I’m using my ratings and Bill James’ log5 formula to estimate the chances of each participating team advancing to a particular round of its conference tournament.

Patriot League
Location: All games at higher seed
Dates: March 3, 5, 8, 12
Chance of bid thief: zero
Current kPOY: Maurice Watson, Boston U.

Projections:

             Qtrs  Semis  Final  Champ
 1 Boston U.  100   85.6   62.7   43.2
 2 American   100   78.9   57.6   28.1
 3 Holy Cross 100   82.4   32.0   14.0
 4 Bucknell   100   80.3   29.6   10.7
 7 Colgate   86.4   20.0    6.2    1.7
 5 Army       100   19.7    4.6    1.0
 6 Lehigh     100   17.6    4.0    0.7
 9 Lafayette 52.9    9.8    2.5    0.5
 8 Loyola MD 47.1    4.6    0.6    0.1
10 Navy      13.6    1.1    0.1    0.01

The PL tips off the next five weeks of tourney action when Colgate hosts Navy at 7 eastern in opening-round play. I will always remember this Colgate team because after I suggested Zach Lowe write about their innovative three-point attack, head coach Matt Langel tweeted on Twitter that I should think again:

Twitter is awesome but not when a head coach (or anybody else) is publicly questioning your work! But hey, looking back on it, I think it was all a set up from Coach Langel. Colgate is one of three teams to make at least 40% of its threes while taking 40% of its shots from beyond the arc. (The others are Duke and Creighton.) And the Raiders led the PL in offensive efficiency as a result. Yes, they lost 12 games in league play, but none were by more than 11 points, and they scored as many points as they allowed in compiling a 6-12 record. They would be a trendy sleeper pick were it not for the home-court format of this event throwing a wet blanket on any sleeper talk.

Of the nine seasons using this format, the one-seed has won seven with the two-seed winning the other two. This year may break that trend with Holy Cross and Bucknell rating not that much worse than the nearly even one- and two-seeds of Boston U and American, but I wouldn’t count on it. Home-court advantage rules and the top two seeds get a nice probabilistic boost as a result.

You can’t give the national coach of the year to a guy in the Patriot League, because thems the rules, but American has been one of the most surprising teams in the land, and first-year coach Mike Brennan has been the head coach of that team. And if people applied the same standard to Mike Brennan as they do to whomever they give the award, they would see that Mike Brennan has probably done the same thing that guy has. Like, what if Sean Miller was forced to coach American this season? Would the Eagles be better than the 124th-best team in the country? Would their two-point offense have risen to fourth nationally after ranking 309th last season? These are questions you should not ask yourself, because then you would realize that coach of the year is a pretty dumb award.

 

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