Monthly Archives: January 2011

Last season, if you’ll recall, I asked a question regarding the tournament selection process: Let’s say you were given the following task: From a list of 320 college basketball teams, pick the 34 best. Not the most deserving, not the most difficult to play against, not the ones with the best athletes or the cutest […]

Jared Sullinger takes back first place after a week in which his team made a case as the best in the nation while he poured in 27 and 16 at Illinois. Sullinger didn’t post huge numbers in last night’s rout of Purdue (which isn’t considered in the standings below), going for 17 and 7 in […]

A few conference games have been played and the elusive dream of going unbeaten in conference play has ended for most. By my count there are 23 teams undefeated in conference (although this includes Princeton and Penn who have not yet played a conference game). Last season, only Butler could achieve this task. With Belmont’s […]

Within approximately 24 hours both The Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy and CBS’s Seth Davis expressed a similar sentiment via twitter to oddly identical questions. @mikevukkdka What is biggest thing that will keep Pitt from the Final 4?”—Can they generate scoring chances to beat elite D, shot clock? – @tsnmike Not scoring enough, fast enough RT […]

The kPOY continues to gain traction in the nation’s basketball psyche, as evidenced by a link on Wikipedia to an entry yet to be created. Now, I just need a real trophy. (Maybe a pizza trophy?) In other news, we have a new leader. However, since the race from first through fifth is so tight, […]

I’ve been working on another project this week. So I present these without comment. More chit-chat next week! (Standings through Sunday’s games.) 1. Jared Sullinger, Ohio St. (Rating of .503, last week: 1st) 2. JaJuan Johnson, Purdue (.499, LW: 4th) 3. Jon Leuer, Wisconsin (.491, LW: 5th) 4. Nolan Smith, Duke (.486, LW: 7th) 5. […]

As people who have followed my twitter feed have figured out, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the use of plus/minus data in college basketball analysis. I once produced something called an HD Box score which contained +/- data. It was a thrill to make the breakthrough to compute such data because after all, […]

Let’s own up to it – this year’s player of the year race is still open to be claimed and to me, that feels somewhat unusual for January. Most of the players in the chase for the inaugural kPOY had rather sluggish efforts coming out of the holiday break. This opened the door for something […]

(Ed. note: simulations run for the Pre-Conference Preview Blowout do not include Monday’s action. Nor does any of the text.) This is part 2 of the Pre-Conference Preview Blowout, where I preview conference races by simulating them 10,000 times using my ratings. In this edition we find that Duquesne is sneaky good and you should […]

As each conference gets started with games by Saturday, it’s a good time to look at who is likely to win each of the 32 D-I leagues. I’ve run the season 10,000 times using the current ratings and then recorded how many times each team finished at the top of its conference. If teams shared […]