Kansas will not win it all*
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, March 18, 2010
I tried a variation of this in the past and it didn’t go so well, but I stand behind my reasoning.
The way Kyle feels about brackets in general is the way I feel about “expert” brackets. Yes, thanks guys, Kansas is the best team. We didn’t need your expert opinion to figure that out. However, Kansas is not going to win the whole thing*. (By the way, I have no idea why George Dohrmann is a basketball expert, but I now have serious respect for him. He’s the only one to deviate from Kansas and Kentucky for a national title pick.)
If you have to pick somebody, of course it’s going to be the Jayhawks because Kansas is the most likely team to win the whole thing. But any reasonable estimate out there has their chances at 25-35%, which is far from the certainty…
Conference tournaments not a bad way to decide best team
by Ken Pomeroy on Sunday, March 14, 2010
In many ways, conference tournaments get a bad rap. When somebody like Houston wins the Conference USA tournament, we are forced to try and make sense of how a team that had a losing conference record could be declared its champion. However, in the vast majority of situations a tournament is not a bad way to decide a conference champ.
More specifically, it’s not much worse than the regular season in this regard. It might seem like a 16-18 game schedule should reliably determine which team is the best, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Take for instance the Atlantic Sun. Four teams tied for the top spot with another a game back. The A-Sun could have played an 82-game schedule and we still could not have felt comfortable about which team was truly best. I don’t think anyone would argue that a tournament was a bad…