LATEST STORIES FROM KENPOM.COM
How much is air worth?
Wyoming hosts San Diego State tonight (if the Aztecs make it to Laramie) and it got me to wondering about the importance of altitude. The Aztecs won at New Mexico last week, and while observers were impressed with the win in the Lobos’ building, nobody really mentioned that they had to overcome the thin air of Albuquerque (elevation 5300 feet) as well. There are a few studies...
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21 days ago
Discuss
The untrained eye: New Mexico vs. UNLV
UNLV beat New Mexico 80-63 in a 64-possession game Saturday night. I was there. This is was I saw.
Mike Moser is great offensive rebounder considering his shot selection.
I don’t think there’s a useful position descriptor for UNLV’s Mike Moser. Whatever you want to call him, he was a busy man on Saturday night, taking 16 shots, grabbing 13 boards and recording...
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22 days ago
The 2012 kPOY watch list
It’s time to release the first leaderboard of the nation’s premier statistical individual award. For those new to these parts, the kenpom.com Player of the Year is based solely on statistical data. It’s safe to say that “player of the year” means different things to different people. But I’ve tried to define in the way it’s assumed to be defined...
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24 days ago
The six-game tournament?
The Ivy League likes to fancy its regular season as the “14-game tournament” because it doesn’t have an actual tournament and thus its 14-game regular season determines the conference champion. Technically, though, this is a misnomer. The Ivy League regular season is comprised of 56 games. The West Coast Conference has a tournament, but I’ve been wondering if you could call...
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25 days ago
Play-by-Play Theater: consecutive field goals
Welcome back to Play-by-Play Theater, the semi-regular feature where we mine play-by-play data from the past 2+ seasons to discover the wacky things that happen in college hoops. Last week, we beat consecutive fouls to death. Today’s topic was suggested by a reader. Read on…
Mr. Pomeroy,
The host of a local sports call-in show used an example from the Kentucky-Tennessee women...
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27 days ago
Best players by state
After anointing Luke Martinez the best D-I player from North Dakota a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to figure out who had geographical bragging rights in each state and Canadian province on the continent. The table below summarizes that research. I’ve taken the kPOY formula out of the garage for the first time this season and used it to determine “best” in...
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28 days ago
A tribute to Quincy Roberts
The player of the year race is not about which player is most valuable to his team. At least, not exactly. The evaluation includes a subjective component related to the quality of the player’s team. That’s why Grambling’s Quincy Roberts has no shot at getting any fame from his performance this season. I’ll try to do my small part to change that in the next few paragraphs...
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January 13, 2012
A note on recent site updates
There have been some features added to the site over the past 2-3 weeks and I haven’t gone out of my way to publicize them. I think most subscribers have discovered them, but for those that haven’t, I’m providing a description of the improvements here.
InstaGamePrep – Now you can click on upcoming prediction on a team’s schedule (or the game time on future...
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January 12, 2012
Play-by-play theater: Revisiting consecutive fouls
Play-by-play theater is a feature (that I just started) where I use the comprehensive play-by-play archive from the past three seasons to hunt for extreme, and possibly silly, events that have occurred in a college basketball game. And who doesn’t like extreme, and possibly silly, events? I do! I mean, I don’t! I don’t not like extreme, and possibly silly, events!
On Saturday...
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January 10, 2012
On Wisconsin: The FAQ
As you may have noticed, Wisconsin inhabits the #2 spot in my ratings this morning despite having lost five of its first 17 games, including a home game to Iowa and a lopsided loss to Michigan in the past week alone.
This is an issue that is not going to go away this season. Even in a worst-case scenario for the Badgers, they are going to be highly ranked on this web site the rest...
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January 09, 2012
The untrained eye: Washington State vs. Utah
Utah beat Washington State 62-60 in a 60 possession, overtime game on Thursday night. I was there. This is was I saw.
Imperfection denied
Heading into last night, no team in the nation had a better shot at going winless in conference than Utah. Their inaugural Pac-12 contest was a 40-point loss to Colorado, who is (despite now leading the conference at 2-0) probably somewhere between...
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January 06, 2012
Get to know Mike Scott
It’s getting to that time of year where people start talking about All-American teams and player of the year honors. There always seems to be that one guy that is having a large impact but fails to get the proper recognition because his team plays at a very slow pace and thus said player is unable to accumulate the shiny counting stats that other big-time players use to get the...
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January 05, 2012
The untrained eye: Wyoming vs. Utah Valley
Wyoming beat Utah Valley 76-70 in a 59-possession game on Tuesday night. I was there. This is what I saw.
