Stomp The Lunatic

So exciting – even if my Boilers did lose by 4 points to Michigan State.   I have posted by bracketology page, we will see how I do.

I have a feeling that I am going to do poorly this year – but to be honest, I think all the bracketologists will be wrong this year.

There is so much disagreement amongst the commentators on the bubble teams.   Do you value regular season championships for the small conferences (Akron, San Diego St, Wichita St, St Marys, Valparaiso, and Monmouth sure hope so).   Or do you value teams that have demonstrated the ability to beat some of the top teams but also have a lot of losses (like Syracuse or Michigan).

Right now, I found myself able to sort out who I thought were the top 23 teams, and then start to throw up my hands.   I will be excited to see who the committee picks!!!

On a side note, schedules are updated through all of Saturday’s games – just 5 more games before the Selection Committee chooses the 68 teams that will get to dance this March!   VCU and St. Joseph’s will both try to make sure they don’t have to worry about if the Selection Committee will choose them (my guess is they are both safe, but why take a chance).  Connecticut will try to ensure that Memphis won’t steal another bid from the bubble.   Michigan State will try to see if they can lock up a #1 seed by taking the Big 10 championship – while my Boilermakers will try to stop them.  Kentucky and Texas A&M will battle to see who wins the SEC.   And another top 50 RPI regular season champion from a small conference will do their best to try to earn their ticket to the dance and not leave the decision up to the committee as 28-4 Little Rock tries to win the Sun Belt conference against Louisiana-Monroe.

Should be an exciting Selection Sunday!!!!!

I don’t normally post links to other sites – you should be able to find these on all the major sports sites.

But I don’t think I have seen two crazier moments.

First, Cincinnati and Connecticut obviously knew they were both on the bubble – because they sure put on a show.   Late in the third overtime, Cincinnati hit a three pointer which looked like it gave them a 3 point victory.  But the Huskies inbound the ball and hit a 3/4 court shot to send the game to a fourth overtime – where they ended up prevailing.

Then, there was the nightcap of the Big 12 semifinals.  West Virginia makes a great defensive play at the end with a 1 point lead with just 1.8 seconds left.   After hitting a free throw to extend the lead to 2, Oklahoma inbounds the ball to their star, Buddy Hield, who dribbles up to half court and lets it fly, making the half court prayer.   But after video review, the ball is found to be barely in his hand when the clock struck 0, and so the miracle winning shot is taken away and West Virginia continues on to play Kansas for the title.

Just crazy – if this is anything as a sign of things to come in the tournament, it is going to be an awesome March!

Well, it is ready through Thursday’s games!   For the most part, the file is the same as normal – maybe a couple extra fields of information.   The biggest data difference is that I noticed the NCAA RPI pages classify the conference tournament games as conference games instead of post-season games (which makes perfect sense when you think about how they use the non-conference strength of schedule and record).

So, I have not gone through the trouble of marking those games off with a flag of 2 stating they are the tournament games.

But for those of you who want to do crazy statistical research, build models, or just have all the schedule data at your fingertips to evaluate teams, the data is there in the research links under 2016 Schedule.

Obviously, remember 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.

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!!!!

After Syracuse lost a tough ACC first round game against Pitt 72-71, Syracuse’s hall of fame coach Jim Boeheim had the following quote to make his plea to be included in the dance.

“The basketball committee is not the infractions committee,” Boeheim said (quote was obtained by ESPN)  “Their job is to pick the best teams for the tournament. These guys had nothing to do with any of this and should be evaluated on how well they played. They’ve been punished enough.”

To me, this is disgusting, and I hope the Selection Committee on Sunday comes back with this final answer.   Jim Boeheim is right that we are not the infractions committee, but unfortunately for Jim, they are not one of the best teams and thus did not make the tournament.

