Stomp The Lunatic – Page 113 – Just another WordPress site

The Handicapping Page has started

March 18, 2014

For those degenerate gamblers out there looking for an edge, you no longer need to wait. The Lunatic has proudly started picking the Play-in games. He actually really wants to spend more time analyzing the main games – so he has only picked tomorrow’s games (wouldn’t want to not get the page out before the games).

So, go ahead and enjoy the picks. Just remember the Lunatic’s typical disclaimers. I get stomped every year in the pool, and I don’t believe I have ever walked away from a Vegas sportsbook ahead. However, I do seem to do well when it is just mythical money on the line – as I did last year.
Welcome to the 2014 Stomp the Lunatic Contest

March 17, 2014

Now that the email is out, let me officially welcome everyone to the 2014 Stomp the Lunatic Contest!!!!!

Just a quick reminder that even if you have entered before, my system does not remember previous years – so you will need to register again. Once you register, that will take you directly to your main login page where you can choose to enter your picks – or come back later and enter after doing some research.

We don’t pick the first 4 games, so your picks need to be into the system before the first game on Thursday, March 20th (to be on the safe side, I normally recommend 11:45 am EST….).

For those of you who want to do tons of research, the Schedule Excel spreadsheet is updated to include today’s 5 conference championship games as well – so it now has the complete season.

For those of you who don’t want to dig through all that data but want a quick way to look at how the teams did this year, check out the 2014 Cheat Sheet – which gives you information like records, RPI, Adjusted Scoring Margin, and how they did against the top teams.

No matter how you pick your teams, I am sure that there will be plenty of you to give the Lunatic a good and thorough stomping. Good luck to everyone in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!!!!!!!!!
Let the games begin

March 16, 2014

Well – the site is up and running. If you just can’t wait, the bracket is up and you can go and enter your picks for the Stomp the Lunatic contest!!!!!

I will send out an official email tonight inviting everyone, but it has been a very busy basketball day for me – and after the shock of some of the seeding by the committee, I need a few moments to gather myself. While I know when I was going over their resume, I thought it looked a little light for a top 25 team, I didn’t think SMU would be the first team (as long as I remember) to be ranked in the last top 25 polls of the season and not make the tournament.

And don’t even get me started about the Midwest bracket and Louisville as a four seed!!! Wow!!!!!!!! But I digress!

The brackets are out – and lots of fun basketball will happen over the next three weeks!!!!!! Good luck in stomping the lunatic!!!!!
The Lunatic’s Bracketology is released

March 16, 2014

Well, Kentucky almost taking out Florida, as well as Michigan State beating Michigan made me have to make some late changes.

But my Bracketology page is now on the site. One of these years, I will have to do this a little differently than just quickly putting something out before the committee.

Especially, around the bubble, I put teams more where I thought the committee would than where I would put teams. I am hoping the committee proves me wrong with Green Bay. I would much rather see a regular season champion get the last spot – but when comparing resumes, my last team in, the Dayton Flyers, have more quality wins. I think that will matter.

Anyways, the moment is almost here. The selection committee is about to announce the field of 68 – and then, my favorite tournament begins. MARCH MADNESS IS AWESOME!!!!!!
The Schedules are Updated

March 16, 2014

The 2014 Schedules are updated all the way through Saturday night’s games. So, at this point, there are only the 5 championship games remaining (Atlantic 10, Sun Belt, ACC, Big 10, SEC) – there shouldn’t be any more bid stealers hanging around – although St. Joseph’s would make their Sunday afternoon a lot less nervous if they were able to beat VCU today.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if either the Michigan / Michigan State or Duke / Virginia game ends up determining the race the for the last #1 seed (as most believe Wichita State, Florida and Arizona are safely the other three #1 seeds). Then again, at this point, as I prepare my bracketology update, it is one of those years that I am really not sure who is going to be on the top line. With Arizona losing twice recently, Villanova’s shocking early loss in the Big East tournament, and Kansas falling apart as their star center has been injured, it is really unclear what the committee will do.

Should be a fun day – only 5 games, but they are probably going to be really fun. March is definitely here.
Rough season to be a regular season champion
March 15, 2014
The NIT might be a difficult tournament to get into this year. That is because the automatic bids to regular season champions that don’t win their conference tournament or an NCAA at-large bid get an automatic birth into the NIT.

And sadly for the regular season champions, they are falling like flies. Here is the list of top seeds that lost so far.

America East – Vermont

Atlantic 10 – St. Louis (will still get an NCAA bid)

Atlantic Sun – Florida Gulf Coast (although at least they lost to their co-champ Mercer)

Big 12 – Kansas (will still get an NCAA bid)

Big East – Villanova (will still get an NCAA bid)

Big South – High Point

Horizon – Green Bay

MAAC – Iona

NEC – Robert Morris

OVC – Belmont

Patriot – Boston University

Southern – Davidson

SWAC – Southern (although they apparently are not eligible due to academic reasons)

And there is still lots of games still to be played. 14 top seeds are still playing in their tournaments.

