Morning folks. How we doing?
All is well here in Hoosier land today, at least as far as
attitudes coming out of a win, I think nothing else to talk
about. Indiana finishing off the season
with a nice victory over Michigan State and they moved to
10 and 10 in conference play and end up with the sixth seed.
We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about where
Indiana's at in the big scheme of things, and we're going to
talk about why Indiana is still not in the NCAA tournament
picture despite. Having a 10 and 10 record
overall in the Big 10, which is normally like an automatic, like
please walk through the door, go to the NCAA tournament, why is
that not happening? So we're going to talk about
that. We're going to talk a little bit
about some of the other teams that Indiana's in proximity with
to try to explain to everybody why the metrics don't like IU.
And I almost did a video on this earlier in the year, which I'll
talk about in a minute, but ended up not.
Now's a good time to do it because I think now that the
team is playing better, it's kind of back on everybody's
mind. Before I get to that, just a
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probably the best venue to watch this particular show in.
I will put this up as an audio episode, but you may want to go
find and I'll put the link in the sub stack.
You may want to go find the live video recording off of the Back
Home Network YouTube channel because I'm going to be using
screens to kind of walk through some of the things I'm talking
about here. So just keep that in mind.
And I've got several people in the chat and I I'm not going to
touch on Mike Woodson's comments yesterday in this particular
show. We are going to talk about it
when Scott and I podcast again here soon, which might be today.
So not trying to avoid talking about that.
I will be happy to address that and kind of talk through things
and would love to get people's overall commentary on it because
I'm sure a lot of you have ideas and thoughts on on how all that
went, but not going to talk about it in this particular
broadcast. Hopefully you can understand
that. So I appreciate the interest and
we will talk about it soon. What we are going to talk about
today is Indiana's spot right now within the metrics and the
predictives and why those matter and and why it's really why
Indiana's not in the NCAA tournament picture even on a
four-game winning streak and with a 10 and 10 record.
So first of all, again I'm going to call some screens up and I'm
going to talk through this a little bit.
I want to show everybody, first of all the the Ken Palm page,
because I think that's a good place to start.
A lot of you. Are not necessarily unfamiliar
with Ken Palm, but a lot of you still I think are are struggling
at times with how it works and and how it's utilized.
I'm going to zoom in here a little bit so you can see this.
If you're watching along on the screen, what you've got across
the board here is a bunch of numbers which look completely
hard to get into. But they all make some sense and
I think it's important to understand.
By and large, what exactly you're looking at and what these
metrics are calculating and how all these teams get ordered,
because it helps us to understand and explain why
Indiana's aren't very good. We're also going to talk about
the net, which I'm going to walk you through as well, so that you
can understand that I'm going to try to keep this not boring, so
I'm going to move relatively quickly.
But if you have any questions, please put it in the chat.
I'll be happy to throw those up on the screen and answer those
as we can. So let's start with Who are the
best teams in college basketball according to the computers and
why? We've talked a lot on this show
about this idea of offensive and defensive efficiency.
And I'm going to give a quick overview of that.
Again, Offensive Efficiency is the number of points your team
scores over 100 possessions. The reason it's done like that
is it's a standardized number because the way the games work,
there's a real broad spectrum in what A-team's total number of
possessions in a game are. You take a team like Virginia or
a A-Team like Purdue last year who played mega slow, they may
be doing 5758 possessions. You take a fast team like North
Carolina, they may have like 7374 possessions in a game.
How do you compare those two teams?
You can't use like points per game.
Because even though Wisconsin or Virginia or whoever may be
scoring a lot fewer points per game, it doesn't mean they're
automatically going to lose to North Carolina just because
they're scoring more, right? So instead, what you get is this
standardized number where we take the total number of points
you're scoring over 100 possessions and use that to
calculate how efficiently you're scoring.
Scoring efficiency is an important thing to keep in mind
because ultimately the goal going down the floor.
Is this whole idea of you want to get as many points as
possible for every trip that you make?
If you get 0 points on a possession, that's clearly bad.
If you get one point on that possession, maybe you hit one
out of two free throws. That's that's about average.
Like you. Know the the minimum you really
want to have is one point per possession, or something
slightly more than that, but most of the time you're going to
be scoring 2 points or three points, very rarely 4 points per
possession. And so, if you are consistently
able to score points when you go down the floor, more often than
not your offensive efficiency is going to be higher.
Your defensive efficiency is the exact opposite of that.
Your defensive efficiency is how many points your opponents score
every time they go down the floor.
So whereas your goal is to score as many points as possible, your
goal is also to keep the other team for scoring points.
Very basic stuff. But again taking that out over
100 possessions and averaging it, that is how you figure out
how overall efficient a team is on offense or on defense.
We talk a lot about adjusted offensive and defensive
efficiency and that's what you see in this Ken Palm stat.
So ADJO&ADJD what those represent are your.
Efficiency numbers filtered through how good or bad your
opponent happens to be. So if you score 1.2 points per
possession against one of the worst defensive teams in the
country, you're not going to get as much credit as if you score
1.2 points per game against a team that's like fifth in the
country defensively. And vice versa.
If you hold a team that scores very efficiently to an
inefficient scoring number, that's going to be better for
your Adjusted Defensive. Efficiency number.
So what it's trying to do is take into account how teams
play. And make it so that it's not
just a matter of, oh, we're going to run the score up on
this team or that team, but there are boundaries within that
and that's that's where it gets a little tricky for Indiana
elsewhere on this page. Just to note, you'll know that
there's an adjusted tempo number here and that is to tell people
how quick or how slow a team plays.
What's interesting this year, I think is that obviously the top
two teams in the country are playing really slow.
There's only 300 and 57 teams in Division One.
Houston is one of the slowest teams in the country.
They're playing at 63.6 possessions per game, adjusted.
Connecticut's not much faster. Purdue is actually significantly
faster. They're about four possessions
faster than Houston is. But then you've got a bunch of
teams that play really fast that are in this, this top 10.
Auburn, Tennessee, Arizona, North Carolina, Illinois all in
the top 100. Where that comes into play is,
you know, to a large degree. What you find is that generally
slower paced teams do better in these adjusted efficiency
numbers because if you are efficient over a smaller number
of possessions, it tends to carry better across the data
set. But it's not the end all be all
as you. Can see here and that's what
makes teams like Auburn and Tennessee and Arizona really
interesting because they are efficient despite playing at a
very quick pace. The the way that these get
ordered is adjusted efficiency margin and all that is, is you
take the bigger number and the smaller number and you subtract
1 from the other and if it's a so in this case Houston, if you
take 120.9 which is their adjusted offensive efficiency
and 88 which is their adjusted defensive efficiency you get
32.89. Obviously there's some rounding
involved there. That's the number that.
Ken Palm or Torvik or the net looks at and says that's the
best team in the country because it has the highest adjusted
efficiency margin. And again, it it kind of, you
know, normally what you find here is you'll find teams that
have a higher offensive efficiency and a lower defensive
efficiency. But there's a sliding scale like
if you look at this like Houston is not as efficient offensively
as Purdue. Purdue's actually the most
efficient offense in the country.
They they score the most points per possession adjusted every
game. But what you'll see here is that
Houston is like hyper good defensively.
Like by far they are the best defensive efficiency team.
The only the next closest one is Iowa State.
So you take those two numbers and you kind of try to
extrapolate from them who does what.
Well, Illinois is a great example of a team that kind of
reminds me of, say, Indiana in the 2011, 2012 season.
That season with the watch shot season where they went to the
Sweet 16, That was one of the most efficient offensive teams
in the country. But they weren't very good on
defense, relatively speaking, to the other top contenders,
Illinois, only 73rd in the country in defensive efficiency.
The rest of these teams are are right up there like both numbers
are in the top 30. And generally speaking, teams
that are going to go the furthest in the NCAA tournament
tend to be. Teams that are really good in
both of those numbers tend to be like top 25, at least in both of
those numbers. So A-Team like Alabama.
Great offense and really bad defense.
I wouldn't expect them to do a whole lot deep in the NCAA
tournament this year. But a team like, say, Auburn,
who's really good in both of those numbers, I think there's a
real chance that they could do something big, you know,
provided that the bracket works out.
Anyway, those are all of how the numbers work there.
Let me show you Indiana, because the problem with Indiana is
obviously is they're way down here.
They're they're 86 and that's gone up lately.
I'm going to take you inside their page.
So we can kind of look at why Indiana is so low.
First of all, you can kind of track where Indiana's Pomeroy
numbers have gone. Indiana started the season.
I think it's important to remember like the projections
for IU based upon who was coming back and the projections based
upon the new. Players that were on the floor
for Indiana The The projection for Indiana was 50th in the
country. That didn't last very long and
you can see like very quickly, you know, they they win against
Florida Gulf Coast by 6 and they dropped three points.
They had that really bad game against Army, they dropped eight
points. They had the game against Wright
State, they dropped 12 spots. And that kind of set them into
this, this phase that lasted right up until the beginning of
the bulk of Big 10 season where they were kind of in that range
between the 70s and the 80s. And I'm going to come back to
why. And then you can see in the Big
10, the number dropped through the floor for a while.
