One of the big issues in my mailbox is how consistency impacts a team’s prospects in The Tournament. More specifically: how can we expect Southern Illinois (Pythagorean rating: 34, Consistency: 1) and Nevada (Pythag: 63, Consistency: 2), teams that have dominated their respective conferences without piling up big margins of victory, to perform in The […]

Ken, You seem universally skeptical of intra-season “team improvement” stories.  For example, with Duke you give a great alternate explanation of their possible future success.  What do you make of Vanderbilt’s improvement this season?  From a 1-3 start with losses to Wake and Furman to a 7-2 mark in their last 9 SEC games, beating […]

These aren’t the games I would have chosen to run, but I’m at the mercy of SID’s and webmasters from around the country on acquiring the necessary data to create boxes. And unfortunately, the SEC guards substitution data like it’s gold. Penn State/Ohio State It’s not often you see a cellar-dwelling team lose a starter […]

We always talk about “shooting” as one of the four factors, and easily the most important of the four. But it isn’t really shooting, more accurately it’s “making shots.” And in my mind, making shots has two components – shooting and shot selection. You don’t have to be a good shooting team to shoot a […]

Raw plus/minus is nice, and I think interesting, if not statistically significant, for an individual game. But step two is to calculate an on/off rating a la the work Roland Beech does on NBA players. This kind of analysis is problematic for star college players, because many of them play nearly all of their team’s […]

I’ve been kind of distracted by work on the HD box score. Here’s Wednesday’s Ole Miss/LSU game, a 71-70 Rebel win in 60 (counted!) possessions. A decidedly bizarre game where Ole Miss (now leading the SEC West, kudos to Andy Kennedy) turned it over just four times but saw that advantage offset by LSU’s slightly […]

A lot of folks send in great tips on some cool box scores that appear during the season. I wish I was dutiful enough to print them all. I did get a lot of mail about Butler’s offensive assault on Cleveland State last week. A historic game indeed – Butler’s 92 points on 53 possessions […]

[Note: I have no ftp service today, so there will be no updates to the stats/ratings pages.] Q: How much is a star player actually worth to his team? A: To be revealed later this week. But based on the data I have, I found it interesting when Jamie Dixon went to the coaches playbook […]

For those that missed it on Tuesday night, Texas Tech suffered a heartbreaking loss to Nebraska. After the Red Raiders played flawless defense on the final possession of the game, a rebound on a Marcus Perry missed 3-pointer headed for the sideline. Tech’s Charlie Burgess leapt out of bounds for it, attempted to call timeout […]

There’s a perfect storm brewing in the tempo-free world. UNC, one of the 10 fastest teams in the land may well have the best defense in the game, and Georgetown one of the 10 slowest, might have the best offense in the country. I’ve talked about the Tar Heels enough, but how about Georgetown? They […]