An APB for a memorable season
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, December 23, 2009
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…
Excerpts from 1953: team stats
by Ken Pomeroy on Friday, December 11, 2009
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…
The Tempo-Free State
by Ken Pomeroy on Friday, December 4, 2009
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 CarolinaFrom 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.…