You know, they lose that Nebraska game and now they're in
the 90s. And it is literally taking them
all the way through the rest of the Big 10 season with the one
exception of that after the Iowa win to get completely out of the
90s and back into the 80s. So they just haven't been a very
impressive team. Now the big question is why?
And I saw some comments today from people like it doesn't make
any sense that Indiana is behind Maryland in Ken Palm or in the
net when they beat Maryland twice.
Why doesn't head to And the problem that you have
with Indiana is that in almost all of their non conference
games they underperformed their expectations.
So if we go back to like the Florida Gulf Coast game as an
example, I'm going to, I'm going to walk you in here and kind of
see how to interpret all of this.
So if you look, go back and look at the the original game score,
Indiana was about an 89.5% favorite to win this game.
And you know the the original state of this game in terms of
what was projected was essentially that Indiana was
going to win by a pretty significant margin.
They only end up winning by 6. So the computers look at that
and say, well, we, let's say that projection was 12 points.
I don't remember what it exactly was in that game, but you know,
the 50th ranked team playing the 238th ranked team on their home
floor, it's like, oh, you should probably beat that team by 12
points. Indiana only beats that team by
6 points. And it's like that's a problem
that that demonstrates that you weren't as efficient either
offensively or defensively or both.
And so as a result, the computers are going to say that
team's probably not as good as we thought that it was going to
be. The Army game was probably the
one that did the most initial damage.
Army, as you can see, is, is not a good team.
This is a team that you know they're going to finish.
They finished ten and 22 on the season.
Their best win on the year was a road win against Texas, San
Antonio. Two of their wins were against
SUNY Maritime and the US Merchant Marine, and neither of
those games counts in the standings.
So only beating Army by 8 when you probably should have beaten
them by 18 or 19 ends up creating a lot of problems for
your overall statistical profile.
Because again, it's looking at your team and it's saying why
didn't you perform as well as the statistics thought that you
would. That's all that it is.
There's no bias in these predictive statistics.
There's no bias in Ken Palm. There's no bias in in Torvik.
There's no bias in the net. It's not about what we hate your
team, you know, and therefore we're going to give you a lower
number. That's not how this works.
It's it's simply a matter of here's what we thought you would
do versus this opponent based upon where you're ranked and
based upon where they're ranked. And if you exceed those
expectations, your number's going to go up.
And if you are worse than the expectations, your number's
going to go down. And that's essentially what
happened with Indiana for most of the season.
Even in their wins, in many cases they would not perform 2
expectations. The Morehead State game is a
great example of that. Like that was.
That was a game Indiana went into.
With a a pretty good overall #85.1% was their pre, their
pregame win expectancy, and yet they only won by a point, if
you'll recall that. In Indiana, in that game, if you
go and look at the individual numbers, you can see that like
Indiana's points per game or points the points per possession
in that game, one point O3, that's really bad, you know And
for Morehead State, for them to allow Morehead State to score
that many points, one point O1, almost exactly the same as
Indiana did, also not very good. So you continue to do that
throughout the course of the season and what you end up with
is essentially a ranking of Indiana that places them at a
spot where they are around 100 or as we see now like 86th in in
Ken Palm, because they've just consistently underperformed
their own expectations based upon what the computers think
they should be doing. Now you can say, well, Galen,
what about teams that they've beaten here recently?
They just beat Michigan State. Michigan State was ranked 19th
in Ken Palm. You know why?
Why didn't Indiana get more credit?
Well, hey, they did. Indiana won that game and went
from 93rd in Ken Palm to 86. They jumped 7 spots which is
sizable and and when you look at the the track of things you can
see there's very few moments when Indiana either gained or
lost that many spots. I mean we we can see them here.
The army game, they lost eight spots.
They lost 12 spots with the right state game.
There were a couple of moments where they jumped back up the
for instance, the the win against Harvard was actually a
pretty good one, a 13 point win, a really high offensive
efficiency number that jumps them eight spots.
Losing at home to Penn State, they dropped from 89th going
into that game to 100th. That's the kind of jumps that
you'll see when you significantly over or under
perform. Indiana didn't significantly
over perform yesterday in that game, but they did over perform
to the point where they got some credit in the net and in Kenpop.
So I just, I put all that together because I think it's
important to understand and I'm actually going to call the
screen back up and and show you a team that maybe you're like
why is that team better in the net than or the OR in Kenpop,
sorry than Indiana is. So let me go to the Big 10
conference page. Let's pick Ohio State's probably
the best example of this. Ohio State is one game behind
Indiana in Kenpop. They're 19 and 12:00 and 9:00
and 11:00. Indiana beat them twice, and yet
Indiana's 86th in Kenpom and Ohio State's 49th in Kenpom.
How can that be? Well, let's look at Ohio State
and see what they've done over the course of the season.
And what you see here is, first of all, A-Team that's pretty
good offensively in terms of efficiency.
Over the course of the season, 39th in the country, they have
an adjusted number of 115.9, which essentially means they
score 1.16 points every time they have a possession.
Their defense isn't great, but it's better than Indiana's.
They give up about a about a point per possession basically.
But you look through at what Ohio State's done and the reason
why their number looks better than Indiana's despite having a
slightly worse record in the conference, is that Ohio State
as you can see has a ton of close losses.
So Indiana for instance, that, you know that was a that was a
six point loss that they had to Indiana, they had a two point
loss at at Iowa, they had a three-point loss at home versus
Indiana. They had a bunch of wins where
they won by a significant margin.
So yes, they, you know, they, they beat Alabama for instance,
that carried a lot of weight. They won 9281.
It's hard to believe that game actually happened.
They beat Santa Clara, who's a pretty good team by 30 points.
They beat Minnesota by 10. So you know, while they
certainly had some some losses, a lot of those losses didn't
look as bad according to the computers because they were
already expected to lose those games.
So for instance, then I'll use this Northwestern game as an
example. Probably the worst game that
that they played all year, Northwestern was already
projected to win the game. So, you know, even though Ohio
State lost by a huge amount, it wasn't that shocking to the
computers that they lost that game, but still that game
dropped them 11 points in Ken Pop.
If you look at the way that these numbers go, it really
tracks very closely to if you have consistent success and if
you're winning games big while simultaneously not losing games
big, you're probably going to see your number go up.
That's what teams like Ohio State and Maryland, Maryland's
probably the the most extreme case that we have in the Big 10
right now. Like Maryland, yeah, it's 15 and
16 have a losing record. But the reason why their
efficiency numbers look so good and the reason why their Kenpon
numbers better than Indiana is they have a dynamic defense and
they run a slow tempo. So they've been able to keep a
lot of teams under their scoring levels and that looks good to
the computers. Does that necessarily mean that
they're better than Indiana? No, But it means that according
to the way that we kind of standardize and analyze teams
across the country, they are better than Indiana on aggregate
over the course of the season, even if they lost to Indiana
twice. And I know that's a hard context
for people to get their heads wrapped around, but that's how
these things work. Tyler asked the question and IU
beaten the by games by 20 a game.
Where do you think they're at in the metrics and subsequent
bubble? That's a good question, and I'm
going to kind of take a circuitous route to answer that
because I want to take a look at the net rankings.
And you know, 'cause that is the primary thing that the committee
is looking at when it comes to choosing who they're going to
put in the NCAA tournament. So this.
Is the net rankings as they currently stand, let me zoom in
a little bit here so you can all see, you can see they very
closely match what we have in Ken Palm.
Like if we if we flash back over to well we can't flash over to
Ken Palm here. But if you look at Ken Palm,
it's almost the exact same in terms of the overall order like
you've got Houston, Purdue, Yukon, Arizona, Tennessee,
Auburn, North Carolina, Alabama, That's your top eight in the net
and it is Houston, Connecticut, Purdue, Auburn, Tennessee,
Arizona, Duke, North Carolina in Ken Pop.
So outside of Alabama who's only three spots below where they
are, it's very, very interesting, you know to watch
that that dynamic play out. There's some reasons why those
two things factor in. What does the net exactly do?
So if you look at the net and and what it.
Provides. There's actually a nice and I
will put this in the in the video in the the sub stack
e-mail that I send out. What gets collected in the net?
Like how does the net get calculated?
So basically what they do is the the factors for the net.
Right now after they revamped the formula, there's the Team
Value Index, which is a results based feature that rewards teams
for beating quality opponents, particularly away from home, as
well as adjusted net Efficiency rating.
So that basically takes a calculation like what Kenpalm
does, where it looks at your adjusted net efficiency, again,
how many points you're allowing, how many points you're scoring.
It jams those things together. That's your Net Efficiency
rating. But then, beating quality
opponents, particularly away from home, is rewarded more than
just winning games just in general, like against weak
opponents or doing most of your winning at home.
The NCAA really puts a premium on winning games away from home.
It gives you more credit for winning in a true Rd. game than
it does for winning in a neutral site game than it does for
winning in a game that you're playing on your home arena.
So if you go through and look at the net explanation, adjusted
efficiency is a team's net efficiency adjusted for strength
of opponent and location across all games played, which we just
described. So basically that's what the net
calculates. It is like Ken Palm, but it's
got some extra factors thrown in.
