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Friday, December 12, 2003

Don’t Call it a Comeback

A follow-up to last night's post on how teams making big comebacks fare in overtime:

I looked back on all the OT games played so far. I limited my search to games involving the "BCS" conferences and the A-10, Mountain West, MVC, and WAC. When you start dealing with lower conferences, it becomes difficult to get accurate game information. Below is a list of teams that overcame at least a 15 point deficit in the 2nd half to force OT.

12/6 Michigan St. vs Oklahoma (MSU down 15 with 13 minutes to go) Result: OU 80-77 12/6 Kansas St. vs. Oregon St. (KSU down 16 with 15 minutes to go) Result: OSU 87-82 12/10 Florida vs. Maryland (Florida down 17 with 16 minutes to go) Result: Md 69-68

So the team making the big comeback is 0 for 3 in overtime games. By the end of the year hopefully there will be 15-20 such games to give a decent idea of whether there's a legitimate trend here. If so, I think it would suggest that the effort needed to make up a deficit is greater than the effort needed to build a lead. Hence, the team coming back is pretty much pooped in OT and often loses.

It was somewhat arbitrary that I chose 15 points as my cutoff. If I had chosen 14 I would have included Xavier's comeback against Indiana which ultimately was also a loss. But 15 is a nice round number so I am going with that. I could go with 10, but then I saw Duke make up that deficit in less than a minute against Maryland once, so it doesn't seem like a big deal.

Posted on 12/12 at 12:10 AM
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Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Number 1 and done

I guess I wasn't really surprised that Florida once again failed to win a game as #1. They couldn't put away a dreadful Stetson team in their last game, like a top team should.

This game provides an introduction for one of my wacky theories: A team making a big comeback to force overtime often loses. I don't have the facts to prove or disprove this at the moment, but hopefully I can get to it soon. College basketball record keeping is so poor it's going to be difficult.

Posted on 12/10 at 11:49 PM
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Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Defending the RPI, Part 1 of 3

Most discussion of the RPI involves the weaknesses of the system. I haven’t seen anyone come to its defense, but the RPI is not that bad, really. Let me clarify - in the middle of December it's bad. But the RPI is a tool in the tournament selction process, so it's not meant to be used until March.

First, I think we can agree that the best thing the RPI has going for it is its simple formula. For those who don't know, it's

25% x your winning percentage (WP) + 50% x your opponents' WP + 25% x your opponents' opponents' WP

More simply its 25% x WP + 75% x strength of schedule (SOS)

It’s not something one can compute in their head. But any dork with a computer can calculate the RPI. While many fans know the formula, nobody really knows how it works. Which leads me to the first of the three main complaints about the RPI:

Complaint #1: ¾ of the RPI is out of a team’s control.

While it seems like an obvious truth, that’s not how it works at all. To illustrate this let’s look at the range of values for both winning percentage and strength of schedule among all teams in recent end-of-season RPI’s.

Year   Max WP   Min WP    Diff     Max SOS   Min SOS     Diff
2001   .9286    .0385    .8901      .6127     .4080     .2047
2002   .9286    .0385    .8901      .6099     .4064     .2035
2003   .9063    .0385    .8678      .6123     .3796     .2337
Avg.                     .8827                          .2140

So the portion in the team’s control has a range of values of roughly .8827, while the portion out of a teams control only has a range of .2140. Even when one accounts for the fact the winning percentage is just 25% of the formula, it still turns out to have a bigger impact than SOS:

WP:   .25 x .8827 = .2207
SOS:  .75 x .2140 = .1605

SOS plays an important role, but unless your SOS is in the bottom third of college basketball, a poor schedule can be overcome with a great record. For instance last year Weber St. had a schedule ranked 178 out of 327, but with a 25-3 record they were able to have an RPI rank of 41. This is the beauty of the RPI, you can’t really schedule your way into a good rating as most people think. The more difficult your schedule, the harder it is to maintain a good record and therefore a good RPI. The range of values in the SOS is also part of the reason the RPI is useless early in the year. SOS has a much greater range this time of year, so it does control the ratings. But as the year progresses, everybody’s SOS gravitates towards .500 and winning percentage becomes more important.

Next week: Complaint #2 – When winning still hurts.

Posted on 12/09 at 10:44 PM
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