As of this year, lets be clear, the Syracuse players have not been punished – Boeheim was.   Wisconsin had their amazing coach retire, and all the Badgers did was play better for their interim coach.  Michigan State lost their best player for 4 games, and they didn’t lose their two games to the two teams that would be RPI equivalents to Syracuse’s losses to Clemson and St. John’s.   Yes, Boeheim missed 9 games, but Syracuse’s best players did not – those players finished as the 9 seed in the ACC tournament (only because Louisville was ineligible – where another hall of fame coach needs to just stop talking and accept his punishment – if what is being said is true, Pitino should consider himself lucky if the NCAA doesn’t go and slap a few more years of post-season bans on top of Louisville’s self-imposed sanctions), and lost to a fellow bubble team.

Syracuse had some great wins.   And the ACC has an unbalanced schedule – so their seed could be tied to having to play a tougher schedule.  But then come out and say that.  Say that you think that Syracuse has already shown that they are deserving through their victories against Duke, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, St. Bonaventure and Connecticut.  But stop giving excuses.  Its hard to believe the loss at Pittsburgh early in the season was because the coach was out – considering that the Panthers then went on to win two more times when the coach was on the bench.  That then makes it hard to believe that the loss to Miami FL – a better team than Pittsburgh – was also not simply because of going on the road against an excellent team.  And if you are one of the best teams, you simply don’t lose to 8-24 St. John’s.  So don’t go there.  Stop telling other people what their responsibility is – when you were punished for letting things get out of control on your watch.

The Selection Committee hopefully also knows that their job is to pick the best teams.  They don’t need a lecture on that from a coach who allowed academic fraud, illegal booster support, and failed compliance with drug testing on what their responsibilities are.   I will be honest that I haven’t looked close enough at the bubble to know if Syracuse’s resume deserves to be in.   But I do know that there are multiple regular season champions of small conferences that did everything that you should in the regular season including beating a top 50 RPI team from a major conference – including St. Mary’s (27-5), Valparaiso (26-6), Monmouth (27-7), and Wichita St (24-8) – that need an at-large bid because they were upset in their conference tournament.   If it is a punishment for a middle of the road power conference team to not make the tournament, it seems like it would be a harsher punishment to not award these regular season champions (who by the way, don’t have any legitimate punishments from the NCAA on their record).   And yet my gut says that at least one of these regular season champions will be going to the NIT – my hopes it isn’t because a hall of fame coach gave an excuse and a sad story to convince the committee that Syracuse’s players deserve the spot more – they simply don’t.

OK – my rant is over for now.  Who knows – maybe even I will put Syracuse in my bracketology work over the weekend when I look at team resumes.  But I won’t be giving Syracuse the benefit of the doubt for their 9 games while Boeheim is being punished – there isn’t enough evidence to believe his presence caused them to lose those 5 games.

Monday so far has been a rough day for some of the best mid-major teams in the country.   First, Monmouth (whose RPI is #47) lost a close game to Iona in the MAAC Championship game.   There is some sad irony because Monmouth was known for the emotion that their bench displayed in major upsets, but it was a technical foul called on a player on the court trash talking that broke a tie late in the game – and Monmouth spent the rest of the game trying to chase down the lead.

Then, despite some amazing heroics to send the game to overtime, Valparaiso (whose RPI is #39) lost to Green Bay.   It would have been easy for the Phoenix to fold after Valparaiso came charging back in regulation – including an improbable baseball pass with 2 second left leading to the tying basket.  But Green Bay came out hot in the overtime and knocked out the Horizon Conference’s regular season champion.

So, now, two of the mid-major’s best need the committee’s help.  Monmouth beat UCLA and Georgetown on the road, and Notre Dame and USC on neutral courts – as well as played a tight game with Dayton.   Valparaiso went on a West Coast road trip where they played Oregon to the wire, and then upset Oregon State on way to a 26-6 record.

And that doesn’t even include the show that the Colonial regular season co-champions put on – as UNC-Wilmington triumped in another overtime game over Hofstra.  If you decided not to watch the games until the big tournaments started playing, you missed some really fun basketball games that really epitomize what March is all about.

6 more days to Selection Sunday!!!!!!