So if we go back and look at that net screen again, what
we'll find, oh, I don't want to load a video, hit the wrong
button there, there we go. So if we go back and look at the
net rankings, what we see again is teams that have generally had
high efficiency ratings throughout the course of the
year, teams that have played pretty well on the road and or
on neutral sites and teams that have performed pretty well
against teams in what's called quad one.
These are all kind of complicated measures, but
essentially quad 1AA win in quad one means that you either beat a
top 25 team at home, a top 50 team on a neutral site or a top
75 team on the road. So you get more credit for
beating worse teams if you're playing away from home than you
do if you're playing on your home floor.
And the reason for that is it's hard to win on the road.
You know, I mean, obviously Indiana's seen that this year.
A lot of other teams see that. You know, we saw Kansas
yesterday, who's a pretty good team.
They're they're not, you know, top 20 or top ten necessarily in
the net. But they got smashed by Houston
in that game. In Houston, it's hard to win on
the road. So the NCAA has tried to factor
that into their selection process.
If you go down and look, you see Indiana State.
Indiana State's 29th in the net after that loss that they had
yesterday. They keep scrolling, keep
scrolling. Where's Indiana?
Indiana's 93rd now they went up
one or four spots. Sorry, thanks to that win
against Michigan State. But if you look at Indiana's
overall net components, you can kind of extrapolate them both
from what's here and then also from looking at Ken Pond,
because it's a very similar kind of calculus.
So you can see Indiana 18 and 13 overall, that's not great.
But whatever, four and six on the road, not good, one and two
in neutral sites, not good either 13 and five at home.
It really depends on who you're playing.
And then against the quad one teams that I described 3 and
eight, five and four against Quad 2, four and one against
Quad 3. So you combine that record which
is kind of that's what comprises your team value index with what
you see in Kenpom and what you get is this overall, you know,
evaluation. Now someone brings up that
Indiana's a bit higher in Bart Torvik.
So that is true And and what? There's some differences between
Torvik and Kenpom and I don't have the bandwidth to be able
to. Adequately describe all of those
but. It is worth noting that the way
that Torvik calculates these things, it's a little bit
different than how Pomeroy does. And yes, Indiana is marginally
better. You can see them right there,
They're in 78th, right behind Minnesota, who they swept this
year. Which again shows you that even
if you change the calculus sometimes, you'll still run into
the same sorts of problems if you're a team that just hasn't
performed very well according to expectations.
So there's no grand conspiracy among the computers against
Indiana. What you're seeing even in
Torvick, which is a relatively kind metric for Indiana, largely
because it likes the way Indiana's been playing defense a
lot more lately and and they have been playing defense
better. What you're getting is simply a
reaction to how Indiana's been playing relative to what the
computers thought that they should have been doing given
their offensive and defensive efficiency and given who they
play. If you look at the overall, and
I'm going to go back to that question, I'm going to pop it
back up that Tyler put up here. Tyler asked like if I you had
beaten by games. And by the way, a by game, for
those of you who don't know is where you bring a lesser
opponent in and you have to hand them money in order to play the
game. So like Florida Gulf Coast or or
Army, like they got a nice big check from the IU athletic
department to come and play that game.
Those games happen all over the place, particularly among power
conference teams. Those are always called by
games. So if Indiana blows out their by
game opponents, are they in the bubble conversation?
Let's take a look at Indiana's overall schedule so that I can
effectively answer that question.
Let's see here. There we go.
So. Let's go back to Indiana's Ken
Pompage. So where are the problems for
Indiana? The the biggest problem in terms
of their net or and their overall predictive rankings is
is what was alluded to by Tyler in that question is that they
really didn't dissect any of their non conference opponents.
You know if you look down the list, a six point win against
Florida Gulf Coast who finished 238th against Army.
We talked about that already. Only win by 8 armies 300 and
45th Wright State. That game ends up looking worse
because of the lack of a key player for Wright State in that
game. So Indiana probably should have
won it by more and so on even down in the three games at the
end of the of 2023. A one point win against Morehead
State and then North North Alabama was one of the few games
where they kind of over performed expectations, just
barely. But then you go back to that
Kennesaw State game, they underperformed expectations,
which is why they dropped there. So that's one of the things
that's hurting them. If they had beaten all those
teams by 25 or 30, yes, their number would be better.
Would they be in the conversation for the NCAA
tournament? Probably not.
So why is that? Because if you look at who
Indiana has beaten and where they've beaten them, they really
don't have a lot of impressive wins.
They lose to Connecticut on a neutral floor.
That's fine. I mean you're going to lose some
of those games. They didn't really over perform
against Louisville. They they they won that game by
about what they were projected to.
But beating Louisville anywhere, HomeAway neutral floor, not
going to get you a lot in terms of the eyes of the NCAA
committee because Louisville is just simply not good.
That's not a tournament team. Their neutral court win against
Auburn went terribly. Not only did they lose that,
they got blown out. They dropped 12 spots and Ken
Palm as a result of that. So that was another missed
opportunity at a neutral or Rd. site win.
Where have they won away from home.
So they've beaten Michigan non tournament team on the road.
They've beaten Ohio State non tournament team on the road,
Maryland non tournament team on the road and Minnesota non
tournament team on the road. That's that's essentially it for
Indiana in terms of racking up wins away from home.
They just don't have anything that the NCAA tournament
selection committee can point to and say, oh, this looks like a
tournament team. This looks like a team that can
do something away from home. And if you go down and like you
know, you, you look at the teams that are in contention, most of
them have at least one signature victory.
The home wins just don't matter that much.
And you know the the reason for that, that you'll always hear,
and it's an accurate one and I mentioned it earlier, is that
you're not going to play NCAA tournament games at home.
You have to play them away from home.
There's a rule that you can't play an NCAA tournament game at
home. So when you go through and look,
yes, Indiana now has beaten Michigan State at home by a
point. They beat Wisconsin at home by 4
points. They beat Iowa, who's probably
not making the tournament. They beat Ohio State, who's not
making the tournament. They beat Minnesota, who's not
making the tournament. They beat Maryland, who's not
making the tournament. So they're just, they're not,
Unfortunately, a team that has done nearly enough to get even
into the at large conversation, they're going to have to win the
Big 10 tournament, even winning in the in the Big 10 tournament.
Probably not going to be enough to demonstrate to the committee
that they're even in the conversation we asked, we asked,
Randy asked the question, what is Iowa's big victory?
So if you go to Iowa, you know what Iowa is struggling with
right now is the fact that their best win or best wins.
Maybe we can categorize that they have a neutral court win
against the Seton Hall team that they're kind of in conflict with
for an at large bid right now on a neutral floor.
They won at Michigan State, they won at Northwestern.
If they don't have those two wins, both of which happened in
the last couple of of weeks, I was not even in the
conversation. Even with those wins, Iowa is
probably going to be on the outside looking in simply
because they just, they haven't done enough throughout the
course of the year. We had a question about
Villanova in the chat from Randy as well.
So if we go back and look at Villanova's page, let me see if
I can call this up real quick for you all.
Villanova, despite having a pretty good overall efficiency
number, they're 29th in the country.
They're 14th in the country in defensive efficiency.
They have a couple of things that are really nice.
They have a neutral court win against Texas Tech, who's going
to the tournament. They have a neutral court win
against North Carolina, who's a potential one seed.
They have a road win against Creighton.
That's huge. Like not a lot of teams have,
have have won there. You know, Villanova's problem is
that they've got some bad losses early in the season, losing to
Penn, losing to Drexel, losing to Saint Joe's, and they just
have too many losses. I mean there's 17 and 14 right
now and you know, that's there's just a lot of losses there.
They missed a lot of opportunities to pick up
additional wins that could have bolstered their case, whether it
was at home versus UConn or Marquette or a road win against
a team like Xavier. So we had another interesting
question here and I appreciate everybody sending these
questions in. How much of these metrics are
colored by where they started the season?
In other words, there's a miscalculation of their starting
numbers impact them at the end much.
It's a great question and the answer is no.
So first of all, the net doesn't do a calculation until I think
it's like late December or early January.
I forget the exact date, but they don't even start
calculating until that point. For something like Pomeroy, what
what they'll do is they'll start a team based upon a pre season
set of expectations with some aspects of the previous year
baked into the numbers. But then what occurs is after 10
games, the pre information about that team filters out and it's
replaced entirely by what has gone on in the season that we're
talking about. So that's how you know you've
got a preliminary number like Indiana preliminarily was 50th.
That was clearly an over calculation of how good Indiana
was going to be. And so ultimately as Indiana
played games the computer started to count that pre season
calculation less and less until after 10 games suddenly you're
only focusing on the data set that's been generated so far in
the season that you're talking about.
So it's not like for instance, a like the AP.
Poll in football or basketball where if a team gets overrated
or underrated early, it can be very hard for them to either
fall out of the rankings when they deserve to or.
Boost their rankings if they start outside.
That's not how this works. This whole thing gets calculated
according essentially to had new data being added at all times.
Someone asked me to look at Michigan State.
It's an interesting case. It really is.
Why is Michigan State such a a big question mark?
