I actually love how Championship Week starts and builds. Monday and Tuesday in some sense are the calm before the storm. Other than the ACC having their first round on Tuesday, these days are dedicated to the mid-major conferences. Seven of these conferences will crown their champion over the next two days, which should lead to some exciting basketball. We also start to get an idea on if there might be any bid stealers.

For bracketologists or insane people like myself, these are great days to start to get your hands around what to watch for before the major conference championships begin. Thus, the calm before the storm.

However, if you want to watch some fun college basketball games, Monday and Tuesday are still great days. Many of these teams have seniors who are playing for one last chance to get to the biggest stage in March and compete for a national championship. They know that if they play well today, they get to extend their college career for at least one more game. And that emotion and all-out effort tends to lead to some magical events happening on the court.

If you are looking for a bid thief and probably the best chance to look at a team that could go far in the tournament, you have to stay up late to watch the West Coast Conference semi-finals. Gonzaga plays St. Mary’s at 9 pm EST, and BYU plays Pepperdine at midnight EST. Gonzaga is obviously the number one team in the country – so you can get a sneak peak at them. BYU is in the top 20 of the NET rankings, and St. Mary’s is in the top 65 – so while everyone expects Gonzaga to keep winning, they will have some decent opponents. And obviously, if St. Mary’s or Pepperdine shocks the world over the next couple of days, they will shrink the at-large bubble.

The rest of the conferences look like they will be playing their championships knowing that this is their only way to the dance. Of the remaining 6 conferences, only 2 had teams in the top 80 of the NET rankings (Horizon had Wright State at 72nd and Southern had Furman at 75th at the time of writing this). Wright State was a co-champ of the Horizon at 16-4 with Cleveland State, but they did not survive the quarterfinals when they lost by 2 to Milwaukee. Furman was strangely the 3rd seed in the Southern – and also fell in their quarterfinals to an overtime loss to VMI. Neither Wright State or Furman had a quad 1 win and both lost early in their conference tournament. So, neither likely is going to get an at-large spot for the bubble to shrink.

But the remaining teams still are competing for a championship. And that always brings out the best in teams.

So if you are watching basketball tonight. Tune in to one of the conference finals at 7 pm EST.

The Southern Conference has UNC-Greensboro trying to defend their regular season championship against Mercer. Meanwhile, the Sun Belt Conference has Georgia State, the best team from their East division playing against Appalachian State.

You also have Cleveland State trying to defend their regular season co-championship in the Horizon semi-finals and South Dakota State trying to defend their title in the Summit semi-finals.

Of course, on Tuesday, you can also tune in to see if Duke is going to make one last run for the dance. But I would spend some time and enjoy the smaller conferences fight for their tickets to the dance. The Colonial, Horizon, Summit, Northeast, and West Coast Conferences all will have their championship Tuesday night. Maybe you find your bracket buster team – that 13 or 14 seed who comes out of nowhere. Those types of teams are going to start to introduce themselves to the world tonight and tomorrow – so if you have some time on TV and you are craving basketball, take the opportunity to watch them earn their tickets to the dance.

Well, it is ready through Saturday’s March 6th games!   For the most part, the file is the same as normal.   I have continued with the approach that conference tournament game are counted as conference games instead of post-season games.  Since I had the new NET ranking pulled from the NCAA website and added to the standings, I added a couple other things. In the standings file, the NCAA NET page lists out a team record for the 4 quads, so I copied those into the Standings page. And because I had the rules and the NET ranking, I merged it onto the Schedule page in a way that you can see the NET ranking for each opponent, and what quad that game is. I did not validate that matched the NCAA site, so take the data for what it is…….

The NCAA Archive site doesn’t appear to be loading the PDFs that I had been downloading – they keep moving more and more contact to their Statistics webpage. But why not simply use that as an excuse to give you more access to the data I find. The 2021 NET Nitty Gritty link actually goes to the NCAA Statistics website – it gives you an option to download the Nitty Gritty as a PDF. If you click on one of the team’s names, it takes you to their schedule, and if you click on their NET Ranking on the schedule page, it will give you a team sheet that is similar to what they provide in the PDF. The only thing I don’t like about that is it doesn’t have all the other computer scores (the old PDF used to have KenPom and Sagarin scores for example on their team sheets). It also isn’t in one large document, which is annoying. If I find a better option, I will add information as we go……

But that does have the benefit that there is now only one file to update instead of 3. No promises that I will update the Schedule Excel file every day, but wanted it to be available to everyone as early as possible. I will update as I have time throughout the week – the spreadsheet has a page that says when it is last updated.

