Wednesday, December 23, 2009
An APB for a memorable season
One team that deserves a little more press than it’s been getting - which is zero - is the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff. Like many HBCU’s, the Golden Lions are wrapping up their annual pre-New Year’s barnstorming tour, having zig-zagged the nation collecting paychecks in exchange for beat-downs.
But a couple of things have been different about their travels. First, UAPB hasn’t mixed a tournament into their schedule, thus they have played an entire slate of true road games. With their first three SWAC contests on the road, the first game they will play outside of a hostile environment will be on January 16, some 16 games into the season.
The other part of the story is that while the team is 0-10, it hasn’t taken any beat-downs in the traditional sense. They’ve been quietly competitive in every single game, not losing a single contest by more than 20. When you’re playing the likes of Kansas State, Georgia Tech, Missouri, Arizona State, Oklahoma State, and UTEP - all in their place - and your conference stinks, that’s a start that your conference foes should be concerned about.
In fact, Pine Bluff is in the unique position of heading into the SWAC schedule winless - pending a game at Oregon next Monday (memo to Ernie Kent: this isn’t a gimme) - while having a legitimate shot of running the table in conference play. Probably not the 18% chance I’m showing right now, but even 5-10% is a staggering figure for a winless team.
I, for one, hope they can do it. Maybe it will provide some evidence that just because you lose doesn’t mean your confidence has to be shot. You can actually make strides in losing to quality opponents and there are such things as moral victories. Expect the Lions to get one more of those in Eugene. (Which would make them morally unbeaten?) After that, only real victories will matter, but there should be plenty of those on the way.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Excerpts from 1953: team stats
This is part of a continuing series examining pages from the 1953 Official NCAA Basketball Guide.
Naturally, the stats section in the book was one of the first things I turned to. If it was possible to get 51 rebounds in a game, then you can probably make the inference that a lot of shots did not go in back then. Indeed, as page 29 of the Guide shows, only three teams in all the land made over 40% of their field goal attempts. The “dunk shot” had not yet been popularized, obviously. In addition, no team could crack the 70% mark in free throw accuracy.
By the way, in today’s NCAA each basketball program is classified into one of three divisions for basketball. In ‘53, it was every school for itself. The intro to the major-college statistics section describes exactly how classification was determined.
Approximately 150 college basketball teams, which play most of their games against each other, are classified as “major-college” teams. They represent the field of so-called “big time” college basketball, as judged by the class of competition rather than seasonal strength. Teams of all other four-year colleges comprise the “small-college” field. An official list is issued annually.
Click on the thumbnail for a life-size image of page 29 and make note of that wacky defense Ole Miss is playing, guarding zones on the floor instead of individual opponents!
Friday, December 04, 2009
The Tempo-Free State
There are some interesting things that Google Analytics provides to web site owners. The thing I’m constantly fascinated with is the geographic breakdown of visitors. They give you a map that colors each state in various shades of green to indicate the relative frequency of visits from each state. That map isn’t terribly insightful, though. The top five states by visitors to this site since the start of the season breaks down like so…
1. New York
2. Illinois
3. California
4. Texas
5. North Carolina
From that list, we have four of the top five states by overall population. What I really want to know is which state’s citizens have the most interest in the site when scaled by population. Here’s how the top ten looks when dividing visits by total population of each state…
1. Kansas
2. Kentucky
3. Washington
4. North Carolina
5. Nevada
6. Virginia
7. Missouri
8. Illinois
9. Nebraska
10. Wisconsin
For the record, the District of Columbia produces over twice the per capita visitors that Kansas does. The list isn’t too surprising as there are a lot of hoop-heavy states in here. I’m not sure how Nebraska made the list, though. I’m pretty sure how Nevada did. Washington is an interesting find at #3. If we scaled by total basketball fans, we’d probably find the Emerald State would rank first. What’s the bottom five?
1. Louisiana
2. Arkansas
3. Hawaii
4. North Dakota
5. South Dakota
SEC country in general ranks low as they continue to be distracted by football. Every state in the southeast is in the bottom half of the nation in terms of per-capita interest. That’s part of the reason I’m running these stats now - to see where the serious hoops fans come from.
One other interesting bit of info is what pages are being hit the most. When I limit that list to the 2010 team pages, this is the kenpom top 25 in terms of popularity so far this year…
1. UNC
2. Duke
3. Kentucky
4. Kansas
5. Texas A&M
6. Washington
7. Texas
8. Syracuse
9. Wisconsin
10. Gonzaga
11. Missouri
12. Michigan State
13. Illinois
14. Minnesota
15. Purdue
16. Washington State
17. Marquette
18. Portland
19. Clemson
20. UNLV
21. Florida State
22. Memphis
23. Arizona
24. UCLA
25. Iowa
With Indiana, Michigan, and Northwestern falling just short of this list, the Big Ten actually has 9 teams in the top 30 and easily provides the biggest source of interest in the site.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
When Exhibit A sucks
If you’ve perused your favorite MSM college basketball site, you’ve surely seen this story. It basically summarizes a paper by a couple of professors who determined that officials call fewer fouls on the home team, fewer fouls on the trailing team, and fewer fouls on the team that has more fouls at any particular moment. I found this passage in the AP story odd, though:
The professors studied 365 college games during the 2004-05 season and found that refs had a terrific knack for keeping the foul count even, regardless of which team was more aggressive.
Exhibit A: The 2005 Final Four meeting between Illinois and Louisville. The Illini, known for being more aggressive defensively, got whistled for the first seven fouls. By the end of the game, the foul count was Louisville 13, Illinois 12. The Illini won 72-57.
Really? That’s your Exhibit A? I’m not sure if a Bruce Weber-coached team was known for being more aggressive than a Rick Pitino-coached team in 2005. It doesn’t seem plausible, but we do have facts we can check. This really isn’t news to anyone in touch with tempo-free stats, but Illinois under Weber has a history of fouling infrequently unless they’re behind in a close game. (The other issue is that four Louisville fouls occurred after the Illini established a double-digit lead late in the second half.) The shock of that game was not that the Cardinals’ foul total eventually exceed that of Illinois, it was that Illinois has a 7-0 edge in fouls at one point.
I have not read the journal article, and because I am not a subscriber to the Journal of Sports Science, I probably never will. It may be well-written and make useful points. But there have to be better examples of officials playing catch-up than this one.
Monday, November 23, 2009
That dying 3-point shot
Perhaps the most interesting statistical trend over the early weeks of this season is the number of 3-point attempts being jacked up. Here’s how 3-point attempt percentage has progressed over the past three seasons.
3PA%
2008 34.4
2009 33.1
2010 32.4
Obviously the dip last season was due to the movement of the 3-point line back a foot. I’m not sure how to explain what’s going on this season. My recollection from last year is that 3-point attempts didn’t change much during the season, so it seems likely that this will be the first season since the introduction of the 3-pointer that we’ll see a decrease in attempts without a change in the location of the line. And that certainly goes against what I would have predicted.