This should actually be a bigger question mark than they are
Going into the NCAA tournament. They have one of the best
defenses in the country and a pretty efficient offense.
Their best win on the season is a semi home win by 24 points
against Baylor and Baylor's a really good team.
They but all the rest of their wins of note have come at home.
You know their their best win away from home and I'm not going
to count that Baylor game. Their best win away from home is
probably Maryland, which is the same win that Indiana has.
The difference is twofold between Michigan State and
Indiana. A Michigan State, again, because
they play a slower tempo and because they really do a good
job of holding opponents to not scoring, they look better
according to the computers. And the other thing is, you
know, they don't have a lot of bad losses, you know, in fact,
ironically, you know the the loss against Indiana is one of
the the worst losses, maybe the worst loss they've got all
season. Although if you factor in home
versus away, the worst loss for them is it's probably either the
James Madison game or the Iowa game.
Michigan State. Are they getting the benefit of
the doubt? Like there's no secret
calculation in the net. It's simply that they have.
They've won a lot of games, impressively against teams that
they weren't expected to win by as much against, and when
they've lost games. By and large it hasn't been a
lot of blowouts. 3 point loss to James Madison.
Six point loss to Arizona. 7 point loss at Nebraska.
Four or three-point loss at Illinois. 3 point loss at
Minnesota. One point loss last night.
So you can see what's happened is, you know, it's interesting.
Michigan State like, dropped early in the net, climbed back
up. And really, since Big 10 play
started, their play has been incredibly consistent.
They haven't been great. They haven't been terrible, you
know, and they're 10 and 10 in conference, but they've avoided
a lot of the huge ups and downs or mostly downs that Indiana
had, and that has helped them maintain their net rating and
their Kenpom rating where it's at.
So kind of a circuitous way of answering all of that.
But what I'm trying to get across to you is this idea that
ultimately it's not simply wins and losses, it's how you play in
those games and what the expectations were.
And so as we go through all of this, you know, you just have to
keep in mind that like Indiana had every opportunity to over
perform expectations or just perform 2 expectations and just
didn't. And this is something I talked
about on on one of the preview podcasts the other day.
There's an interesting statistic in Kenpalm that a lot of people
misinterpret, but it's a great, you know, and it's an
interesting factor in in trying to determine how things are
playing. Let me let me show you this
statistic here. It's called the luck statistic.
So luck in computers doesn't really exist.
What luck is, is basically looking at how your team has
performed consistently statistically over time and then
reconciling that with what your actual record is.
So if the computers are looking at how you've played in all of
these games. And it says, well, that should
be the 15th ranked team in the country, but you're you've
you've lost 11 games. You're probably very unlucky in
how things have factored out because you've lost a lot of
games that you wouldn't have been expected to lose based upon
how you play. So what's always interesting is
like, you know, looking at who the luckiest and unluckiest
teams are in the country. So Michigan State is a great
example of this, and it's one of the reasons why their ranking is
so high. If you look at this, their luck
ranking is 354, which means they are one of the unluckiest teams
in the entirety of college basketball.
Well, what does that mean? It means they've performed well
enough in several games that they, according to the
computers, should probably have far fewer losses than they do.
But they lost those games and so they are deemed unlucky that
statistically they didn't win those games.
A-Team like Purdue is one of the luckier teams in college
basketball where they have won several games that statistically
they probably shouldn't have won based upon how they play.
So you take that and you average it over the course of the season
and that's where that factor comes from.
Now if we go down to Indiana, and this is the thing that's
kind of fascinating about Indiana, there they are.
Indiana is in the top ten in luck in all of college
basketball, and that is another reason why Indiana's metrics are
so low is because according to the computers, Indiana shouldn't
even be 18 and 13. Indiana should probably be
closer to a 500 team. But they've managed to squeeze
out some of these games, including the game last night
against Michigan State, including the Wisconsin game,
where statistically they underperformed, but they still
won the games. And so that's where luck comes
in. And you know, there's a few
other teams that fall into that category.
Syracuse has been incredibly lucky in terms of how they have
played. South Carolina, who's at a
really good season, has been incredibly lucky because they've
they've won several games against teams they probably
shouldn't have. So that's how all of that works.
Now I got several questions in that space that I want to go
back and and track. So first of all, Tony Stuckey
asks do you think a cap needs to be implemented to avoid beating
up on a lower rated team by 30 points to game the ratings.
So I'm going to say the unpopular thing here and say no,
I don't think there should be a cap.
Here's why. If you go back and look at all
of the ways that we've tried to calculate sports and use
computers to be predictive and how things are going, including
the full margin of victory almost always gives you a more
accurate number than not. You know, there's been all this
noise from like, ACC coaches like, oh, the Big 12 games, the
net, because they're blowing all these teams out.
And you know, the teams are bad, like they're 300 and worst teams
like, well then here's the thing, The ACC could have done
the same thing and and and the ACC in the games that they
played that were against slightly better competition
could have blown those teams out too.
But they didn't. Ultimately, the numbers work
year after year. It's very rare that you get
teams that aren't adequately represented in the predictive
statistics, you know, as the best teams in the country at the
end of the year. I think the whole idea about
trying to cap margin of victory, maybe there's a diminishing
returns moment. But I think capping it entirely
kind of defeats the point, which is that you want to get an
accurate sense of how good a particular team is versus
another team. And just saying, well, gosh,
anything over 20 points or every anything over 15 points we're
not going to count, doesn't really give you a fully accurate
representation. And I think, you know, this is
where Indiana's a good example of this, Like Indiana not being
able to beat Army by significant margins where other teams were,
was a representation of, you know, the relative strength of
Indiana versus those other teams.
So just artificially capping it because, you know, people accuse
you of gaming the system by blowing out bad opponents, I
don't really think achieves what people think it's going to
achieve. It'll actually make the data
less valuable. There was examples for this in
football when they were putting the BCS together.
If you remember the BCS, they had margin of victory in there
originally. The reason why they took it out
wasn't because it wasn't a statistically valid measure.
It was because the NCAA didn't like the idea of incentivizing
teams to run up the score, which you could argue whether it
actually incentivized that, but that's why the NCAA forced the
BCS formula to take out margin of victory.
The thing is though, you get a better statistical profile of a
team. If they blow A-Team out and you
give them full credit for all of that, then if you blow, if they
blow A-Team out and you only give them credit for half of
what they did. So that's where I am not a fan
of of capping those things artificially unless it makes
statistical sense to the people that put the formulas together.
And it seems like rarely does that happen.
So, Randy asked. Do I agree?
There we go. Does do you agree with the
current process or is it flawed? I Randy, if you're still
watching, I'd be curious which process you're talking about.
If you're talking about the selection process, I do think
the selection process is flawed, but not because of any of the
computer rankings. I actually think they're the
selection process is flawed because they have all these
computer rankings, but they use human judgement to rank the
teams rather than, you know, letting the computers play a
larger role. And you can say, well you can't
just judge based on computers. And there's a little bit of
truth to that. But the problem is when you
start getting into subjective territory, you end up not really
providing I think an accurate picture of what's going on.
And look, I think A-Team that's good enough to over perform its
metrics expectations is going to be able to win against a higher
metric size team that isn't as good.
Randy asks. This is the clarification.
The idea that teams can't improve and that they are what
they're at the beginning IU as a new roster but clearly got
better even though though it took so much time.
See here's the thing, I don't agree with the premise of your
statement. IU has had plenty of
opportunities to get better and demonstrate that on the floor
and even though they've won these last four games you know
they've they've they have improved.
I mean they going into the going into the Wisconsin game, Indiana
was 104th in Ken Palm. Coming out of the Michigan State
game, they're 86th in Ken Palm. So that means in two weeks they
have jumped over what the 20 spots basically, which is a huge
improvement. I mean that is that is an
immense improvement. But The thing is you have to
judge the the whole season. You can't just say, well, this
team's playing well at this particular point in the year you
would. We've had people say, well,
maybe they should just take a record of how you played in the
last 10 games. The thing is, though,
statistically, when we've gone back and looked at that, what we
found is that doesn't really give you any clearer sense of
how good or bad a team is. You have to take us a team's
entire season in totality if you're going to try to figure
out how good they are. And so even though Indiana has
played better here down the stretch, at the end of the day
when you're judging a team's entire resume, it really doesn't
do a whole lot value wise to just reward teams who are only
playing better at the end of the season.
And you know, there's a there's a lot of examples of this.
I'm not going to go through all of them right now.
Ultimately, what you get is the situation where teams can win a
few games and string those together and maybe play better
than what their expectations were.
But ultimately, it all ends up being this larger picture, and
the larger picture is how the NCAA selection committee tries
to judge who's getting into the tournament and who isn't.
And I think that ultimately that's a fair representation
because you have generally gotten teams pretty accurate in
terms of their overall seating and how things play out.
There's always other factors that come into play, but I don't
think that it's necessarily a flawed process.
Indiana just dug themselves a huge hole with the way they
played for most of the season and that's an important thing to
keep in mind. OK, so Patrick's got some
issues, so let's see. I'm saying remove the
subjectivity, but the data can be manipulated.
It's proven by weighing the data so heavily.
