Ht/Wt Year To From Quincy Diggs F […]

Let’s continue the countdown of the least likely victories from the past season… #5 The Game: Austin Peay at Akron, November 15. The Situation: Akron 72, Austin Peay 57, 7:36 left, Austin Peay ball. (1.6%) The Outcome: Austin Peay 80, Akron 77 The Quote: “First off, when you’re up 15 points with 7:36 to play, […]

With a nearly complete database of win probability calculations for each possession played last season, it’s time to do something reasonably fun with the data. What follows is not a compendium of the biggest comebacks in terms of points. It is a mix of those kinds of situations and cases where an underdog spotted its […]

There have been a few write-ups on the Isner/Mahut marathon tennis match already. Most notably this one by Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal. None have addressed the core issue – was this a conspiracy just so John Isner could appear on Letterman? Unfortunately, tennis stats are not sophisticated enough to do a proper […]

(For a more detailed explanation on how these were derived: see also this.) Well, nearly every game. You’ll have to look hard to find the missing games involving two D-I teams. Just head over to your favorite team’s page and click on the score of the game. Since these are adjusted win probabilities, games involving […]

Somewhere in the past week, this innocent blog post went viral. At least viral in the sphere of basketball blogs that still publish regularly in the offseason. The upshot is that coaches who bench players with foul trouble are only hurting themselves. It’s more geared towards the NBA, but the same principles discussed in the […]

The 2010 title game was pretty boring from a win probability perspective. So much so, that I questioned whether my code was working correctly at halftime of my live WP experiment. As it turned out, I almost picked the worst possible game for semi-live win probability to make its debut. It seemed unusual for a […]