Monthly Archives: March 2012

In today’s fast-paced society, it can be difficult to carve out time to break down video on your favorite team’s next opponent. One way to cheat the system and get a rough feel for offensive tendencies is to look at ‘assisted-on’ data, which indicates how many of a player’s made shots were assisted. Does a […]

Mercer beat Utah State 70-67 in a 66-possession game Wednesday night. I was there. This is what I saw. (Really, this is heavier on the random thoughts than game recap.) Travel and Altitude Redux There’s nothing like travel and altitude to enhance one’s road struggles. So serious credit goes to Mercer for overcoming a 2000-mile […]

If you’re into the twitter scene like I am, you’ve noticed Gary Parrish tweeting after each round where the remaining teams were ranked in his pre-season top 25 (and one).  That got me to thinking about the old issue of the pre-season poll versus the final poll. It’s been another good year for pre-season polls. […]

The field has been rid of the longshots. At this point, there aren’t any true surprises left in the field. Final4 Final Champ Start 1 in… 1S Kentucky 76.6 57.2 33.6 19.7 3 2E Ohio St. 64.4 41.2 24.8 19.3 4 2MW Kansas 53.0 22.5 10.9 9.1 9 1MW N. Carolina 47.0 18.7 8.5 6.6 […]

Hot off the presses, we have the log5 analysis for the 16 remaining teams. These teams comprised 81% of the title-winning chances before the tourney started, up from 69% last season, indicating that this year’s group was more expected than last season’s. (Pre-tournament chances are indicated in the ‘Prev’ column.) Michigan State received nearly 6% […]

Swt16 Elite8 Final4 Final Champ 1 in… 1S Kentucky 81.5 60.0 48.5 31.9 19.3 5 2E Ohio St. 81.2 65.8 44.4 29.9 18.6 5 1W Michigan St 71.1 52.7 39.0 24.0 14.1 7 2MW Kansas 73.6 49.5 31.9 16.3 8.6 12 1MW N. Carolina 76.6 62.1 34.2 16.3 8.0 13 4E Wisconsin 64.5 38.5 19.1 […]

It was high comedy on Sunday when the brackets revealed that Memphis and Saint Louis were forced to play each other in the round of 64. I haven’t done the research, but it would be hard for any previous round-of-64 game to top this one in the overall strength of the competing teams. Once my […]

Full disclosure: Every year I love the prospect of a 16 winning its first-ever game over a one-seed. Loyal readers will recall my irrational exuberance regarding Oral Roberts in 2006. This is not without reason, though. If you run the numbers, the chances of all of the one-seeds getting to the Final Four are typically […]

What follows is log5-style predictions of each team’s chance of advancing to each round in the tournament. The full list of 68 follows the regional analysis. [Corrected tables due to error in UNC’s rating -kp 3/12] South – I agree with Luke. Kentucky has the easiest path for a one-seed. The reputations of Duke and […]

Congratulations to Tommy Lemoine of Manchester, New Hampshire who earned himself a lifetime subscription to my site by virtue of winning the Mountain West tourney contest. Tommy is a recent Michigan State grad and here was his winning scorecard: Question Pick Result What will be San Diego State’s largest lead against Boise State? 12 11 […]