You have the nonsense of Ms. use analytics being that much better
than I use. I don't think that it's
nonsense. I mean, at the end of the day,
you know, first of all, it was interesting because looking at
the all of the metrics put together, they only had Michigan
State as about a 3 1/2 point favorite or a three-point
favorite in that game versus Indiana.
Indiana won that game by a point.
Now there's a lot of factors that go into that.
One of them is Indiana's overall success at home.
Michigan State struggles on the road.
But it's also that, you know, Michigan State plays really good
defense and at the end of the day, Michigan State was one shot
away from winning that game. If you look at what happened in
that game, it kind of held true to form in a game that started
with Michigan State as a slight favorite.
Michigan State held Indiana to under a point per possession,
which is what Michigan State does, and they themselves just
couldn't score nearly as well to to do what they needed to do to
win that game. Just because Indiana beats
Michigan State in one game at home by a point doesn't mean
that Michigan State being significantly better in the
metrics is wrong. And you know, with Michigan
State, as I pointed out earlier, it's not that they blew a bunch
of opponents out per SE, it's that they've lost a bunch of
very close games. Indiana doesn't really have that
on their resume. And overall Michigan State has
played better in terms of offensive and defensive
efficiency by a pretty significant margin versus what
versus what Indiana has done over the course of the season.
So I don't, I don't think that that's data being manipulated.
You know even the arguments that oh you're going to go blow out a
bunch of bad teams in the non conference and that's going to
artificially inflate your stats. That's not artificial inflation.
That's that's just a representation that you are
beating teams by a large margin and that matters.
You know, I mean if no one's, no one's going to sit there and and
you know, in any individual game I think say well that shouldn't
count because that team only beat that team by XY or ZI.
Think ultimately as you get into this you're you've got to look
at it in the aggregate and you have to say that when you are
beating teams by a larger margin than you're expected to, that
indicates that you are probably a better team than the computers
thought. But these things settle down
over the course of the season. All of these curves kind of
settle in and it again, it becomes an average over the
course of time. Let's see, we're going to Scroll
down here and get some other other comments.
So Scotty says winning margin and efficiency metrics seem to
weigh much more than other factors.
Well, you have to keep they they do.
But you have to keep in mind that ultimately the goal in a
basketball game is to win by scoring more points than the
opposition. So of course efficiency margin
matters with that because that is ultimately the way that you
calculate that over 30 games or 35 games is what have you done
adjusted for opponent in all of these games And if you've
performed better against better teams or you've performed better
according to expectations that is going to factor in.
And I mean what I I guess what I'm curious with all you folks
that seem to be have have a problem with winning margin.
You know the idea that you would only count a win as opposed to
considering how the win happened and what the margin was.
That is what we had for years with the RPI.
For those of you who are old enough to remember the RPI which
they finally retired a few years ago, all the RPI calculated was
did you win or lose the games, what was the record of the
opponents that you beat and what was the record of the opponents
opponents? Well, that gave us some wildly
inaccurate ratings for how good or how bad teams were, and it
essentially made the whole exercise just a matter of
racking up as many wins as possible, which was not an
accurate metric, you know, So to me, is this a perfect system?
No. But I think that considering
margin of victory and considering winning margin,
considering efficiency gives a far more accurate portrayal of
how good or how bad a team is, you know?
And so that all of those things do have to factor in.
Let me get a couple comments in here, Randy says.
I figured after losing to Kansas, we were essentially
going to have to beat Purdue once.
When we didn't, it was over. I mean, there were other routes
for Indiana that didn't involve beating Purdue.
You know, and if you go back and look at it, I'm going to call
this this page back up because I think it's informative.
If you look at Indiana's games that they played, where were the
opportunities for Indiana after they lost that Kansas game?
I mean, beating Nebraska at Nebraska would have been a
really nice win. That would have been a
tournament caliber win. Instead, Indiana lost by 16.
Beating Wisconsin on the road at the time would have been a
really good win, and even now it would be a good win.
Instead, they lost by 12. Beating Illinois on the road
would have been a big win. Instead they lost by 8.
You know, beating Northwestern at home wouldn't have counted
quite as much, but that would have been nice.
They lose that game, beating Nebraska at home would have been
nice. Instead they lose by the margin
that they did. So you know a lot of this was
you know Indiana had some opportunities in the non
conference to build a resume that was going to be worthwhile
and they and they just failed pretty much at every every turn.
So it does to some degree factor a lot of different things in as
you go through and it's interesting kind of watching the
numbers go up and down throughout the course of the
year. And again, one of the things to
keep in mind is all of this stuff is being calculated with
all 357 teams. So every day games happen and
that has a knock on effect in terms of trying to figure out
how good or bad each team is, which then will affect the
overall calculations. So again, the computers have
taken into account, OK, Indiana won these games and lost these
games by these margins against these teams.
And as that goes along, the the numbers will change even in the
background, not just based upon what Indiana's doing in the
moment, but what other teams have started to do.
So like, you know, Wisconsin falling off the map a bit or
Ohio State starting to play better, You know, those will
have a push and pull effect where Wisconsin not being good
can actually hurt Indiana's rating because they they lost to
them on the road by 12. But Ohio State being better
makes Indiana's overall numbers look better.
So that's that's overall that I think that's an interesting
thing to factor in. Who's your three ass?
I thought quad wins and losses were important, but yet Indiana
and Michigan State are virtually the same well.
So this is a good, a good question and I'm glad that
somebody asked this. So the quad wins are important
and I'm going to call the net back up so that we can kind of
look through these together. Here we go.
So if you look at the quad numbers, yes, if we look at
Michigan State, who's 25th in the net now, Michigan State's
three and eight in quad 1/5 and five in quad 2.
If you Scroll down to Indiana, here we go, Indiana's three and
eight in quad 1/5 and 4IN, quad 2, four and one in quad 3.
Indiana does have a quad three loss.
But one of the things you have to keep in mind is that
generally speaking, the tournament selection committee
is using the net, the calculations from the net about
again, how teams have played, what their overall efficiency
margins have been, what teams they've beaten and lost, how the
computers thought they would perform all of that.
They use the net as essentially a broad based ranking tool.
And so if you think about the way the NCAA tournament
selection process works, there are 68 bids, there are 32 bids
that go to automatic qualifiers. So that's the the teams that win
their conference tournaments and then there's 36 at large bids.
So it's going to be rare for a team ranked below like 60 in the
net to even get into the conversation about being in the
NCAA tournament because according to this ranking
system, once you get below 60, you're not really a tournament
caliber team. So even if your quad numbers
look relatively the same, you're you know, unless you're up in
that range between like 30 and 50 as an at large team or
better, you're probably not going to get considered and the
quad numbers don't matter that much.
I mean we can go through and find some examples here like LSU
has more quad one wins than Indiana does.
They have certainly fewer quad two wins.
You can Scroll down and and find some teams like Georgia Tech,
Georgia Tech's four and six in quad one and four and seven in
quad 2. They're not in the NCAA
tournament selection picture either because they're 122nd in
the net. So you got this broad cat, you
know, container basically and you can cut it off, you know,
right between 60 and 70 somewhere in that range.
And you can essentially say unless there's like a really
unique case, we're probably not going to consider this team for
the NCAA tournament as an AT large.
So like Iowa is like right on the brake line.
They're 60th in the net today after losing to Illinois, So
they're three and eight in quad 1/5 and 3IN quad two.
And what's hurting Iowa is that they're four and two in quad 3.
So you will occasionally have teams that'll be in this range
that have like a ridiculously good record against quads like
Seton Hall's a good example, Seton Hall's got 5 quad one wins
and four quad two wins. They're 62nd.
They are in a probably a better spot right now than Iowa because
they have two more quad one wins and only one less quad two win
and they also have one less bad loss.
So that's why when when Hoosier 3 asks the question about quad
numbers being important, they are important.
But they're only important if you're in the conversation to
begin with. And Indiana is not in the
conversation because the overall metric that would rank them has
them so much farther below not just Iowa, not just Ohio State,
but Michigan State. Who's significantly above?
Let's scroll through Scotty, going back to what was talked
about earlier. That's why we see so many good
teams playing quad four games in the preseason.
Well, you, you see a mix of those things.
I mean, you're always going to have a little bit of a
sprinkling of of of good games, average games and bad games.
The argument for playing the quad four games is if you can
blow them out, you're going to get some benefits from that.
But you get just as many benefits by beating quad three
teams, quad two teams. The problem is if you're losing
or not winning by nearly enough against those quad 2, quad 3 or
quad four teams, the computers are going to look at you and say
that really didn't work out particularly well.
Then again, Indiana had multiple opportunities against the same
types of teams that that, you know, other teams were playing
where they could have won those games by larger margins and they
just didn't. That's ultimately where you get
a lot of the differentiation here.
And and I I think that overall in terms of like you're always
going to have teams that are in the lower quartile, you're
always going to have teams that are kind of in the middle.
You're always going to have teams that are up top.
It does matter how well you play against opponents relative to
their strength and that does get adjusted throughout the course
of the season. That's that's ultimately the
point that I'm trying to make. OK, Bryce Waltz asks.
Say Maryland jumps above 75 in the Big 10 tournament to give IU
another quad one, and IU takes two more quad.
