Archive for the 'NCAA' Category

Sporcle wants you to name every #1 seed since the NCAA Tournament started seeding teams in 1979. Are you up to the challenge?

ESPN is rolling out a new encyclopedia -- this time for college hoops -- and they preview it with page 1196: Jeff Sagarin's all-time NCAA program ratings... Oh, and it turns out UCLA isn't number one, a fact that has some people angry (the coaches' reactions are more subdued, though).

Another Sporcle quiz! No, this one isn't specifically related to college basketball, but I found myself thinking a lot about conference affiliations as I took it. And some of these are definitely not easy... So can you name the states (including DC) in which these universities are located?

For those who are still recovering from the NBA Finals, here's a reminder: the NBA Draft is a week from today! Yes, time has flown by for me, too!

Luckily, Ed Weiland of HoopsAnalyst is back for what must be the 5th or 6th year in a row, bringing us what I consider must-read material, hands down the best draft previews available on the entire internet. Ed doesn't succumb to hype or anecdotal analysis; his rankings are strictly by the numbers, and he looks at the key indicators that have predicted success -- and failure -- in the past. Here are the links to Part I of his lengthy preview:

• NBA Draft 2009: Shooting Guards
• NBA Draft 2009: Combo Guards
• NBA Draft 2009: Point Guards

Seriously, everyone out there who's interested in the Draft should read this stuff.

I don't typically link directly to YouTube vids, but here's a brand new mix from KBlaze, one the net's best mixmakers, celebrating the highlights of The Admiral, David Robinson. D-Rob is one of our favorites here at the blog because his numbers were simply off the charts at his peak in 1993-94 & 1994-95. Yes, Hakeem did him dirty in the playoffs, but because he was on the wrong end of a few Dream Shake highlights (which I would challenge anyone to stop, btw) we don't think he's been treated fairly by the general public over the past 15 years. So here's to you, Mr. Robinson:

(Bonus points for old-school Craig Sager footage at the beginning, too. Didn't know that guy owned a suit that wasn't ridiculous...)

Here's a good Sporcle quiz that is sure to bring back memories... Can you name ESPN's Top 25 College Basketball Players of All Time?

Our friend Jon Nichols over at the Basketball Statistics.com blog has a neat study today on the correlations between college stats and NBA stats... For instance, NCAA & NBA blocks per minute have an R-squared of 0.93, meaning good shot-blockers in college tend to be good shot-blockers in the pros; meanwhile, there's only a 0.29 R² between a player's NCAA and NBA FTA/min, so players who draw a lot of fouls in college don't necessarily do the same in the pros. Obviously there's some selection bias in the study, but it's still a cool snapshot of what abilities players tend to retain as they make the leap to the pro level.

If you don't know who Ed Weiland is, you should -- the guy puts together the best draft previews on the web (for people who like stats, at least). And in the most recent HoopsAnalyst post, Ed lets us know whose stock is rising and falling over the past few months.

Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference.com makes a guest appearance to present the results of his annual NCAA Tournament simulation. --JK

As I've done for the last six years, I've relied on a little bit of computer science to fill out my NCAA tourney pool. I have two young kids at home, a baseball site to worry about, and I've watched zero NCAA basketball games this year, so using my own scouting and intuition is obviously out.

What I do instead is rely on a rating service and simulation to compute the best (in this case, most likely) bracket to occur. Invariably, this leads to a boring bracket, but you'll find in the long run that better teams win more games in the NCAA tourney. Doing the simulation also provides some interesting answers to questions like "Which low seeds are most likely to make the Sweet 16?", and it presents it all in terms of probabilities.

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It's time for the NCAA Tournament again, and if you're anything like me, that means filling out your brackets, crossing your fingers, and just hoping for the best. I mean, I'd like to think I'm some kind of great prognosticator on the basis of my correctly picking the two title-game participants in 6 of the last 10 years (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008), but I always neglect to remind myself that I correctly picked the winner only twice in that span (2001, 2008). In the early days of my braket career, I strictly picked from the gut (this was before I knew about APBRmetrics -- or SABRmetrics, for that matter), and in 2001 my intuition was spot-on... but it has also led me astray more times than I care to recall.  So in recent years, I've gone with a more scientific approach to filling out my bracket, with decent results (I have to say that the amazing kenpom.com has really aided me in that venture).

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