Right now, that means only Delaware (Colonial), Wichita State (MVC), North Dakota State (Summit) and Gonzaga (WCC) have so far managed to win their conference tournaments (guess we could throw Atlantic Sun co-champ Mercer into the mix).

Normally, the top seeds of the small conferences do better than this. But this year, with all these teams that dominated their conferences in the regular season are losing their bids and falling into the at-large pool, it does make you start to wonder if the Ivy league has the right idea to give their invitation to the dance to their regular season champion…

I know it will never happen – it is all about money. But it hurts to see all these teams work so hard to win their conference only to have those dreams dashed in a 3-4 day tournament.
The Bubble IS NOT SOFT!!!!!!!!!

March 13, 2014

It happens every year – someone comments about how soft the bubble is. Once again, I am sure they do it just to build conversation but it still rubs me the wrong way. This weekend, the ESPN Bubble Watch writer finally broke out this horrible statement (I am actually shocked I had not seen it up to this point). Eamonn Brennan brought out his typical soft bubble article – and as he said, Championship Week isn’t going to change that.

I hate when writers do this – because it diminishes the work that so many teams have done during the season. Lets looks at some of the soft teams that are on the bubble.

There is Nebraska – who finished 4th in the Big Ten, including victories against Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Ohio State.

How about Xavier – who finished tied for 3rd in the Big East, and was able to knock off both Creighton and Cincinnati.

We could talk about Dayton – who went 10-6 in the Atlantic 10 while being able to beat Gonzaga, UMass, St. Louis and George Washington – all likely tournament teams.

The last team in according to ESPN is Arkansas – who swept Kentucky, and beat fellow bubble teams SMU and Minnesota.

Do I think any of these teams are going to win the entire tournament. No – of course not. Do you remember a double digit seed every winning the tournament, so I think it is unfair to blame these teams because they are likely going to fall like other bubble teams have done. But they have not had bad seasons – they have been very strong teams, and have shown the capability on a given night to beat a top 4 seed.

But that brings me to the thing that really makes me upset about this. Lets talk about Horizon regular season champion Green Bay. During the non-conference season, the Phoenix had one of the more stunning upsets of the season when they beat eventual ACC regular season champion Virginia. This was after almost beating Wisconsin earlier in the season. These are teams that are figuring to be top 3 seeds – and they held their own with them. So, what else did the Phoenix do.

Overall, Green Bay went 7-3 in the non-conference against Division 1 opponents, with a win over Tulsa (one of the co-champs of Conference USA) and respectable losses to Harvard (the Ivy champion) and Eastern Michigan (a MAC team with a winning record and top 100 RPI – although we know the RPI is a flawed number). Then, Green Bay dominated the Horizon – going 14-2, only losing to Milwaukee (their main rival) and Valparaiso (in a game they played without their second leading scorer).   So, they would have been 21-4 if you don’t include the game their center was hurt.

Then, came the conference tournament, where they got upset by the same Milwaukee team that upset them in the regular season. And now, unfortunately to most, you have a small conference team with an RPI of 60 and no chance of getting invited to the Big Dance.

Brennan is so sure of this, that he didn’t even include the Phoenix in his Bubble Watch – although surprisingly, he still has Louisiana Tech – another one of the Conference USA co-champs on the list. Why is this surprising.

RPI: Green Bay (60)   Louisiana Tech (68)

Best Victory: Green Bay (Virginia – RPI 12), Louisiana Tech (Oklahoma – 22)

Non-conf SOS:   Green Bay (60), Louisiana Tech (288)

Overall SOS: Green Bay (163), Louisiana Tech (248)

Bad Losses:   Louisiana Tech (2), Green Bay (3)

So – of all the metrics that the committee harps on, Green Bay has the advantage over Louisiana Tech with the exception of Bad Losses. And even that is debatable. Unlike the 2 LT losses, 2 of Green Bay’s happened to the team that is going to be playing in the NCAA Tournament (Milwaukee) and 1 happened while they had a major injury.

But I digress – quite frankly, I believe both teams at least belong in the bubble discussion. But that is the thing that makes me so mad about writers saying the bubble is soft. Green Bay went 21-6, beat the ACC regular champ, lost by 3 to a team likely to be a protected seed, 3 of their other 5 losses are to teams who will also be dancing, and one of their losses happened without one of their best players. And this writer who says the bubble is so soft doesn’t even put this team on the list. They are not even good enough to be one of the weak teams being considered to get rolled over by a top seed in the tournament. This is a complete travesty, and an unbelievable amount of disrespect to what was truly a fantastic season for Green Bay.