One wins from Illinois and Nebraska.
A6, An 8 or 6 or 9 quad, one record and six and four quad 2
record isn't enough to get in the bubble conversation.
Probably not at this point, again, because Indiana's
predictive metrics say that they're not a very good team on
the aggregate for the whole season.
Have they played better over the course of the last two weeks?
Yes. But that's not how the NCAA
Tournament selection committee looks at these things.
And it's not how the metrics are designed to evaluate.
They are designed to evaluate your entire resume.
That has been a bedrock principle of the NCAA over the
course of time, and it hasn't really changed much, even with
the introduction of the net. If anything, I think the full
totality of a team has taken more into account now than it
used to be when there was like a legitimate set aside That said,
well, how has this team played in their last ten games or their
last twelve games? They got rid of that because
statistically they looked at it and said that's actually not
telling us a whole lot. It's not predicting success in
the NCAA tournament. A-Team could play really well in
their last ten games and then lose in the NCAA tournament.
So why are we really even factoring that in?
And and again, there was a whole set of calculations behind the
scenes that they used to make that decision.
OK, some other questions? Mason asked.
Is there a merit to the argument that winning versus teams at
certain points in the season are more valuable than others?
No. That's one of the things about
this whole process that I think is interesting is that the
numbers will adjust as you go along.
I mean, think about when Indiana beat Auburn, when, excuse me,
when Auburn beat Indiana, Indiana was ranked 65th in the
in the in Ken Palm. And I don't know what they would
have been at the net in the in the net at the time.
But you know right now like if you look at the way that the
numbers have have shifted around that win if Indiana, let's let's
say Indiana was 50th in or 60th in in the net.
At that time the net hadn't been released yet, but it was using
it as an example, that would have been a quad two win I think
or quad one. It would have been a quad two
win for for Auburn IN being 93rd in the net.
That's shifted over time because the calculations for Indiana and
all these other teams have changed.
So you know this is where a lot of the stuff gets baked into the
system. And what I mean by that is when
you win or lose against a particular team, if their
statistical numbers go way down or or come way up, you're going
to get the knock on benefits down the line or the drawbacks
of what that team does. So essentially, I mean, I I I
think the one exception would be if you play a really good team
early in the season and then they just collapse, you're not
going to get nearly as much credit for that win as perhaps
you thought you should have gotten when you beat them.
So like if a team starts off and they are ranked very highly in
the, in Kenpom for instance, let's say they're ranked 15th,
they lose that game and then they just deteriorate over the
course of the season. You're not going to get the
benefits of at the end of the season of being able to say,
well we beat a top ten team or a top 15 team.
At the end of the day, it'll be like, well, we beat a team that
finished at this particular number.
You may say, well, that's not fair.
But ultimately, again, you're trying to judge an entire season
through the computers and that's how it ends up working out.
Let's see Tony noting going back to what was brought up earlier,
it's a decent method to compare and rank teams.
It's not coincidence that every past national champion has been
ranked in the top 30 of offensive and defensive
efficiency. And that's kind of the point is
like are there individual exceptions that you could point
to and say we'll see, that doesn't make sense or that
doesn't make sense Of course. I mean and any any calculation,
any statistical approach to things is going to have
outliers. It's going to have things that
that maybe don't yet. You can point to it and say well
that's proof that this isn't the case.
But if you take it in aggregate, and we've got 20 plus years of
data now looking at this, it's this calculation is really
effective at figuring out who the best teams in the country
actually are. And I understand IU fans feeling
aggrieved by the idea that they have an 18 win team and A10 win
conference team and yet they're, you know, in the 90s in the net.
It's like, well, why aren't we getting credit?
And it's like the it's not that you're not getting credit.
It's that the moments that have been good for the season have
not been good enough compared to what other teams have done.
And even though you've played well these last few games and
have been rewarded for it because your numbers have jumped
up, your aggregate performance on the course of the season has
been significantly worse than the teams above you.
And those are the teams that end up in the NCAA tournament, you
know. And that's that's ultimately
what it comes down to. Mason, They call this comment
up. It's like IU football finally
beating Michigan State, the season the Spartans only won
four games. It can end up being a really
good win or just a regular win. Absolutely.
That was 2016, is what Mason's talking about.
That looked like a huge win for Indiana that year and an ended.
I think actually Michigan State was 3:00 and 9:00 at the close
of that season. So you go back and you look at
it and it's like, well, it seemed like a great one at the
time. I think Michigan State may have
even been ranked, but if you go back and look at that at the end
of the season, it's like that actually wasn't that great of a
win at all, Honestly. Like a lot of the wins in
football in that magical 2020 season came against teams that
didn't have good years. You know, Penn State finished
that season with a losing record.
Michigan finished that season with a losing record.
You know, so you you have to think about these things not in
the moment, but as you get data and as you're looking back on
the whole season, which is what the selection committee is doing
right now, you have to take the whole thing into account.
It's not just what happened at the time.
And and that is ultimately the key to keep in mind and as as
Tony pointed out was pointing out here, it's ten wins in a
terrible Big 10 year. So it's not just that and and
and look, I think the Big 10, actually it isn't as bad as it
has been at times this year. The difference with the Big 10
this year is that it just doesn't have a whole lot of top
end. It's got Purdue and it's got
Illinois kinda, and then it's got a kind of a lot of mush in
the middle of it. The other thing to keep in mind
is that you know Indiana to some degree their record is a little
more impressive because their conference strength, the
schedule ended up being 4th you know out of this out of the 14
teams, which essentially means Indiana played a tougher than
average schedule in the conference.
The problem is that is relative to the strength of the
conference. So you end up overall dealing
with a situation where even though Indiana got ten wins in
the conference, it's just not that impressive in the big
scheme of things compared to someone rattling off ten wins.
And say the Big 12 this year where you have a bunch of teams
that that have played at a very high efficiency number
throughout the course of the season, Michael points out the
Hoosiers are paying for the sins of bad play earlier this year.
That's absolutely true, and it's a shame.
But look, the other thing to keep in mind is if Indiana had
played well and then lost four games in a row at the end of the
season, they'd be paying for that Then too.
Again, this is an aggregate ranking as opposed to something
that's like punishing A-Team for for XY or Z.
It's really all about how did you perform over the course of
all of these 30 plus games and what did that lead to anyway?
I think we've run out of overall.
I did have a question that was good that I wanted to go back to
from from Mason. Let me see if I can find it
here. It was about the situation with
the Indiana State Sycamores who of course lost yesterday in the
Missouri Valley Conference final which was a shame.
Just had a they had a bad game at the absolute wrong time.
And so the question was how do you feel the committee will view
the resume for 28 when Indiana State over an 18 or 19 win power
16. So here's where a couple of
different things come into play and let me, I'm going to call up
where Indiana State is in the net to start off with And and
that'll give us a good baseline for comparison.
So this is actually a great example of what we've been
talking about throughout the course of this conversation.
Indiana State, as you can see here, the 29th in the net, which
is a good spot to be according to the internal computers, they
are in the top 30. They're better than, you know,
we we see Mountain, you know 2 Mountain West teams.
Florida Atlantic. Another Mountain West team,
Nebraska, who's you know considered to be safely in the
tournament right now. But what is it about Indiana
State that's, you know good and what is it the that's
problematic? Well, A, the reason why their
net is so high is because of how efficiently they've played over
the course of the season. They have scored at an
incredibly efficient rate. They've been, you know, they've,
they've played a style that has given them, you know, a lot of
opportunities to score in that. They're they're 41st in the
country in tempo and they've taken advantage of that.
They're 23rd in offensive efficiency, they're 96th in
defensive efficiency. They're the top field goal
shooting team in the country even though that doesn't really
matter that much. Where they are in good shape is
that they have performed well away from home.
They're nine and four in Rd. games, There's six and one in
neutral games. That does matter to the
committee because they want to see can a team win games away
from home. And so you can see you know
that's 15 out of the 27 wins Indiana State has are in road
and neutral sites that is that is going to be crucial if
they're going to make it in as an at large.
Where they're hurt is in a couple of ways.
Hey, they've only got 1 quad one victory on the whole season and
that was the win that they had at Bradley way back on the 2nd
of December. They've got 4 quad two wins,
which is nice, but they have a quad four loss and that is the
one that hurts. That loss that they had against
Illinois State on the 13th of February looks real bad to the
committee, not just because they lost, but because they lost by
13 points. They had an abnormally bad
shooting game. I think they had a key injury in
that game, which might be considered a mitigating
circumstance. They also followed it up with a
loss, which is I think still a quad two loss.
I'll be at a borderline when it's Southern Illinois.
Ultimately, the big problem Michigan State's going to have
is they just don't have a marquee win.
Their best win is that Bradley game that I mentioned.
They swept Bradley, which was, which was nice.
They beat Drake at home, but they lost to them on the road
and then they had a chance to beat Drake on a neutral floor
and they didn't. So the calculus for Indiana
State is ultimately going to be, can the NCAA tournament
selection committee look at them and say, we like you better than
we like, you know, some of the teams below you.
