Stomp The Lunatic

It is a horrible job to be that poor soul that has to pull aside one of the head coaches at halftime and interview one of the coaches.

In the BYU – Ole Miss game, the reporter started off with a great question.  One of BYU’s stars, Kyle Collinsworth, left the court late in the first question favoring the knee he had ACL surgery on last year.   BYU’s Dave Rose answered well also – letting everyone know that Collinsworth looked like he would be alright and play in the second half.

Then, the low.  The reported asked Rose what type of adjustments they were going to make in the second half.   For those not watching, BYU is currently leading at halftime, 49-32.   When you are up 17 points, you likely don’t make a lot of adjustments.  I even think I heard a little chuckle from Rose as he composed himself to answer.  He answered the stupid question nicely – but I am sure if he wasn’t being so nice, he could have easily answered – “In all my years of coaching, I have learned one thing.   When you are winning by 17 points at halftime, you don’t make adjustments – you keep attacking with the game plan that has gotten you a huge lead!”

Great first half by the Cougars – hopefully, Collinsworth really is OK.  Would love to see this team at full strength keep knocking down shots from everywhere.

That’s right, the only team entering the tournament with a losing record managed to get to .500 tonight, as they jumped out to an early lead on Manhattan, and held on through the second half for a 74-64 victory!!!!!

Tourney basketball is here – the Madness has officially begun – and it starts with an upset!  The beauty of the dance – all you need is an invitation, then anything can happen.

Don’t believe that they stand much of a chance against Kentucky, but it is still a big deal for Hampton to have won an NCAA Tournament game!

So, I have already demonstrated that I can’t seed teams through my bracketology – although to be fair, in just studying resumes over a Sunday afternoon, I managed to do better than the Yahoo and Sports Illustrated bracketologists.  And the CBS bracketologist and I were the only ones able to get 67 of the 68 teams (although apparently that is because I was the only person crazy enough to think that UCLA belonged in the pool).

But that madness isn’t enough for the Lunatic.  I have gotten quite a complex caused by the fact that all of you stomp me every year.   And so in a sad attempt to demonstrate that I really do know something about college basketball, I handicap all 67 of the games (assuming I don’t run out of time – 32 games in 2 days is tough).

To get a jump on things, I have predicted the First Four games – picking BYU to win and Hampton to cover the spread on Tuesday, and picking North Florida and Dayton (seriously, the Flyers are playing on their home court) to win on Wednesday.   And thus, fans from Ole Miss, Manhattan, Robert Morris and Boise State have now cheered out – we have a fighting chance now that the Lunatic has picked against us!

Enjoy the handicapping!!!!!!

At this point, you now should have most of everything that you might need to make your picks.

First – most importantly, you can enter your picks – just register and then click on the link to enter.  Reminder that I don’t maintain the database from year to year – you will have to register again, even if you have been doing the pool for years.  By the way, I love the fact that we have 7 entries already – and I haven’t even sent out the rules email.  You all know the drill – you don’t need my emails….

Second – for those of you who are crazy statistical modelers like myself, the data is updated to include Sunday’s five games.  Whether you want RPI, Adjusted Scoring Margin, or simply want to see what teams played each other, all the games are there in the Schedule file.

Third – for those of you who don’t want to do all that work, I have placed the cheat sheet out there – I went for substance – not style.   Not the prettiest web-page ever, but on that web-page, you can see side by side each game – with generic information (records, adjusted scoring margin, RPI, top wins, bad losses, etc.)

Of course, I have not started my Handicapping page – but I do hope to do that as well.  So for those of you waiting to see who I pick against the spread so you can pick the other team, you will have to wait a few days.

So – other than picking contrarian to the Lunatic (which probably is a good strategy), you should have lots of information at your fingertips to do your “analysis”.

Good luck to everyone!!

The Brackets have been released – and 68 NCAA teams have their invitation to the big dance.   And that means we are ready to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will send out the traditional rules email sometime tonight – but you don’t need to wait for me.   The site is ready for you to enter your picks into the Stomp the Lunatic contest!!!

There will be plenty more from me – but after all the watching of basketball today (as well as getting the schedules and bracketology ready), I am going to take a short break – the kids are watching Big Hero 6 – seems like a nice relaxing change from trying to type as fast as CBS displays the names of the teams.

Good luck to everyone in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!!!!!

How awesome – only 15 minutes away from the Bracket being released.  And as always, in last second fashion – with no talented knowledge whatsoever, the Lunatic has posted his version of Bracketology.

Those who follow the Lunatic know that while I love reading the Bracketology pages from those experts like Jerry Palm from CBS and Joe Lunardi from ESPN.  But then I hate how afterwards, they talk about how great a job they did by picking 67 of the 68 teams.  It is a relatively straight-forward sorting exercise.

This year will be a true test of that – since I have not been following as much as I normally do – yet, I can still pick the best 6-7 teams from the Big 10, the best 6-7 teams from the ACC, the best 6-7 teams from the Big 12 (and so on) and guess what teams are going to make it.  I have more fear that I have one wrong – since I picked RPI 60 Indiana and RPI 49 UCLA over RPI 34 Temple.  But if you start looking at the rest of the numbers, it looks like Indiana and UCLA are better teams…..

Anyways, if you want to see how badly I did – I have posted my picks for everyone to see and criticize.

The schedule data is now available on the links – notice “2015 Schedule” in the Research links.  This data is up to date through all games this season.   I will at some point update the final 5 Sunday games (championships for Atlantic 10, SEC, Sun Belt, American and Big 10) after the brackets have been announced and the most important parts of the site are ready for use.

Obviously, take the data the traditional Lunatic disclaimers.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks against RPI data – but there are a lot of games, and so I will not make the claim that I have checked every piece of the dataset.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tradition, 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 just randomly pick late Wednesday evening.

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.   You will notice that the data has up-to-date RPI rankings, conference standings, and then each team’s schedule and results for the season.

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!!!!

And not just any Pi Day – it is the centennial Pi Day, since it is 3/14/15.   I will add some credit to my friend Mikel Pulins, who reminded me that not only is it the centennial Pi Day, but at 9:26 am (at 53 seconds), we can honor Pi Day to the 10th digit!!!!!!

For those who feel bad of missing this important moment in time, NPR points out that you can do it again this evening at 9:26 pm at 53 seconds).  If you want to be totally nerdy, you can celebrate it for two seconds – the 11th digit is 5 – so you can round up to 54 seconds.  Just think about that while you are enjoying the Big East, MAC, Big Sky, or Southland championships tonight.    (Or whatever more normal thing that you might be doing this evening).

Hope everyone enjoys Pi Day!!!!!   I know that I will have a fantastic one enjoying tons of college basketball!!!!!!   Might even have to see if I can get some actual pie to celebrate.

The site is ready for another year of madness!   The Lunatic is ready to come out and try to prove his amazing amount of basketball knowledge – but we all know better – he is CRAZY!!!!!

Right now, the site is ready for people to register (although there probably isn’t any real value in doing that until next week).   Once the Selection Committee announces the Field of 68, I will enter them into the database – and we will be ready to start!!!!

So, watch the Conference Championships, start reading about the teams on the bubble, and do whatever analytics you typically do – whether that be build a model or make sure you know which team’s mascot you are rooting for.    And hopefully everyone will be ready to STOMP THE LUNATIC!!!!!