They did everything they were supposed to do except for win the final 2 games of the season that mattered – the games they needed to win in their conference tournament to get the Horizon’s bid. The least that we can do if we are going to call the bubble soft is invite the Phoenix into the discussion – their resume deserves that.

I don’t know if Green Bay gets in. History says that regular season champions of small conferences that have RPIs greater than 50 don’t have a great chance. But if the committee decides to ignore history and ignore ESPN’s opinion, they will be picking a team that is very deserving of being invited to the dance and very capable of pulling the type of first round upset that is what makes the tournament so special.
Data junkies – go and start your research!!!
March 12, 2014
That’s right. In an incredible twist of fate, the Lunatic appears to be ahead of the game with getting box scores for all you statisticians out there who want to build the statistical model that will win this year’s contest.

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. So, just click on 2014 Schedule in the Research menu and get an Excel spreadsheet with summary box score and standing / RPI information for each game for every Division I team.

Now – my disclosures:

I have updated the data as of Monday, March 10th – as the week goes on, I will continue to update this file. No promises on daily updates. But I will definitely update on Sunday once I can get all of Saturday night’s conference championships – that typically leaves you the complete schedule minus the 3 or 4 championships on Sunday.

I have gone through countless efforts to validate this data just to make the realization that I have no faith in validating this data. What I can tell you is my overall records match the standings pages you can see on the commercial sites (to a point – which will continue to explain).

There are two instances of games played between conference teams that are considered non-conference games. Rhode Island and George Mason from the Atlantic 10 played a non-conference game in November (believe it was on their schedules before George Mason joined the conference this year and they just decided to keep it). NC Central and Hampton from the MEAC also played a game in January. ESPN has it listed as a non-conference game and CBS has it as a conference game. When going to the MEAC website (yes, the MEAC has a website), they list it as a non-conference game – and so that is what I have listed it as well.

I have gathered neutral site games by going on the NCAA official site and checking where they said the games were neutral. Hopefully, I did not miss any but this is sadly not a straight forward process.

If I did, it would be tough to tell. This is because I have found that ESPN, CBS, and the NCAA site all disagree on whether the venue is a neutral site or not. I have obviously leaned on the NCAA site.

But then, I noticed that in one case between two Southland teams (my guess is this will not crush your analysis), the NCAA site had two teams (Grambling State and Arkansas-Pine Bluff in conference playing twice with both games at Arkansas-Pine Bluff. This made no sense to me – and so I kept digging and the box scores on the NCAA site even said the games were played at two different venues. So I am not sure how this translated to two home games for the one team. I chose not to change my data – which according to the box scores said they played a home and away.

My RPI standings, while close to what the NCAA published, is not a 100% match. This had me discouraged for several hours this weekend as I tried to figure out my error. Then, I had a realization. The CBS site and ESPN site don’t match what the NCAA published either. This is because CBS considered different games as neutral games, and ESPN included Abilene Christian and Incarnate Word – two first year provisional division 1 members which are not supposed to be included in the RPI calculation (and are not eligible for the tournament). I imagine ESPN has issues with the neutral games as well. So, at this point, I gave up. If ESPN and CBS with all their resources can’t get it right – and to be fair, the NCAA can’t even keep track of home and away games so their data is suspect as well, why should I have to be held accountable to this level of accuracy.

So – trust the data as much as you can. If you find serious errors in it, let me know and I will fix it for everyone.

Enjoy the data – but remember, don’t let it stop you from watching a couple of the games – they have been really good so far (although a little sad for a few regular season champions – which will have to be a post for another time).
Welcome to the 2014 Stomp the Lunatic Contest!!!!!!

March 8, 2014

We already know from previous blog posts that the Lunatic is just screaming to get out. The Lunatic still has a bunch of work to do to get ready – as it wouldn’t be the Lunatic contest without having tons of data and crazy analysis. But there is one thing that is ready – the main parts of the site. If you want to register early, you are welcome to do so – although obviously, you can wait until the Selection Committee actually announces the field of 68. All are welcomed to try to stomp the Lunatic. This feels like the time to have some kind of trash talk about how no one will beat the Lunatic this year. But we all know the truth – the Lunatic is crazy if he thinks that he will be able to pick better than all of you!!!!

Good luck to everyone in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!!
2014 User Blog

March 8, 2014

This is your opportunity to put your own thoughts on the tournament onto the site. Whether it be comments on the games, telling the world who you think will win, or simply wanting to have fun – this is your chance to be heard!!!!

My only rule is that you keep things clean – we have families who come to the site. I reserve the right to remove any inappropriate comments.

All you have to do is reply using the form at the bottom of the page!!!!