I enjoyed reading this piece about Iona coach Tim Cluess. Cluess vents about the continued decreased in scoring in college hoops and mainly pins the blame on controlling coaches. The root cause of the problem is probably more complicated than that, but I compliment Cluess on his candor. Of course, it’s easy to bash your […]

While more conferences are taking the plunge into playing all games at the higher-seeded team, no other league has yet joined the NEC in its hard-core effort for fairness by reseeding the bracket for the semifinals. Last year, fourth-seeded Mount St. Mary’s overcame the challenge and won the tournament in one of the more unlikely […]

Cliff Ellis has the life, man. As head coach of Coastal Carolina, he gets to live near the beach, coach at a school with a new arena, and regardless of how his team does during the regular season, it gets to host the Big South tournament. While other conferences of a similar stature have adopted […]

The OVC begins its tournament Wednesday night with all games being played at the Nashville Auditorium. The top seed is Murray State who blew through the 16-game conference slate without a loss, one of three teams nationally to go unbeaten in conference play. The Racers were taken to overtime twice and played four other single-digit […]

I’ve been doing this for a few years, and it seems like it used to be common that the top seed would not be the favorite to win its tournament. But over the years, more conferences have engineered their bracket to reward regular season play (the nerve!). This season America East joins the party by […]

Add the Atlantic Sun to the list of conferences spiking the single-site format and putting all games at campus sites. This means the 818-seat Hodge Center at USC-Upstate will get to host a tournament game, so citizens of Spartanburg, get your tickets fast. (Though the Spartans drew 866 to their season opener, so if you […]

The Horizon League features a surprise top seed as presumptive preseason-favorite Green Bay was caught by Valparaiso, who won eight of its last nine to beat the Phoenix by a game. The two are rated almost identically, but the top seed is rewarded with home court, so the Crusaders are the favorite to snag the […]

The Patriot League tips off tournament basketball Tuesday night and with that begins a series of posts with tables featuring numbers between zero and one. We’re using the low-tech log5 method and my ratings to estimate each team’s chance of winning its conference tournament. From now through next Wednesday, you’ll see periodic posts breaking down […]

My favorite aspect of win probability models is the concept of leverage. As Ken Pomeroy wrote in 2010, Leverage measures how much is at stake on a particular possession.    I’m especially interested in how leverage functions as an unorthodox stand-in for excitement level and game tension in basketball.  Considering we now have win probability […]