Stomp The Lunatic

Not going to write a lot but you can not go wrong today no matter what game you watch.

The Big 10, SEC, American and Atlantic 10 all start their quarterfinals – whether you want to watch the Power Conferences or the Mid-majors.

The Big 12 still have some intrigue as TCU and Oklahoma will see if they can move on to the Championship against the Locks of Kansas and Texas Tech

The Pac 12 should be fun – Colorado tries to make their case for being on the bubble against Arizona while USC and UCLA battle it out.

The Big East has Creighton against Providence and Villanova against UConn.

From a bubble perspective, there might not be any more important semi-finals than the Mountain West. The games are super late but if you have insomnia tonight, watch Wyoming and Boise State start at 9:30 with Colorado State and San Diego State tipping off around midnight. Any or all of these teams could make their way into the dance but being outside the Power Conferences, you know none of them will want to leave it in the Committee’s hands. Win 2 more games and you don’t have to worry.

I have no clue when I am going to do my bracketology – so many good games to watch!!! Enjoy the games!

I mentioned in my morning rant about today’s games that I would not mind if Karma provided Michigan a loss in Coach Howard’s return due to his horrible sportsmanship at Wisconsin that earned him a 5 game suspension. Karma must have been listening, and sometimes she can be awfully cruel.

Michigan didn’t simply lose the game. No – that is not how Karma works. Karma allowed the Wolverines to jump out to a 60 – 43 lead on the Hoosiers with about 13 minutes to play. And then Indiana, a team who had lost 7 of their last 9 games, outscored Michigan 29 – 9 for the rest of the game to upset Michigan in amazing fashion.

Meanwhile, Syracuse without their leading scorer who was suspended for punching a player in the middle of a blowout victory, played extremely competitive against #7 Duke. The Orange led by 4 at halftime and went up 79-78 when Jimmy Boeheim tipped the ball in with 3 1/2 minutes to play. That tip-in might have been the last points that Syracuse score all season, as the Blue Devils finished the game on a 10-0 run to send Syracuse home. With a 16-17 record, they are likely not even going to be invited to the NIT.

So, as you can see, it is super important to stay on Karma’s good side. Play the game with passion but with good sportsmanship. If you don’t, you never know if you will be next on Karma’s list. Thank you, Karma, for showing yourself today – please let me stay on your good side. You are wise, wonderful, and powerful.

Most of the major conferences are getting started with their 2nd round or quarterfinals. Which means you have a lot of bubble teams playing each other.

The day starts off with a bang – as we get to see Michigan and Indiana battle it out in the Big 10. The Hoosiers definitely need this game more than the Wolverines at this point, but it will be interesting to see if Michigan plays with extra passion having Coach Howard back (as you can tell from my rant from yesterday, I will not be upset if Karma comes and leads Indiana to a victory – and I am a Purdue fan, so that tells you how much I hate the whole bad sportsmanship piece).

The SEC will be starting off with Florida and Texas A&M, as Florida has been trying to hang on to their bubble spot while Texas A&M has surged into the conversation with some big victories towards the end of the season.

The Big 12 starts off with TCU vs. Texas. This is a chance for the Horned Frogs to get one more big win on their resume against a top 25 team.

And it isn’t even 2 pm yet!!!! For those who have to work (including the Lunatic), don’t you worry. Thursday evening has games for you to watch as well.

The ACC will have Virginia Tech, who survived last night off a buzzer beater, going against Notre Dame – with the ACC bubble picture so murky, both teams really could use this game.

You have an interesting bubble candidate in the Big 12 from Oklahoma. The Sooners are still in the picture but they are 7-11 in the brutal conference play. The bracket didn’t give them any favors either, as they drew Baylor, who looks like they might be one of the 4 top seeds next week. Beating the Bears might help the Sooners get that one high profile victory they need, but can a 7-12 team in conference really make it if they lose.

If you want to check out some games of really good teams that you probably didn’t know about, check out the Mountain West tournament today. Their big bubble match is Wyoming vs UNLV. Wyoming had been ranked in the Top 25 recently, but they have stumbled recently to make this quarterfinal a huge game for them.

I am also still curious about the middle of the Pac 12. If you listen to the experts (who might be right), there is no bubble in this conference. Arizona, UCLA, and USC are safely in – and might all be playing late into March. And then that’s it. So, I am interested if some of those teams with NET rankings in the high 60s and 70s can make a run – especially in the quarter-final between Oregon and Colorado today.

And of course, the people here in Richmond will probably be excited for the final ACC match up between North Carolina and Virginia.

There might be a few better games than what I have mentioned. To be honest, if you want to watch great basketball, you can probably just turn on the Big 12 tournament and leave it on all day. But there is only so much time before work to blog!!!!