A (Mountain/Great) West showdown
Why was I at the Utah Community Credit Union Center last night? For one, I can now say that I’ve seen a game in a Great West Arena, and I’m guessing you can’t. But also, I felt a little guilty for missing out on a chance to see surprising...
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January 04, 2012
State of the game 2011
Last week, Matt Norlander introduced you all to the idea that scoring is down across college basketball this season. This is something I should have done, but despite several people mentioning to me over recent weeks that they thought scoring was down, I never took the matter seriously enough to investigate. You should read the piece for yourself, but the summary is that it appears...
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January 02, 2012
2012 conference previews, the last
This is the final installment of the Monte Carlo style conference previews. The following six conferences are the most up for grabs. I am writing this while listening to a live stream of the South Carolina State/Hawaii game which tipped at approximately 1:45 AM ET, which is to say I was barely conscious and that is reflected in the quality of this post. Games played on Thursday night...
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December 30, 2011
2012 Conference previews, part 4
The is the penultimate look at the 32 Monte Carlo simulations performed on each Division I conference regular season race. This will leave us with the six remaining conferences where the favorite has less than a 50/50 chance of winning its league. For those needing further explanation of what they are about to read, please consult Monday’s post, then follow up with Tuesday’s...
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December 29, 2011
2012 conference previews, part 3
This is the third installment of the monte-carlo style conference previews where I simulate each conference’s schedule 10,000 times. If you’re unclear as to what’s happening, check out Monday’s post, then look back with fondness on yesterday’s effort. Today, we get into the territory where this analysis predicts that the favorite in each conference is barely...
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December 28, 2011
2012 conference previews, part 2
Welcome to the second of five installments where I run 10,000 simulations of each conference’s schedule to get a sense for which teams have a viable shot at winning their conference’s regular-season title. For those late to the party, see yesterday’s post, where we learned not to hand over the Big West’s NIT auto-bid to Long Beach State just yet. In today’s edition, we...
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December 27, 2011
Conference previews, Monte Carlo style
As done in this space last season, it’s time to look at how conference races might shake out based on what my ratings say to this point. The ground rules are similar to last year: I’ll use the current ratings for each team, simulate the conference season 10,000 times and record which team gets the one-seed for its conference tournament in each case.
Many conferences have already...
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December 26, 2011
A trip to Scobey, Montana
There are places in America where you can’t just go to a college basketball game on a whim. A trip must be planned, time off must be taken from work, and you need to get someone to watch the dog for a few days. No town has Scobey, Montana beaten in this regard. According to Google Maps, it’s a seven hour and 49 minute drive from Scobey to Max Worthington Arena in Bozeman. It...
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December 22, 2011
The untrained eye: Baylor v. BYU
Baylor beat BYU 86-83 on Saturday in the game of the weekend as determined by FanMatch. I was there. Here is what I saw.
Perry Jones is good at playing basketball
The best thing about the game-watching experience was witnessing Perry Jones. Some games, he is more potential than production. In this game, he was productive as well, to the tune of a career-high 28 points. He made two...
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December 19, 2011
A graph of substitution patterns
I have 828 play-by-plays from last season where the final margin was single-digits and for which the play-by-play has clean substitution data. “Clean” meaning that according to the play-by-play there were five players on the floor at all times. (This does not necessarily mean it’s accurate. There are probably some glitches as the curiously low figures immediately...
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December 14, 2011
Murray State and the quest for the Holy Grail
The Murray State Racers went to the FedEx Forum and beat the Memphis Tigers 76-72 yesterday. It was a nice upset, the kind that will give the Racers at-large cachet, but the bigger story now is the rest of Murray State’s schedule. They play in the Ohio Valley Conference, a league that is never terribly strong, but his season it is worse than usual, sitting 27th in my conference...
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December 11, 2011
Moribund Fascination: The Utah Runnin’ Utes
The Utah Utes basketball program currently ranks 12th in the country in all-time wins. They were in the 1998 championship and actually led Kentucky at the half. They play in an arena that hosted arguably the most famous game ever played.
But this season, their basketball team is bad. Not bad in the way that DePaul basketball is bad, but bad in a way that could be truly historic...
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December 09, 2011
A quick note about the influence of preseason ratings
There have been a few questions about the influence of the preseason ratings and how this works itself out of the system early in the season. This is handled the same as last season, the details of which are here. You can just subtract one day from the key dates mentioned in that post. One important update is that subscribers can access raw values for both efficiency and tempo. One...
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December 07, 2011
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