Schedules for the ’05 season are coming out at a breakneck pace now. The ACC and SEC recently finalized their respective conference slates, allowing most of its member teams to release their full schedules this week. One of the interesting aspects of these schedules is the participants in the pre-season exhibition games. As you may […]

Just like with my post on the unlucky teams, I’m going to start this post on the lucky teams with a look at what happened two years ago. The following are the ten luckiest teams – as measured by wins over expected – from 2003 with their actual 2003 conference record in parenthesis. 1 Niagara […]

Before I get to the teams that were the most unlucky last year, I should show if this method is effective or not. Below are the top 10 teams from 2003 who ended up with a worse conference record than they deserved as measured by wins below expected, using the Pythagorean formula mentioned in my […]

Andy Katz recently published his preseason top 50 for the upcoming season. He did a very thorough job and I think captured something close to what the preseason polls will have. Although I am a little puzzled as to why Gonzaga is ranked as low as 22. At any rate, it’s time to start speculating […]

Wake Forest meets New Mexico on December 22nd. This game won’t make any of the pre-season must-see lists but it should. For one thing, most of the marquee games end up on neutral courts. This game will be at The Pit and almost surely will be a sell-out. Wake will get first place votes in […]

(This post is the continuation of previous posts, here and here.) It’s tough doing statistical analysis of hoops. In baseball, the sum of the parts equals the whole. In football, offense and defense are easily separated. In basketball neither is true, which makes life for a stathead difficult. Especially with respect to my recent rant […]

My recent post about the effect of the proposed experimental rules on college basketball ignored something important. It ignored the context under which these changes are being considered. After all, if the balance between offense and defense is tilting towards the offense, then making a few changes to help the defense might be appropriate. The […]

About a month ago the NCAA announced the experimental rules that are to be used in exempt games this season. For the second consecutive season, the 3 point line will be moved back 9 inches to 20′ 6″ and the lane will be widened. (Although the lane won’t be the international-style trapezoid used last season, […]

Perhaps the most talked about aspect of the 2004 National Chamionship game was Georgia Tech’s insistence on forcing a fast pace. It was widely regarded as a mistake for the Jackets to avoid creating a halfcourt game. I’m not exactly sure why, because the Jackets could match the Huskies in both athleticism and depth. But […]

Check it out, Todd Beck has calculated the effectiveness of various college hoops computer rankings. Actually he did this in real-time during the season. Some observations… Looking at the second half results, most systems fall on the correct side of the spread 50-52% of the time. This isn’t very good in the grand scheme of […]