This is a weekly digest documenting the biggest upsets, craziest comebacks, and Alan Williams news of the past seven days. Biggest upsets 3. Navy over Army (9%), Saturday. Heading into this one, Army was 8-3 with an outside shot of capturing the all-important Patriot League one-seed. (The top seed in the PL tourney gets to […]

Sometimes I think of home-site advantage as the simplest contribution of analytics. I don’t know when home-site advantage was first discovered or how it was estimated, but at some point, somebody had to do it and it was a major contribution to those interested in sports. I can’t imagine it took very long for people […]

This is a weekly digest documenting the biggest upsets, craziest comebacks, and Alan Williams news of the past seven days. Biggest Upsets 3. East Carolina over UAB (13%), Saturday. I don’t think I’ve said a word about Conference USA since we had to do the preseason poll for them again. One surprise has been ECU, […]

When you look at average possession length (APL) data, the thing that stands out is that slow defenses tend to be very good. Not slow in terms of the player’s speed, but slow in terms of forcing opponents to take a long time with the basketball. Syracuse, Florida, and Arizona currently have the three slowest […]

Last Friday, I commented on the plight of Longwood’s Jeff Havenstein. He started in Longwood’s win over Charleston Southern, but played just two minutes. These kinds of occurrences aren’t all that unusual, but they often involve some sort of tragedy, like a serious injury. In Havenstein’s case, it was a coaches decision. That got me […]

This is a weekly digest documenting the biggest upsets, craziest comebacks, and Alan Williams news of the past seven days. Biggest upsets 3. Longwood over Charleston Southern (8%), Saturday. Hey look, real upsets are back this week. No more do I have to pretend that events predicted to occur more than 10% of the time […]

Overtime games can produce strange results. On January 15, Mississippi beat LSU by 14 after going to an extra period when the Tigers’ Anthony Hickey missed a 15-foot shot at the end of regulation. If Hickey makes the shot, one might view LSU as two points better than the Rebels on that night. Instead, we […]

This is a weekly digest documenting the biggest upsets, craziest comebacks, and Alan Williams news of the past seven days. Biggest upsets 3. Northwestern (12%) over Indiana, Saturday. The Wildcats have won three of their last four, but the least-likely of those was easily this win at Assembly Hall. While many of the newer Big […]

I’ve received a few e-mails about Creighton’s jump in the rankings after its win over Villanova. The following is representative of them. Ken: How could Creighton jump from 13 to 2 with a win over Villanova?  How could there be that much volatility in your program this deep in the season to create that type […]

Welcome to Play-by-Play Theater, the semi-regular very irregular feature where I mine play-by-play data from the past four-plus seasons to discover the wacky things that happen in darkest corners of the college basketball schedule. On Monday night, Creighton made its first nine three-point attempts against Villanova. Naturally, the reaction across social media and in more […]