Obviously, remember the traditional Lunatic disclaimers.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks that the records from the schedule I have match the official NCAA site – but there are thousands of games, and so I will not make the claim that I have checked every piece of the dataset.  To be honest, I simply check to make sure the records match – I figure if I can get lucky enough that all 347 teams have the correct records, the rest of the data is probably right. 

That being said, one really interesting thing that this file does create is a side-by-side comparison of the old RPI calculation (which my tool still calculates – as does some other webpages) vs. the new NET model that the Selection Committee is using to rank games into the quadrants.  I do think that the NET score is giving the Selection Committee a better ranking. For example, Illinois right now would be 17th in the RPI instead of 4th in the NET. And Iowa would be at 39th in the RPI instead of 6th. I am sure that it could be even better – KenPom has Colgate as the 88th ranked team instead of 8th for the NET (or 7th for the RPI). But glad that the NCAA is moving a step forward….

For those of you who are not familiar with this tradition of me doing insane data pulls to grab all this great college basketball data, I will give you some more details.

As many of you know, one of my insane features is that I try to provide people with data about the teams in case they want to do research on the teams. Each year, we get several people who have demonstrated the power of statistics by building models in order to predict the games. Some of them have been extremely successful with this – especially Bill Kahn with his Bradley-Terry models, showing that even something extremely unpredictable as sports can be forecasted through good statistical techniques. But the part of this that has made me happy – and why I do this – is because a few people who were not statisticians but were taking a stats training course at work used this data for their class project and ended up having some success – including our 2006 champion, David Shaddick.

So, since that point, I decided to provide the scores to everyone in an attempt to provide people as much of a chance to try to leverage data to make their decisions. I realize that most of you will probably spend three to five minutes just looking at the teams and figuring who will do best – I probably don’t need a model to decide that the number 1 seeds will beat the 16 seeds… In fact, I typically spend so much effort maintaining the site that I pick Purdue to go far and just randomly pick the other games late Wednesday evening.  So, I am not really sure what I am going to do this year with my Boilers looking like they might not be dancing.

However, if I can give people a chance to try to learn something about statistics in a very fun environment, it is well worth the effort.

If you notice something terribly wrong, let me know – no promises I have time to fix it, but at least everyone will know.

Enjoy the data!!!!

There were always lots of complaints about the RPI score, and so the NCAA created the NET. It was supposed to be a better assessment and ranking tool. And while the Selection Committee doesn’t always follow the score, it does pay attention to it. It is what creates the Quad system the committee uses to rank schedules.

Traditionally, the top 30 or so teams (whether it be RPI or NET) make the tournament. The Committee might disagree if the 10th team in the computer rankings is better than the 14th team – but they are still typically part of the 36 best at large teams in the country.

So, the Patriot league has created the test case. Because of the pandemic, most of their teams cancelled their non-conference games, and they created a very strange round robin by divisions. And thus, we have the story of Colgate. The Raiders have had a good season, in a strange way. They ended their season 11-1 and have won their first round game in the Patriot Conference tournament. But this is relevant because at the moment, Colgate is 8th in the NET standings.

That’s right – the Colgate Raiders are in the top 10 teams in the country according to the NCAA NET ranking. When we look closer, here is what Colgate’s season has been:

• They went 3-1 against Army, losing by 2 and winning the others by at least 9 points
• They went 5-0 against Boston University, winning all the games by at least 7 points
• They went 4-0 against Holy Cross, winning all the games by at least 9 points (although one did need overtime before they took control)

That’s right, the 8th place team in the country has only played 3 teams – Army, Boston University, and Holy Cross.

We all know that Colgate is probably not the 8th best team in the country. Strangely, they didn’t even claim the conference regular season title – Navy somehow played one more game against their pairings and went 12-1. I have to imagine if Colgate loses to Bucknell on Wednesday in the Patriot semifinals or in the Patriot finals on Selection Sunday against the winner of the Army vs Loyola MD semifinal, they will probably be out of the dance. But if Colgate beats Bucknell on Wednesday, they will likely enter Selection Sunday in the top 10 of the NET.