I have updated the Bracketology page with a listing of the conferences auto-bids, top NET teams from the one-bid conferences, and teams that based on their standings in the polls and NET rankings are either locks for the dance or playing desperately for a chance to continue their season. After today’s games, we will probably be able to better rank those bubble teams’ chances.

Enjoy the games!!!!

I read in the media that the ACC is going to be really interesting to watch the bubble teams play. But one of the better anticipated games between Wake Forest and Miami FL isn’t going to happen. Only problem is that Wake Forest needed to beat 13-19 Boston College to make that happen, and the Eagles had other plans. They managed to make Wake Forest’s wait until Sunday a very nervous one by upsetting the Demon Deacons in overtime.

Virginia Tech almost made it back to back bubble teams to lose in overtime today, but Darius Maddox hit a three pointer at the buzzer in overtime to give the Hokies a one point victory over Clemson.

In the Big East, Xavier lost this afternoon to Butler in overtime. The Musketeers have now lost 8 of their last 10 games (and one of those victories was against struggling Georgetown). They might have gone from being ranked in early February to the NIT tournament.

In mid-major heartbreak, Iona (25-6) lost in the MAAC quarterfinals to 14-18 Rider. Especially with Rick Pitino being the head coach, many felt that the Gaels had the type of team that could win a game in the Dance (they beat Alabama by 4 earlier this year). Now, I suspect Iona is heading to the NIT.

And that was just the start of the major tournaments. Thursday will see the quarterfinals for many leagues – it should be a great day of basketball as we get to see which bubble teams are going to make one final push to convince the committee they should be dancing.

Enjoy Thursday’s games!!!!

It is late – and I still haven’t started my bracketology. But maybe that will work out better. I probably will have better results if I have less time to analyze my decisions.

But before I head to sleep, I have to congratulate Gonzaga and South Dakota State for winning their conference championships. And lets do a very quick article about what to watch for on Wednesday.

There is only one bid up for grabs tomorrow – as the Patriot league will settle their championship. Top seeded Colgate will be playing second seeded Navy to get a chance to play in the NCAA Championship.

Otherwise, Wednesday starts the beginning of the journey for the bubble teams. Many of the major conferences are seeing their opening rounds, and setting up games that might not boost their resume if they win but certainly could pop their bubble if they lose.

A few games that I am interested in are in the ACC with Virginia Tech playing Clemson and Virginia playing Louisville. In the Big East, Xavier will try to stop their stumble to end the season and Butler. I am still fascinated with the middle of the Pac 12 – such as Oregon playing Oregon State, Washington playing Utah and Washington State playing Cal.

The real interesting bubble games will be Thursday – maybe I can get some of my bracketology page done by the time that happens. For now, going to try to go to sleep before midnight. Need to get as much sleep as I possibly can before the madness really begins.

For those of you who like me love their data almost as much as college basketball, you have probably noticed the 2022 Schedule link is already available on the site.   This is our traditional Excel spreadsheet with the standings and rankings in one worksheet and the full NCAA schedule with scores in another worksheet. I have continued with the approach that conference tournament game are counted as conference games instead of post-season games.  As we did last year, I have merged the NET rankings from the NCAA website to have the updated rankings on the spreadsheet, along with listing of records for the 4 quads. I then have used that information to validate that my records are correct. It is a relatively simple check to match the records, home records, away records and neutral court records between what the schedule data says and what was in the NET rankings, so take the data for what it is…….

The NCAA Archive site used to have this great document called Team Pages – it had a page for each team with their computer rankings (including NET, KenPom and Sagarin scores) and then all their schedule listed by quad. This isn’t as good, but the 2022 Nitty Gritty link under research actually goes to the NCAA Statistics website with a summary of key statistics about each team. 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. 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, even if I still don’t understand it.

My example for the year is Rutgers. I get that they had a tough November, but lets look at records by quad. Rutgers is 6-5 vs Quad 1, 3-4 vs Quad 2, 4-2 vs Quad 3, and 5-1 vs Quad 4. That leaves them in 76th place. Lets compare against Ohio State. The Buckeyes are 5-5 in Quad 1, 5-4 in Quad 2, 6-1 in Quad 3 and 3-0 vs Quad 4. Both teams finished 12-8 in the Big 10. I get that Rutgers has those 2 extra bad losses from November. But it is hard for me to believe that Ohio State is the 22nd best team in the country, and Rutgers with the same Big 10 conference record is 76th. Regardless, I still have to think that the NET score is better than the old RPI rankings.

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. 

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 is no stop to Championship Week. Tuesday saw the drama from Monday night, and said “I can do better”. To be fair, Tuesday also has the honor of awarding 6 more conference championships. But there has been a little bit of everything.

