Explaining the game-to-game variation in a team’s performance is difficult. Sometimes, a team’s star player just plays well, or the opposing team plays more poorly than usual, or a team avoids foul trouble, or most of the dozen or so 50/50 calls go a particular team’s way. These explanations are uninteresting and not satisfactory, though, […]

The round of 32 was a bad scenario for the victorious teams from the East Region. While other regions were going up in flames to varying degrees, giving remaining favorites Florida, Louisville, and Ohio State a decent boost to their title chances, the East has gone to form. Previous odds that built in the potential […]

The order of the top six favorites remains the same, but there are changes after that due to the stunning upset of Georgetown by Crazy Go Nuts University. The team that should be least appreciative of this result is Kansas because it’s now more likely they must go through Florida to get to Atlanta, and […]

To kill some time this morning, I decided to create a nine-team conference where the top four teams where exactly equal, roughly equivalent to New Mexico. They had a 50/50 chance of beating each other head-to-head. I made the other five teams somewhat worse, mimicking the bottom five teams of the Mountain West, and then […]

We begin this piece with an e-mail… Hey Mr. Pomeroy, I’m a big fan of the site and it’s especially a joy to use at this time of the year. I mostly wanted to vent my frustration about analysts and the way they talk about team 3-point defense. They’ve caught on about a lot of […]

Florida is 0-6 in games decided by single-digits. A big deal is made of this. A big deal is not made of Indiana going an unimpressive 7-5 in such games, or Louisville going 6-5. Louisville’s record even includes a five-overtime game in which they screwed up the end-game situation six separate times, but that hasn’t […]

We’ve heard that a lot from all of the experts all season. Just three days ago, this column promised us there was massive parity in the game, with quotes from the top coaches. Jim Boeheim says there would be ten different winners if we played the tourney ten times! So which wacky teams did the […]

What follows is the master log5 for the 68-team field. For the noobs, here’s the deal: – The calculations below represent the chance of each team advancing to a specific round based on the log5 formula and each team’s pythagorean rating. Unfamiliar with log5? Here’s more than you want to know. – This does not […]

I’ll update this as more tournaments are decided but I wanted to reprise my post from three years ago defensing the honor of conference tournaments. You can go to that link for the explanation, but the case boils down to the idea that the regular season, too, is an imperfect way to determine the best […]

Here’s a viewer’s guide to the Mountain West title game between New Mexico and UNLV which tips off shortly after 6 PM ET on CBS. Both teams rely on a very good defense (UNLV 9th overall, New Mexico 13th) which defends the paint well. And both defenses carry less-than-stellar offenses. In UNLV’s case the offense […]