If they lose, they would likely be the highest ranked team in the computer ranking to ever miss the tournament. Even if they do win, I can’t imagine they would get a ranking above one of the 37 at-large teams. Regardless of what happens, it is a tough situation for all. You clearly don’t get an invite to the dance by only playing 4-5 teams in the Patriot conference. But would there be outrage if a minor conference team made it into the top 10 team in the ranking the NCAA uses doesn’t get an at-large bid if they lose in their conference championship game.

I hope Colgate wins their last two games. Make this a non-issue – win your conference championship so you deserve your ticket to the dance. But it certainly creates some oddities around how important the committee considers their computer ranking.

As a Boilermaker, I obviously enjoy following the Big 10 conference. And while I always delight in watching the Hoosiers struggle, I was reminded of something that I wrote in the blog 4 years ago.

January and February 2017 were rough for my team’s rival. Things were going well – the Hoosiers were the #16 team in the country at 10-2. Indiana had been to the Sweet 16 in 3 of the last 5 years, and looked like they might do it again. Coach Tom Crean had taken over a program that was picking up the pieces from the NCAA violations caused by Kelvin Sampson’s recruiting practices.

Then OG Anunoby got injured, and the Hoosiers started to struggle without their star player. They finished with a 7-11 record in conference and ended up going to the NIT. The Athletic Director refused to host the NIT game against Georgia Tech, citing the concern that it would “devalue” the Hoosier’s famous Assembly Hall. And of course, they then fired Tom Crean.

I noted that there were only 8 programs in the country that had made it to as many Sweet 16s over the 5 years that Tom Crean did. And that it wasn’t his fault that they dealt with injuries. But Indiana had the expectation of national championships, and so Tom Crean was out, and up-and-coming Archie Miller was going to be the new savior.

Fast forward 4 years – and here is what Archie Miller has delivered to the school that should always be playing for national championships. The Hoosiers missed both the NCAA and NIT in 2018. In 2019, the Hoosiers at least made it to the NIT – they even got to the quarterfinals of the NIT. It looked like the Hoosiers might finally sneak their way back into the NCAAs in 2020 – as they were projected to be a 10 seed by many of the media bracketologists before the tournament was cancelled. And today, the Hoosiers fell to 12-14 after losing by 9 points to Purdue – making Miller now 0-7 against the rival Boilermakers.

All in all, Miller is 67-57 (in Crean’s last 4 seasons at Indiana, they were 82-53….), and looks like he will go another year without playing an NCAA Touranment game. The only season that the Hoosiers were able to get to 50% in conference was his first season when they went 9-9.

Programs and fan bases get crazy desiring championships. Who doesn’t want to win it all. But it is important to remember when you have a good thing going. When Tom Crean started at Indiana, they were left for dead with limited scholarships and post-season bans – and Crean had made Hoosier basketball relevant again. That wasn’t enough. Well, thanks to that not being enough, Indiana basketball has not been relevant for the last 4 years.

It is a shame, because as much as I love watching Indiana struggle, I know the history behind the Indiana Hoosiers’ basketball team. And there are very few places that love college basketball more than the fans at Assembly Hall in Bloomington. I am sure that at some point, winning basketball will resume at Indiana – but it might take some time. In the search for greener pastures, they didn’t realize they already had one of the best around.

It must be March!!!!  Well, at least I think it is – the calendar says it is.  But after a year of missing the madness of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, some things just don’t feel right.  Sure – there are the normal hints.  For example, the Ohio Valley Conference started off Championship Week by having their final – where Morehead State crushed regular season champion Belmont by 15 to claim the OVC bid to the dance.  So, you already have your traditional upsets happening in the mid-major conferences.  But then there is this.

