After a 3 year stint in Denver’s mostly empty Pepsi Center, the Mountain West tourney returns to its roots on the campus of UNLV. It gets underway today with the fun-filled 8/9 exhibition. The reason the tournament moved from Vegas was partly due to complaints about the home court advantage enjoyed by the Rebels. Once […]

Hi Ken, Here is the list of the 10 teams from last season who were, according to your rankings, the most unlucky, yet still in the top 100 overall (from most to least unlucky last season): Virginia Tech Notre Dame Oregon Drexel Washington State Kansas State Georgia Tech Oklahoma State Butler Xavier Pretty amazing that […]

First things first – HD box for Texas A&M and Texas. The Aggies go 11 of 35 on long 2’s and 13 of 25 on 3’s. Here are the odds for the WCC, which starts Friday: Qtrs Semis Finals Champ 1 Gonzaga 100 100 88.8 63.6 2 Santa Clara 100 100 65.8 24.3 3 St. […]

Here’s the CAA log5 breakdown, as contributed by many. Surging ODU has the best odds out of the 2-seed. Qtrs Semis Finals Champ 2 ODU 100 89.2 67.1 42.5 1 VCU 100 88.8 54.9 27.6 4 Drexel 100 85.4 40.4 17.5 6 GMU 91.3 47.6 14.7 5.6 3 Hofstra 100 51.6 15.1 5.4 7 Towson […]

It’s time to calculate conference tournament odds based on log5 principles. The Valley Ledger has the data for Arch Madness. This is strictly a volunteer effort. If you go through the trouble of computing the odds for a conference tournament, I’ll post them. For those interested, 11.5 is the exponent of choice this season.

One of the big issues in my mailbox is how consistency impacts a team’s prospects in The Tournament. More specifically: how can we expect Southern Illinois (Pythagorean rating: 34, Consistency: 1) and Nevada (Pythag: 63, Consistency: 2), teams that have dominated their respective conferences without piling up big margins of victory, to perform in The […]

Ken, You seem universally skeptical of intra-season “team improvement” stories.  For example, with Duke you give a great alternate explanation of their possible future success.  What do you make of Vanderbilt’s improvement this season?  From a 1-3 start with losses to Wake and Furman to a 7-2 mark in their last 9 SEC games, beating […]

These aren’t the games I would have chosen to run, but I’m at the mercy of SID’s and webmasters from around the country on acquiring the necessary data to create boxes. And unfortunately, the SEC guards substitution data like it’s gold. Penn State/Ohio State It’s not often you see a cellar-dwelling team lose a starter […]

We always talk about “shooting” as one of the four factors, and easily the most important of the four. But it isn’t really shooting, more accurately it’s “making shots.” And in my mind, making shots has two components – shooting and shot selection. You don’t have to be a good shooting team to shoot a […]

Raw plus/minus is nice, and I think interesting, if not statistically significant, for an individual game. But step two is to calculate an on/off rating a la the work Roland Beech does on NBA players. This kind of analysis is problematic for star college players, because many of them play nearly all of their team’s […]