Yearly Archives: 2014
“Our conference is in the worst condition officiating I’ve ever seen. When people come out and steal basketball games from our young people like that crew did, they deserve to be put in jail and not working basketball games” – Lute Olson, March 6, 1982 There’s nothing treated less objectively in college hoops than the […]
I used to do this every day, then every week, and now it’s every two weeks. I’d like to do it every day, but I’d go crazy. So here are the last two weeks, reviewed: Public service message: But first, this message. This time of year people will often say something like “kenpom.com predicts team […]
Note: Making its debut on the site today is PASR (Predictive Analytics for Successful Recruiting), a model created by Jackson Fambrough using economic principles, that predicts where college basketball recruits will go to school. The predictions cover the top 150 recruits (as determined by Rivals) for future classes and will be updated approximately once a […]
With many conferences increasing in size in recent years, there are fewer leagues playing a balanced conference schedule. Unfortunately, an unbalanced schedule introduces conference schedule strength as an additional variable that can influence the chase for a conference regular-season title. However, if this is keeping you up at night, it shouldn’t. It’s rarely that big […]
Welcome to Play-by-Play Theater, the very irregular feature where I mine play-by-play data from the past five-plus seasons to discover the wacky things that happen in darkest corners of the college basketball universe. At the Maui Invitational, BYU’s Chase Fischer went on a 3-point shooting tear for the ages in the first half against Chaminade, […]
Hey everyone, here’s what you might or might not have missed over the past two weeks. Biggest upsets 3. Nov. 29: #316 NJIT 84, #120 Duquesne 81 (8%). The Highlanders are still the country’s only independent, and therefore must earn an at-large bid to get into the NCAA tournament. Wins at Duquense help that cause. […]
The battle to determine which conference is the second-best in the land tips off tonight. A total of 14 games will be played in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge over the next three days. As is customary, I simulated the challenge a million times based on my ratings to determine the chances of each conference winning […]
This is the weekly column where I take a look at least-likely comebacks, biggest upsets, and other extremes in the college hoops universe over the past week. There’s also a dash of Alan Williams news and other random thoughts. Just read it. Public service message: Currently, Division-I teams are 129-0 against teams not in Division-I. […]
You can’t make many sweeping judgments three days into the season, especially with so few compelling games being played. Favorites in my system have gone 168-20 so far, which is not testimony to the greatness of my preseason ratings, but that a simple preseason rating algorithm can easily predict winners with so many mismatches on […]
With the season upon us, I thought I’d take some time to summarize some of the new information available I put on the site over the summer. If you’ve paid close attention to my twitter feed, then these aren’t new. But most people don’t, so here goes. – Conference historical summaries. If you want a […]