{"id":1025,"date":"2017-03-16T01:42:27","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T01:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1025"},"modified":"2017-03-16T01:42:27","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T01:42:27","slug":"espn-needs-to-adjust-their-statistical-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1025","title":{"rendered":"ESPN needs to adjust their statistical model"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my rant tonight before the big day on Thursday (and as I wait to get a read on Providence and USC in tonight&#8217;s game!), I am really disappointed with ESPN and their analytics group.\u00a0\u00a0 All year, they have been pushing their BPI statistic.\u00a0 I have read about the teams that are most likely going to lose because of their BPI.\u00a0\u00a0 I have seen them push that the Selection Committee should be using better analytics than the RPI &#8211; they should use Ken Pom and BPI as their guide.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that the models don&#8217;t lend themselves to credibility at the moment &#8211; they might have the last laugh, but it is hard to take them seriously with some of the ridiculous rankings that they have.\u00a0\u00a0 Since ESPN is marketing their model so much, here is how ridiculous these rankings have been.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>BPI is good with three of the #1 seeds (Villanova, Gonzaga and UNC) &#8211; but Kansas should be a 3 seed as the 10th best BPI team.<\/li>\n<li>So who is the 4th #1 &#8211; Virginia.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes &#8211; that is right, not Arizona, Kentucky, Duke, Louisville, or pick your 3 or 4 seed &#8211; Virginia is so poorly ranked that they are off by about 16 teams.<\/li>\n<li>Kentucky &#8211; which won the SEC by 2 games is behind Florida.\u00a0\u00a0 Which I guess isn&#8217;t as bad as Kansas &#8211; which won the Big 12 by 4 games is behind West Virginia.<\/li>\n<li>Syracuse and Indiana would both be in the field as 8 seeds &#8211; yes, that is right.\u00a0 They are not on the bubble, they are safely in the field.<\/li>\n<li>Clemson would have been a 9 seed and Texas Tech and Houston would have been in as 11 seeds.<\/li>\n<li>Minnesota would have been a 10 seed if we listened to the BPI<\/li>\n<li>So which 5 teams would have been left out &#8211; those would have been the two teams playing right now (USC and Providence), #9 Seton Hall, #9 seed Virginia Tech, and #6 Maryland.\u00a0\u00a0 That&#8217;s right, they are saying that Maryland is 23 teams worse than their current seed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I shouldn&#8217;t only hammer ESPN on this.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of the better known statistical ratings like KenPom and Sagarin also have some really strange rank orderings (also loving some of the same teams that BPI loves).\u00a0\u00a0 Which really makes me sad.\u00a0\u00a0 I think you really can leverage statistics to predict these events &#8211; and that should make them excellent for creating a ranking.\u00a0\u00a0 But they are breaking down this year &#8211; because they are inviting teams like Indiana, Clemson and Texas Tech that no one (except maybe fans of those teams) would argue should be in the field.<\/p>\n<p>So, I did the obvious thing &#8211; I have entered all their ratings into the pool, just for fun so we can see how much better we can be over the models.\u00a0\u00a0 Fortunately for the models, the Selection Committee helps them out in a few places (for example, in KenPom 6 of the top 13 teams are all in the East, making games that could be Elite 8 type games happen in the 2nd round).\u00a0\u00a0 But my guess is that we are going to destroy them &#8211; and then hopefully, their owners will go and rebuild them over the off-season.<\/p>\n<p>OK &#8211; going to stop my rant and enjoy the game.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my rant tonight before the big day on Thursday (and as I wait to get a read on Providence and USC in tonight&#8217;s game!), I am really disappointed with ESPN and their analytics group.\u00a0\u00a0 All year, they have been pushing their BPI statistic.\u00a0 I have read about the teams that are most likely going [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1026,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions\/1026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}