• Belmont normally would be guaranteed a chance in the NIT – but not this year with the NCAA’s scaled back 16 team NIT.
• Morehead State wasn’t the first team to claim a bid – Liberty claimed the Atlantic Sun’s bid even though the final isn’t until tomorrow.  That’s because their opponent, North Alabama, is still transitioning to Division I and ineligible for the NCAA Tournament.
• The Ivy League hasn’t played all season, creating an extra at large spot for the dance.
• Duke played their traditional rivalry tonight – losing by 18 points to North Carolina, and falling to 11-11 and likely out of the tournament without winning the ACC tournament next weekend.
• Duke is still better off than Kentucky, who are 9-15 for the season despite their victory this afternoon.
• And Michigan State sits at 14-11 possibly needing to beat #2 Michigan to avoid missing the dance with Duke and Kentucky.  They at least have a few more chances in the Big 10 tourney to stay on the right side of the bubble.

So, it is already shaping up to be a wild March.  Possibly having an NCAA Tournament without Duke and Kentucky.  Contingency plans including replacement teams and the first four games not starting until Thursday, March 18th.  The entire tournament being played in the state of Indiana.  There are lots of things that don’t feel just right.  But at least for now, there is one thing that does feel right.  The NCAA is playing college basketball games and plans to announce the 68 teams that will be playing in the NCAA Tournament in just a week.  And so that can only mean one thing – IT MUST BE MARCH!!!!!!!!!!

And if it is March, it can only mean one more thing – it must be time to STOMP THE LUNATIC!!!!!!!

That’s right – the Lunatic is back for another month of sleep deprivation, looking through stat sheets in a foolish attempt to show he can predict college basketball games.  And I am sure that this will end in the way it always ends, in a horrible beating.  We all know better – he is no real threat – his kids will likely have better picks by picking schools that their grandparents attended.  But while we all know this will end in a thorough stomping, we will all get to enjoy the entertaining ranting and raving of our favorite sleep-deprived lunatic!!!

So, without any more delays, the 2021 Stomp the Lunatic contest is officially announced!!!!!!!

The most important part is ready – the website is up and ready to go for another year of bracket picks.   As always, the website will have all of the pages that make the Stomp the Lunatic great – whether it be NCAA results so the statisticians can build predictive models, poorly done bracketology that will show the Lunatic is simply a crazy basketball fan, cheat sheets once the brackets are released for those of us who don’t want to do hours of analysis, and of course, everyone’s favorite rants about the games.  

For now, you can go to the site to see the previous standings or read all the crazy blogs and ramblings.  I am sure that I will be ranting all week as I try to set up my pointless bracketology page – there will be tons of great Conference Tournament games to watch. Also, feel free to go on the User Blog page and put your own opinions out there (or simply cheer on your favorite team). 

Once the committee has announced the 68 teams next Sunday (March 14^th), I will update the site to have the entry form. If you don’t remember the rules (or this email has been forwarded to you), there is a link on the site. As we have done in previous years, we will not pick the 4 play-in games. But with all the COVID protocols, the tournament is starting late.  So, all entries are needed by Friday, March 19th by the time the first games start (typically Noon).

So, do your research, get ready for the Madness to begin, and good luck to everyone in STOMPING THE LUNATIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!

March is here!!!! Conference tournaments have begun!!!! We have tons of chaos, NCAA contingency plans, the unenviable task in front of the Selection Committee of choosing a 68 team field for a tournament where some teams didn’t play any non-conference games.

I have a busy weekend ahead of me. How does the Stomp the Lunatic contest create contingency plans to react to the NCAA contingencies. How does the Stomp the Lunatic contest create contingency plans to react to unforeseen events. How does the Lunatic pull all the data for his normal schedule analyses? I know all the statisticians / data scientists out there are looking forward to getting their hands on the game data.

So much to do – but it is March, and we currently have college basketball. And if there is college basketball in March, you can be assured that your favorite sleep-deprived Crazed Lunatic is lurking. He needs to be stomped!!!!!

The NCAA has announced some of their contingency plans for the NCAA Tournament. They have really considered a lot of things to attempt to have a full tournament – here is a summary based on my understanding of their release:

The NCAA basketball committee is going to do their best to enter the tournament with a full 68 team field. They plan to follow certain procedures once they have announced the initial bracket on Sunday, March 14th.

