Yearly Archives: 2015

Points, glorious points. That is the takeaway from the first weekend of college basketball. Scoring is up 7% over the first weekend last season. Pace is up 5% and efficiency is up 2%. It’s not 1975-style basketball, but for at least one weekend we turned the clock back to 1995 when it wasn’t unusual to […]

Last season, I did this thing where I picked five guys that would shoot the you-know-what out of the ball and called it the #ShootersClub. The hashtag never did trend on twitter, or was used even ten times, but that doesn’t matter. If you just quit on things because nobody else cares then you wouldn’t […]

It’s time to reveal which two college basketball teams have gone the longest without losing on the same day. It is an absurd piece of trivia, but among the many absurd facts that will be offered by various basketball people over the next six months, it is easily the most interesting. It’s rare to see […]

Preseason ratings were posted over the weekend. Here’s a reminder as to what goes into them… The components and weighting are based on a regression of the past nine seasons. The system is, by 2015 standards, pretty simple. It doesn’t try to project playing time for individual players. It doesn’t know about transfers, and all […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. The thing the offense has the least control over is whether its 2-point shot is blocked. The offense has […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. We’ve previously talked about non-steal turnovers in this series, in which the offense had 59% influence. Forcing steals is […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. Thad Matta’s teams do a lot of things well but the thing his teams have done best is not […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. In the last post, I looked at the “battlefield” of college basketball which was inside the 3-point arc. It’s […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. Pat Benatar’s Love Is a Battlefield found itself in the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 in December of […]

This is part of a series of posts examining whether offense or defense has more control of various aspects of a typical college basketball game. The introduction is here. A description of the methodology is here. There are still statistics that have yet to be regularly cultivated from a basic stat sheet. Partitioning turnovers into […]