And and again this is where you're going to run into some
issues because like Nevada, even though they're below Indiana
State in the net, they have 7 quad one wins, Indiana State's
got one, Colorado State has five quad one wins, Indiana State's
got one. Indiana State gets punished here
because they just, they didn't schedule enough wins or enough
games against quad 1 opponents in the non conference and they
only end up with five total games against those teams, which
is among the lowest numbers that you're going to have in this
whole stretch. Now Florida Atlantic is kind of
in the same boat. They've only got 2 quad one wins
only played four of those games total and Florida Atlantic's got
two losses. The difference is when you go
look at Florida Atlantic, they have a top end win that
demonstrates to the selection committee that they can be a
team. That means serious business in
the NCAA tournament. They beat Arizona, who's either
A1 or A2 seed on a neutral floor that carries a huge amount of
weight. They've also got neutral court
wins against Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and Butler.
Those are huge wins. So even though certainly Florida
Atlantic had some struggles, they've done a lot of things
that the NCAA selection committee is going to factor in
that says You have shown to us that you can compete in the big
dance, that you can win a game on the road against a good team
or at least on a neutral side against a good team.
That's ultimately where the calculus is going to be hurt
from Indiana State because they just haven't really proven that
against another tournament caliber team.
It's unfair. It's disappointing.
I I actually think they might still get in because ultimately
they've they've done a lot of work away from home and they've
been good in terms of the overall metrics that might
barely get them into the field. It's just going to be a really
tight squeeze for Indiana State and they really couldn't afford
to lose that game against Drake in the in the NCAA tournament.
Let's see some some good questions coming in here.
I'm going to take a couple more about the tournament process and
then I'm going to jump over to talk about the Big 10 tournament
which I promised everybody. So Scotty asked, is there
actually a concrete list of factors ranging from most
important to least important when it comes to the net and or
placing teams in the tournament? Well, for the net again it is
where are you beating your opponents and how good are the
opponents that you're beating and how efficient are you
playing both offensively and defensively.
Those are the primary factors that we're looking at with the
net, and those are pretty straightforward.
I think if you're if you're winning games away from home or
on neutral sites, that's going to carry more than if you're
winning games at home. If you are scoring more points
than your opponents are normally.
Allowing teams to score, and if you're keeping your opponents
from scoring points at the level that they're used to, those are
the most important things with the net.
Now as far as placing teams in the tournament, it's generally
like this. You've got your net rating,
which is kind of your general category feature that that
allows you to split down how good or bad teams are compared
to each other using the entire corpus of the season as a data
point. Then after that you've got how
many quad one wins do you have? How many quad two wins?
What's your road and neutral record look like?
What's the quality of the individual wins that you've got?
Are there mitigating factors? Excuse me, due to injury?
Hold on one second, too much coffee this morning, clearly.
Are there mitigating factors that have happened throughout
the course of the season? Did you have a big injury that
that took out, you know, your team for a while or took you out
in an individual game? Those are the kinds of things
that get factored in. But you know, what I would argue
is that most of the time, like the beginning factor is going to
be that net ranking because that is a representation of on the
whole season how good or bad did a team play?
So everything else is kind of used to try to analyse
individual pieces of each team when you're comparing them to
each other. So think about like proceeding
or for selection. Seating and selection are two
different things. The first step is we need to
figure out who the best 36 at large teams are after we take
the automatic bids out. Then the second process is we
need to evaluate how effective each of those teams is so that
we can rank them one through 68 and that's where your seed list
comes from. And then you have to put them in
brackets, which is a whole another process.
So like if you're looking at a bunch of teams that compare to
each other like the reason Houston is considered to be the
best team in the country is their number one in the net in
terms of overall efficiency. They're also number one in Ken
Palm. They have 13 quad one wins and
they have no losses in quads 2-3 or four.
They have performed at the highest level of anybody in the
country against the teams that they've played.
So that's going to factor in. They'll probably end up being
the number one overall seed unless they lose in the Big 12
tournament. Even then, they might still be
the number one overall seed. And it's pretty clear right now
if you look at things like there's three teams that are
head and shoulders above everybody else in the country
based upon not just the net, but how they performed overall.
It's Houston, Purdue and UConn in some order.
And what order to some degree depends on all those other
factors that I just mentioned. What's you know, who are the
wins against cause like as we just talked about a quad one win
can mean anything. Like if right now if you beat
Samford, Samford, not Stanford, but Samford, the Southern
Conference team, if you beat Samford on the road, that would
be a quad one win. If you beat Princeton on a
neutral site, that would be a quad one win.
If you beat, if you beat Boise State at home or Michigan State
at home right now, that's a quad one win.
So Indiana, you know when you look at their record right now
and you say, oh oh gosh, Indiana's got 3 quad one wins.
Well, one of those quad one wins is against Michigan State, who
is 25th in the net. If they drop any more than
suddenly that becomes a quad two win, not a quad one win.
So that's why, again, a lot of this is like shifts, almost like
tectonic plates with how all of this operates.
And so these are the things to keep in mind.
Trent asks, before I get to that question, actually see if
there's anything else. No, it looks like that was kind
of the all we were talking about for the net.
So let's go to the Big 10 tournament.
So first of all, let's call up the the route that Indiana would
have in the Big 10 tournament. I appreciate all you folks for
sticking around for all of this. This was all kind of impromptu,
but I was bored this morning, so I figured I would do something.
So this is Indiana's route. They are going to be the last
game on Thursday. They'll play the winner of the
Michigan Penn State game. They've beaten Michigan
obviously once this season. They've lost to Penn State
twice, pretty decisively this season.
If they win that game, they'll go on and they'll play Nebraska.
And if they win that game, they'll play the winner of
whoever comes out of Illinois, Iowa, Ohio State, that bracket.
So that's actually not a good draw for an Indiana team that
would be trying to play its way into the NCAA tournament.
So a couple of reasons for that. First of all, Indiana's going to
get essentially very little, if any, credit for whatever they do
in the first game that they play.
And and the reason for that is right now Penn State is right
around where Indiana is. They're 15 and 16 overall.
They're 89th in the net. They're nowhere close to the
NCAA Tournament picture. Michigan is obviously worse.
Michigan right now is. Let's see where they are in the
in the aggregate they are 132nd in the net.
I just looked that up. So they're going to get they
would get even less credit and to some degree they could
actually see their net ranking decrease if they didn't blow
Michigan out by a pretty wide margin.
They don't even get credit if they beat Penn State on a
neutral floor for a quad one win, because they'd have to have
Penn State in with a net of 50 or above in order to get a quad
one win. So a win in that game is not
going to help Indiana necessarily at all towards
getting into the NCAA tournament.
So then you go to Nebraska. So you know, would beating
Nebraska help? Yeah, it would.
Nebraska's 37th in the net. If you play them on a neutral
floor, that is another quad one win.
And then if you go on and let's say in the ideal world, you're
playing Illinois, who's 15th, that's a chance that another
quad one win. But the two big issues that
Indiana's going to have with all of this are are the following A
unless Indiana blows out all of the teams that they play, it's
probably not going to have a huge impact on Indiana's overall
net. Because, you know, if they beat
Nebraska on a neutral floor by like 2 points or three points.
The computer's going to be like, that's nice, Maybe we maybe
we'll bump you up two or three spots.
Other teams will drop correspondingly.
But the idea that I use going to take these huge leaps in the net
to get them up into the 60s or even into the the 70s doesn't
seem really plausible. Like, Indiana's season is
represented in the net right now and you know it's like it to
some degree. It's like even though they beat
Michigan State, who's significantly above them in the
net and in Ken Palm, they didn't get as big of a bump as I think
some people want simply because A it was a one point win, B it
was at home and C it's it's a win that according to the
computers, because it was only one point and it was at home,
doesn't look that overall impressive.
And I would actually argue that that's the case.
It was a nice win, but it wasn't one of those wins that suddenly
says this team is ready for the NCAA tournament.
When Mike Woodson says in the post game press conference that
we've played as well as anybody over the last four games in the
nation, AI would debate that point a bit.
They've certainly played better relative to expectations from
earlier in the season. It's significantly better.
But in terms of like making a dent in their overall
statistical profile, not really. You know, a one point win at
home against Michigan State, a four point win at home against
Wisconsin, Those aren't playing as well as anybody in the
country. You beat those teams by 20 or
25. That's playing like one of the
best teams in the country, and that's what Indiana would have
to do to make any kind of movement in their net ranking in
the Big 10 tournament. It's certainly possible they
could do so. We saw them play really well at
Minnesota and we saw them play really well in that second-half
against Maryland. So it's not out of the question
that they could blow out Penn State.
It would be a big turn about from how they played Penn State
up to this point if that's who they end up playing.
But they're probably, unless they're going out and winning
those games by 30, it's just not going to make that much of a
difference. The second issue is that what
we've seen over the course of the last several years is
ultimately the tournament conference.
Tournament wins are not factored in that much.
This is actually something that came up earlier and losses too,
For that matter. This was something that was
discussed when IU women lost in that game to Michigan.
A lot of people were like, oh, well, that that guarantees that
Indiana's not going to host a first and second round and all
of this. And it's like pump the brakes on
that a little bit. Because what we generally see
out of the NCAA tournament selection committee is they will
not often let an entire body of work be adjusted solely because
of what happens in a conference tournament.