The Atlantic Sun tournament decided to create the script that Hollywood couldn’t write. On Saturday, the semi-finals saw the top 4 teams tip off in two great games. The top seed from the West Division, Jacksonville State ended up losing by 3 to their cross-town rivals Jacksonville. And then, the top seed in the East, Liberty lost by 3 points to Bellarmine, who is just in their second year in transitioning to Division I. Bringing us to tonight, as newcomer Bellarmine won the Atlantic Sun championship 77-72 over Jacksonville. However, because the Knights are still in their transition period, they are ineligible for the NCAA Tournament. So, regular season champion Jacksonville State managed to win the Atlantic Sun’s bid three days after losing in the semi-finals.

You had the snoozer game in the Northeast Conference final, as Bryant jumped out to a 25-4 lead to start the game against Wagner, and never looked back on their way to a 27 point victory.

Maybe you like what happened in the Colonial Conference, where the Delaware Blue Hens managed to upset regular-season co-champs Towson yesterday in the semi-finals, and turned around tonight to upset the other regular-season co-champs UNC-Wilmington by 4 points.

Need your late game drama. The Horizon Conference has you covered. Down 2 points, Northern Kentucky’s Marques Warrick hit a three-pointer to take the lead with 22 seconds. Then, Wright State’s Trey Calvin came right back down the court, drives to the free-throw line, and calmly drains the game-winning jumper with 10 seconds left.

You have the power-house mid-major game happening right now, as the West Coast Conference Championship sees #1 Gonzaga playing against #17 St. Mary’s. Right now, the top team in the country has an 8 point lead in their effort to get revenge from the last time these two teams met. Unlike in other years, the bubble can rest easier knowing that regardless of who wins, the bubble will not be shrinking – since both teams are likely already in the Field of 68.

And then you have the classic mid-major story in the Summit Conference. In this story, you have South Dakota State. The Jackrabbits went 29-4 so far this year, and went an undefeated 18-0 in conference play (they were 1 of only 2 teams this year to be undefeated in conference play – Murray State swept through the Ohio Valley). They have a respectable NET ranking of 64th, but because they have beaten no teams in the top Quadrant, they likely need to win one more time. And they are in a battle with 2nd place North Dakota State, with the Jackrabbits leading by 6 with 10 minutes to play.

So much going on – it is such a special time of the year. As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Don’t miss Championship Week – there are two great championship finals going on right now!!!! And there will be more all week long.

Maybe it is that I am just getting old. Maybe I still haven’t recovered from traveling to Charlotte to watch Katie play in her first rugby games. Maybe I was just enjoying getting the chance to watch Charlie play goalie in a scrimmage game for his high school’s JV team tonight. I can make lots of excuses, but I am terribly behind with my ranting.

I found myself writing my normal intro email where I wanted to talk a little about Coach K’s final game, and I almost had to change my topic completely. This is because as I was writing that email last night to all of you to announce this year’s Stomp the Lunatic contest, I had my Python code in the background pulling the box scores that I was missing from the weekend, and had the Southern Conference championship playing in the background.

I looked up from my typing to watch Furman’s Mike Bothwell bring the ball up the court down three, and finally managed to get free from his defender with just 4 seconds to tie the game at 51 and send the game to overtime. At this point, my typing stopped as I was drawn in. Bothwell from Furman kept hitting shot after shot – looking like he was unstoppable. But Chattanooga kept coming back and tying the game, including a big three pointer by A.J. Caldwell with 27 seconds. But this meant the shot clock was off, and the ball was going back in the hands of Furman’s star. And as he did in regulation, Bothwell managed to drive to the basket and score what looked to be the winning basket with 4 seconds left.

And then, March happened. Chattanooga inbounded the ball into David Jean-Baptiste who charged up the court, barely crossed half-court to get to the Ingles logo on the court, jumped as two Furman players closed in on him, and buried the long three-pointer to send the Mocs to a 64-63 victory. His teammates follow him around the court until they tackle him in celebration – Chattanooga will get to go dancing next week!

And I found myself sitting there frozen. I had already written the first paragraph about Coach K. I spent another 20 minutes debating what to do. I still have to finish loading the box scores. I have to start thinking through my bracketology. So much to do, and so little time. And while I could not let the winningest coach in Division I men’s basketball retire and not give him the respect that he deserves for all he has done for the game, I kept thinking to myself that I should be writing about David Jean-Baptiste and Mike Bothwell, two amazing basketball players that might not even make it to the pros. But on Monday night, they put on the type of show that is what makes March so special.

So, while I am behind, I could not let it go unnoticed. Congratulations to the Chattanooga Mocs on being the Southern Conference tournament champs and earning their ticket to the dance.