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.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Alabama is going to win it all
Or at least they have a very good chance. That’s all I can conclude from the odds put on them to go all the way. Witness: Up until a couple days ago, Bodog had the Tide at 20-1, with only 11 teams having better odds. They since dropped them to 40-1, but there are only 20 teams better than that. BetUS currently has them at 15-1, where only eight teams are better. In what may be the most ridiculous proposition ever offered on a college hoops team, Bama is a cool 5-to-1 to make the NCAA title game at BetUS.
This pattern is repeated at other semi-reputable and semi-legal on-line establishments such as the World Sports Exchange, VIP, and sportsbetting.com. All this for a team that didn’t receive a single vote in either pre-season poll. Outside of JaMychal Green having a shot at making all-SEC first team, there’s nothing to suggest this squad has much more than a 50/50 chance of even making the tournament.
What could be causing this? At first, I thought that it must be wealthy Alabama alums just throwing away money in the name of school pride, but Alabama alums won’t even be paying attention to hoops until about the second week of January. Perhaps it’s that people think they are betting on football (Florida is rather highly thought of as well). Or maybe Anthony Grant’s coaching skills have a lot more value than I think.