We have had exceptions. You know, there was that famous
year where UConn was like barely on the bubble and won the five
games in five games in the In the Big East tournament and
ended up as a three seed. That was, I think, an
overreaction from the tournament selection committee.
It ended up being an accurate one since they won against the
national title that year. But you know, we don't often see
situations where tournament losses are going to hurt you
that badly if you've had a good season overall.
For teams that are right on the borderline, they can make a bit
of a difference. But as we saw with Indiana men's
basketball a couple of years ago when they were surprisingly able
to beat Illinois in the Big 10 tournament and then came within
a whisker of beating Iowa in the Big 10 tournament, You know,
people thought that those two games, the win against Illinois
in particular, had safely put IU into the NCAA tournament field.
And then selection Sunday came around and Indiana was in the
play in game. And, you know, so you have to
keep in mind that a lot the NCAA selection committee has
gradually moved away from over emphasizing what goes on in the
in the tournament, the conference tournaments, except
for clear opportunities to differentiate between teams that
are right on the borderline and what they're able to do.
So like a bubble team, Iowa is a great example of this.
You know, Iowa as a bubble team has to beat Ohio State and
probably has to beat Illinois. But I think if they do that, if
they can beat Illinois on a neutral floor, especially after
having lost to them twice in close succession, maybe the NCAA
selection committee says that Iowa team should get in because,
you know, that was just enough to differentiate themselves
from, say, if Seton Hall. Should Seton Hall lose early in
the Big East Conference tournament, That's the kind of
thing you got to keep in mind with all of this is that, you
know, for Indiana to get into the conversation about the NCAA
tournament, they would have to blow out pretty much every
opponent on the way. And the problem is, because the
Big 10 tournament ends on a Sunday, the NCAA selection
committee generally kind of disregards what happens on
Sundays because they don't have time to calculate well, what if
this team beats this? You know, like if Indiana was
playing Purdue in the Big 10 tournament final?
The the idea that you're going to be, you can't really factor
that in effectively the way that the NCAA S there does their
selection and seating process, If Indiana wins that game, they
become the automatic bid. If they lose that game, the the
tournament selection goodies probably like, look, we've
already got the corpus of your work here.
We're going to have to judge you based on that and the idea that
you would factor in a game that happened right at the tail end
of of the selection process. It would be nice if that got
factored in. I'm just telling you all that's
not generally how it works. So I don't see a route.
I actually think Indiana got a bad draw for a team that needed
to rack up wins against good teams going, you know, trying to
get themselves into the NCAA selection picture because
they're not going to get any credit for beating either Penn
State or Michigan. They're not going to get a huge
amount of credit for beating Nebraska.
They're only going to have that game and you hope that they play
Illinois because you want to play as good A-Team as possible.
So you have to play Illinois, beat them handily and hope that
like doomsday scenarios happen for a bunch of other teams.
And even then, I just don't think it's going to elevate
Indiana's net based upon what they've done all season to the
point that they would be in the conversation.
So, you know, like Tony notes, isn't the lowest net ranked team
to ever get an at large bid in the low fifties, high 60s.
I mean, we've only had the net for about 6 years.
But yes, it's somewhere in that range.
And even that was like a special situation where that team had a
lot of high end wins, if I remember correctly.
They just didn't have a lot of depth to their resume.
Charles James said for context and how meaningless Ken Palm is
for predictive purposes, 2012, 2013, Ken Palm said IE would win
it all. Did we win it all in 2013?
See, I don't I first of all, I don't believe that that's
accurate. If you look at the way that it
the things were calculated that season, I'd have to go back and
look at the pre tournament numbers.
Like Indiana was not an overwhelming favorite and when
the season closed up, Indiana was indeed ranked behind
Louisville who did win the NCAA tournament despite what the NCAA
will tell you and they were ranked right around some of
those other areas. I think it's important to keep
in mind that with all of these, the net with Ken Palm, you know,
are they 100% accurate way of predicting everything right down
to score? No, of course not.
However, they are on aggregate a lot more accurate than most
people want to give them credit for because people tend to want
to poke holes in these things again when it doesn't suit their
particular agenda. But if you look at it
expansively, you generally have a really good idea of who the
top teams are and what they can do.
And you've also got the whole idea that just because the one
team is ranked above another, there are individual match up
items that might make it so that the underdog has a better chance
than you might think. Look looking slowly at the
numbers. The game yesterday, Indiana
versus Michigan State was a good example of that.
Should Indiana have gotten more credit for beating a team that
was only favored by three? Probably not.
But you have to keep in mind that the the various factors
that went into that particular game, including where it was
played, have a big effect. And to use 2013 as an example,
Indiana was one of the most efficient offensive teams in the
country. They played one of the most
efficient defensive teams in the country in the Sweet 16 in
Syracuse, and the defense won that game.
So that's that's the kind of thing you got to keep in mind is
that a lot of these numbers and a lot of the way that the
predictives work, you can find individual games where they
don't accurately predict what ended up happening.
But it's generally a good overall measure of the relative
strength of the teams. Anyway, couple of other items
here real quick. Yeah, Charles noted.
I doubt the highest ranked team has won the national
championship often, but they're in the mix and most all the
winners have been in the matrix top 2025.
That's exactly what I was saying.
Someone noted here we need to hire a full time analyst that
can figure this out and manage our analytic ranking.
So here's the thing, I know people have complained about
this with IU. IUI think actually did a pretty
good job of scheduling this year in relation to what the metrics
were going to be. You know the the problem Indiana
has run into in the past is that they, you know, in the Korean
era and a little bit in the Archie era, they scheduled way
too many games against 300 and and below ranked teams in
Kenpalm and then didn't beat them by 25 or 30 points.
That's kind of the trade off. You have to win those games by
large margins for it to matter. And you know we talked at the
beginning of the season about how we really liked Indiana's
non conference schedule provided they could beat one of the big
three teams that they had on the schedule.
They needed to beat a Connecticut and Auburn or Kansas
and they didn't do that. And then what made it worse was
that the mid level teams, the teams between like 100 and 250
or 100 and 300 that Indiana scheduled, they just didn't beat
by a sufficient amount of points to look impressive to the
computers and that ultimately when you compare it to what
other teams did, that's why you end up with the situation that
you're in. So so anyway, going back to
something somebody said about that, we'll end with this
comment. We've gone long enough here.
Michael says looks like the NIT might be the future but still
pleased the team didn't throw in the towel in the last four
games. Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I I think at this point it would be surprising if
Indiana were, you know, anywhere but the NIT.
But I think they've played their way into the NIT with the way
that they've played these last four games, You know now they
look like a team that's kind of on the fringe of the the
tournament discussion, which is what you need to be to get into
the NIT because that's that's the next group of games
essentially. If you take the way Indiana's
played, let's say, let's use, let's use February 25th as the
cut off point and you rank them in aggregate against all the
other teams in the country and how they've played in those
games. So since that Sunday, Indiana
has performed pretty well. All told, they're 23rd in the
country. Their defense has been really,
really good. They're they're 27th in the
country in defensive efficiency during that time period.
According to Torvick, they're 53rd in offensive efficiency.
They've and they've done all that despite turning the ball
over a bunch. They've done all that despite
not hitting free throws, you know, So you could even argue
that they've kind of even underperformed.
And most of where Indiana's been good the last few games has been
they've they've shot the ball incredibly well.
Their effective field goal percentage over the last four
games is 60.3%, which is 13th in the country.
Now, if Indiana keeps playing that way, if they shoot at that,
if they if they have a 60% effective field goal percentage
and they can play defense as well as they've played, they
could win the Big 10 tournament and get into the NCAA tournament
with the automatic bid. They'd probably be like a 12
seed if that happened, maybe an 11 seed, but but it's absolutely
still on the table if they continue to play this well.
So that will be interesting to see.
It's just looking at it in aggregate.
This is an NIT team at best this year and I think barring a loss
to Penn State in that first game in the in the Big 10 tournament,
I think that they've got a really good chance of being in
the NIT, maybe not hosting a game, but certainly being in the
mix as far as the overall number of teams that are that are
selected for that. So we'll see what happens with
all of that. Anyway, I appreciate all the
comments and thoughts and all of you who tuned in at various
times throughout the course of this.
I know a lot of this was kind of complicated and I know some of
you are still not convinced by the math.
That's fine. We'll just agree to disagree on
that. But hopefully this was helpful
to you both in understanding how the metrics work and also in
understanding how the Big 10 tournament might go and what
Indiana, you know, probably can and can't expect out of their
performance there. We'll see what happens in
Minneapolis. Be sure to tune in to all the
other shows on the back home network assembly call radio
coming up later on this week. We'll have the Crimson Cast,
women's basketball show. I think we'll be back on Friday
and X's and Joe's going to be coming back at some point.
Be sure to catch up on those episodes.
Crimson Cast will also be back a bit later as we'll talk more
about what's going on with IU basketball and see how things
set as the regular season has come to a close.
My thanks to all you folks. Once again, we'll catch you on
the flip side. Bring back the Bison.
So long, everybody.