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.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Interesting Reads
The whole Belichick thing got me to reading football analysis this week. It also got me wondering, what do people do when everyone around the water cooler is taking the side of Wilbon in these situations? My MO is to politely excuse myself from the conversation and then come home at night and blog about it. Kind of passive-aggressive, yes, but is there really any other way?
Anyway, in the process I came across some interesting reads from Brian Burke at advancednflstats.com on two of my favorite topics, home court advantage and luck. As you may know, I tend to be of the opinion that there isn’t much difference between the home court advantage at Cameron Indoor and the Fleisher Center. This piece has a unique (and unorthodox) slant on that issue.
And there’s an interesting series of posts on how to measure luck, which seems like a good way to also measure conference parity in college hoops. I’m guessing the ‘08 Patriot League had a hell of a lot of games decided by luck.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Excerpts from the 1953 Official NCAA Basketball Guide
A while back I picked up a copy of the 1953 Official NCAA Basketball Guide. Within the 269 pages of the Guide, there is almost everything one could want to try to reconstruct the state of the game back then, including previews of the upcoming season, standings for the previous season, and a rule book.
And the game was quite a bit different than the one we know today. Periodically, I’ll share pages from it. To start things off, let’s look at page 1, the “National Preview-Review”, penned by future HOF’er Jim Enright. This is not the most exciting part of the book, but it will give you an idea of the style of writing 57 years ago. Perhaps in 50 years, we’ll look at Simmons’ writing in the way we look at Enright’s now. (Although, I like the idea of calling a team’s leading scorer “Mr. Points”.)
The other thing you’ll notice is that this was a production of the NCAA. Whereas now we can go to Barnes and Noble and pick up any one of a dozen or so independently created preview mags. Back then, I’m assuming this was it. Thus, you have Mr. Enright comparing the cage game’s resurgence from the game-fixing scandal of 1951 to something like winning World War II. You also have only a brief mention in the entire publication that likely preseason number one Kentucky was banned from play for violations related to the ‘51 scandal.
Click on the thumbnail for the full text.
