Meet My Friend Pythagoras
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, August 2, 2004
Andy Katz recently published his preseason top 50 for the upcoming season. He did a very thorough job and I think captured something close to what the preseason polls will have. Although I am a little puzzled as to why Gonzaga is ranked as low as 22. At any rate, it's time to start speculating on the upcoming season.
Part of doing that is accurately assessing how good a team was last year. Some opinions will be inflated and some deflated based on the distribution of luck. Can we quantify which teams were lucky and which teams were unlucky last year? We can take a shot at it. (Why do I keep saying we? I am sounding like Beano Cook here.)
Bill James can help us. He's a genius who unfortunately has applied his genius to Major League Baseball. He was the one who invented the Pythagorean Theorem of…