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Showing posts from March, 2015

2015 Luck of the Draw, NCAA Tournament Analysis

(This was originally posted to various internet sources in March, 2015) As we await MSU's 13th appearance in the Sweet 16 in 18 years, I thought that I would once again dive into some NCAA tournament data, this time with an eye on how easy or difficult a path teams tend to take to advance in the NCAA tournament. In my analysis a few weeks ago, I outlined different coaches performance in the tournament based on seed expectations and I used (I believe) a unique metric based on seed differentials to try to normalize for "ease of draw" factors. At some point last weekend after MSU's exciting and decisive victory over Virginia, I caught wind on the Twitterverse that some people (who may or may not have Ann Arbor zip codes) were grumbling that Izzo's amazing performance in the tournament is largely due to getting an easy draw. My seed differential analysis suggests that Izzo has benefited a bit from good draws (notably in 2001 and 2010), but I was curious if I could l

2015 NCAA Basketball Over and Under Achiever Analysis

(This was originally posted to several internet sources in March of 2015) Hi everyone! I am new here, but I was encourage by a friend of mine to post some data that I have compiled related to whether certain college coaches are over-rated or under-rated based on  NCAA tournament  performance. The original question that I tried to answer was "Is Bo Ryan Over-rated." This analysis was primarily meant to answer that question, but I uncovered a lot more. I have compiled a rather large NCAA tournament database over the years where I essentially have the results of every game since seeding began in 1979 in a spreadsheet such that I can performance various analyses on the data if I wish. It occurred to me over the weekend that it would be possible to measure if a coach is doing better than expected or not based on one of two different methods. The first method is to compare a coach's record as a certain seed against the historical performance of all teams of that seed.