Saturday morning reading
by Ken Pomeroy on Saturday, February 27, 2010
I am throwing a little Saturday morning reading out there in response to the fine posts authored by Gasaway, Hanner, and Jen regarding whether the selection committee should include margin of victory in their deliberations. Let’s do this with bullet points. Consider it Pomeroy’s wish for a brighter bracketing future.
1) This should not be framed as an MOV vs. non-MOV argument. This is about considering how a team wins and loses as opposed to solely whether they win or lose. If this was the NBA and every team played a similar schedule, this would be unnecessary. But given the imbalances that exist in college hoops scheduling and the brevity of the season, this is a logical and necessary consideration if you want to invite the best teams to the tournament.
I absolutely want the committee to consider the difference between Cornell getting screwed on a…
A belated answer
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Thanks for all of the responses to last Thursday’s brain teaser. What bothers me is this – the NCAA instructs committee members to select the 34 best
at-large teams. (It says so right here!) Yet the method currently used doesn’t accomplish that. And if the tournament were invented today, I’m fairly sure we’d devise a more intelligent way to select the field.
Let’s take an example from the latest brackets posted yesterday. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with the national bracket, you should do so. It essentially neutralizes the bias or errors of any one bracketeer and gives you a consensus look at who’s in and who’s out. Currently, our country’s bracketologists view Charlotte and Utah State as essentially equivalent teams. For full disclosure, I have not seen Charlotte play this season and I love Bobby Lutz, but they better have some serious extenuating circumstances, because any…
Quick question
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, February 18, 2010
Let’s say you were given the following task: From a list of 320 college basketball teams, pick the 34 best. Not the most deserving, not the most difficult to play against, not the ones with the best athletes or the cutest stories. You had to pick the best teams. How would you do it? Would you use the RPI? Except, you wouldn’t actually use a team’s RPI rank, but you’d look at the ranks of the opponents that each team had beaten and lost to. Who would do that? Please e-mail me if you are one of those people. Just wondering if I am nuts for thinking that this is not the best way to accomplish this task.
No, Kansas did not choke
by Ken Pomeroy on Wednesday, February 17, 2010
It’s rare that I post e-mails in here anymore, mainly because most of the mail I get sucks. So I present this to you both as a thought-provoking piece and as a model for how to converse with me. Please address me as “Mr. Pomeroy” and keep it brief with something insightful for the subject matter. My time is valuable. Be sure to say how awesome I am, too. Also, use paragraphs and punctuation. Sign your work. Be proud of it.
The author, Chris, references one of the first posts I made on the blog, which wasn’t a very good post. But that was before I had even read Basketball on Paper.
As someone who has grown weary of the overuse of free throw shooting as a reason games are won and lost, I can sympathize with Chris’s reaction to old-Ken’s thoughts. But no more! New-Ken endorses the…
The loneliest number
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, February 11, 2010
Last Friday, it was announced that Wyoming’s A.J. Davis would be leaving the program to pursue playing time elsewhere. On the surface, this was not big news. Davis was a solid player and will make a nice transfer for some mid-level program out there, but Wyoming is battling it out with Air Force to determine which team will wear the white jerseys in the 8/9 opening round game of the MWC tournament.
No, the real significance of Davis’ departure was that we are on the the verge of having a uniform number retire itself. Davis wore number 51 for the Cowboys, one of just four 51’s nationally who got meaningful (at least 10 percent of his team’s) minutes. And now we won’t see Davis for the remainder of the season. That leaves three active 51’s: Utah’s David Foster, JMU’s Pierre Curtis, and Campbell’s Preston Dodson.
I’m not sure why…
Give Coach Boze a chance
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, February 8, 2010
Some of this was recently covered by DeCourcy and Miller, but I was already planning to do some bookkeeping on the chances of unbeaten/winless teams remaining perfect mainly because it gives me a hook to blab about Todd Bozeman. First, let’s take a look at the eight teams that have an unbeaten conference record as of this morning…
Remaining perfect teams, chances of going unbeaten, remaining gamesButler 60.5% 5 Morgan St. 48.7% 7 Siena 40.8% 5 Murray St. 32.6% 5 Cornell 26.7% 8 Kansas 21.5% 9 Sam Houston St. 16.1% 8 Princeton 1.7% 10
All told, this collection is most likely to produce two perfect records when conference tournament play starts. After the Saturday win over Wright State, Butler’s the first team to have a projected undefeated conference record this season. Morgan State is right around 50 percent with less than half their conference slate left.…
Majerus does the unthinkable…again
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, February 1, 2010
(Note: Thanks to all that made me aware of this story.)
Rick Majerus has had a colorful career. He’s done some amazing things on the floor, most notably leading a WAC team to the NCAA title game in 1998. He’s done some amazing things off the floor, which include a variety of interesting motivational tactics, most thoroughly detailed in this piece. He’s publicly declared that the team he coaches is in the wrong conference, and announced on national TV that he’s “not a big gay guy”, as if there was some confusion about that after his on-air comments about Ashley Judd.
He was also the architect of the 20-point game, the lowest point total in the shot clock era. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that if there was one man that could defy logic and take on the challenge of completing a game…