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 […]

(Note: Thanks to all that made me aware of this story.) Rick Majerus has had a colorful career. He’s done some amazing things on the floor, most notably leading a WAC team to the NCAA title game in 1998. He’s done some amazing things off the floor, which include a variety of interesting motivational tactics, […]

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 […]

Saturday night, somebody noticed that Saint Louis had a horrible defensive 3P%. The first effects of the post-Rick Majerus era, right? Not really. It’s because the defense has little control over its opponents’ 3P%. As an illustration, let’s look at the best and worst “three-point defenses” in previous seasons on December 4th, and examine how […]

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 […]

Continuing the discussion from yesterday, let’s look at more scatterplots! We’ve looked exclusively at defense so far and in order to get a better understanding of how defense works, we need to look at both sides of the ball. Because clearly the offense has some control over what happens on each possession as well. To […]

[Note: the graphs originally posted Friday were slightly in error. The corrected data has been posted and does not change the conclusions drawn. My apologies for the mistake.] The data from last Friday’s post has got me wondering about a lot of things and I hope it did the same for you. Mainly, how does […]

Welcome to the second of five installments where I run 10,000 simulations of each conference’s schedule to get a sense for which teams have a viable shot at winning their conference’s regular-season title. For those late to the party, see yesterday’s post, where we learned not to hand over the Big West’s NIT auto-bid to […]

Let’s conclude the look at November’s eight-team tournaments with the two that start on Thursday, providing alternative programming for football. The 76 Classic gives you three chances to judge whether Saint Louis is a legitimate at-large threat. However, unless you like a slow-tempo, defensive-minded team, you will want to keep your viewing options open while […]