• Once brackets are released, teams will not be reseeded and the structure of the bracket will not change.
• The deadline for replacing a team that can not play due to coronavirus protocols is Tuesday, March 16th at 6 pm EST
• Once the tournament has begun, no team will replace another that has a COVID-19 issue. Its opponent would simply advance to the next round via the no-contest rule
• If a team can not participate and is identified before the deadline, a replacement team will take their place in the bracket.
• For any single-bid conference, the league may replace its automatic qualifier if it is unable to participate with the league’s preapproved contingency replacement team
• The first four teams that do not receive an at-large bid will be ranked from 1-4 and will be taken from that list in that order to replace any team from a multiple-bid conference that can not participate
• If those first four teams do not get used to replace a team, they will remain the #1 seeds in the NIT that starts on March 17th.

If this ends up being the case, it should be easy to handle for the Lunatic contest. If the team gets replaced, it will look exactly like what happens when we pick one the First Four teams. You are basically picking the team that was in that seed of the bracket to win – regardless of who it is. If the team can not participate after the tournament starts, since their opponent will advance in the bracket, we will treat it as if they won the game.

I think this all looks like good news – because it looks like the NCAA is really committed to having a basketball tournament. And having college basketball in March is a good thing. I hope all the protocols they have in place will keep the players safe, and that they have an awesome tournament!!!!

It looks like I have managed to update all the links in the table to the new server. So at this point, you should be able to go back to previous standings and bring back happy memories about the year that you finished in the top 10.

Please do not use the register or login links. While they look like the old pages, the database has not been updated yet. And so, the link when you submit it will go to a table that does not exist. I will hopefully have this fixed by the end of this weekend – along with the site being tested to ensure all the entry forms work.

Well, it is 2021. We are still dealing with a major pandemic. But it does look like we are going to try to have a basketball tournament.

Some of you might have noticed, but this has been a really rough year for my website. In late March, I was told that my hosting option was no longer available, and so I needed to switch to a different option. But the option was supposed to have more functionality, so it was supposed to be a big win. So, since I really didn’t have a choice, I updated my hosting options.

So, the site updates, and it says everything was successfully setup. And I thought great – that is done.

A little later, Charlie and I decided that we would recreate the 2020 NCAA Tournament by playing each game through our own HORSE tournament. I would take the predicted bracket from the Bracket Matrix website, Charlie would pick what team he wanted to be, and we would play the game. We even put in some rules to try to protect top ranked teams by giving the underdog a letter or two to start.

That still didn’t save #1 Dayton from losing to #16 Winthrop or #2 Villanova from losing to #15 Northern Kentucky. #11 Richmond was making a run from the play-in game to the Round of 32. It even had a horrible moment for me when Charlie chose #7 Virginia over #10 Indiana. And with me down S to H, I went on a crazy streak and led the Hoosiers to a come from behind victory. You can not begin to understand the pain that put me in.

So, I decided that I would edit the blog with our imaginary 2020 NCAA Championship. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t log in to the Word Press page. I just tried to see what the blog looked like, and got a connection error. My whole webpage was no longer assessible. After a couple of hours of figuring out what happened, I gave up. I just couldn’t think any more about how there was no tournament and now there was no blog.

In a way, maybe it was all for the best. Could you imagine my horror if this had happened for real during the middle of the Sweet 16? It also was probably for the best if anyone was still following the imaginary tournament, because Charlie and I both lost interest somewhere in the middle of the Round of 32.

With the possibility that we might actually have a NCAA Championship this year, I realized that if I wanted to do the tournament, I have to fix this. And while it has taken most of the evening, I finally figured out the cause (I think). The hosting service change also literally moved the site to a new server – which made all my connections to my databases and my configuration files for my Word Press pages invalid. All the data was there, but none of the scripts was pointing to it.

I still have a long way to go – but it looks like I have at least restored the blog. I believe that I can fix the rest of the site, but it won’t be tonight.

I apologize that you can’t see the past standings. It looks like I still have close to a hundred files that I have to edit – it is a simple edit, but still have to go through all the scripts to make it. But the good news is as far as I can tell, all the data still exists – which also means that I should be able to set up the site to support the 2021 tournament – assuming the NCAA decides to have one.

I still need to think through rule additions – it would be reckless to run the tournament, and then watch as games get cancelled without no rules around it. Who would have ever thought that you would need to have that type of contingency. But lets keep hope alive. At the moment, it looks like we will have basketball in March. And if I can get my act together over the next few weekends, the Lunatic will be around as well.