Author Archives: johngasaway

Your updated rankings for tournament wins in the modern era

(kuathletics.com)

We have now seen 37 “modern” NCAA tournaments played to completion. All but the first one in 1985 used a shot clock. All but the first two, in 1985 and 1986, featured a three-point line.

The expansion of the tournament to 64 teams in the 1980s also did away with byes, giving us a true measuring stick when teams accumulate tournament victories over the years. Yes, the NCAA muddied that up a bit by expanding past 64 teams starting in 2001, but we can adjust with a well-placed asterisk here and there.

Here are the teams with the most tournament victories since the field expanded in 1985 right through to Kansas winning the 2022 title.

NCAA tournament wins, 1985-2022

                         Wins
1.  Duke                 101    
2.  North Carolina        96 
3.  Kansas                92 (Congratulations!)
4.  Kentucky              83
5.  Michigan State        60
6.  Syracuse              57* 2018
7.  Arizona               56
8.  UConn                 55
9.  UCLA                  53* 2021
10. Michigan              51* 2016
11. Louisville            49
12. Florida               48
13. Villanova             47
14. Gonzaga               41
15. Oklahoma              37
16. Arkansas              36
    Wisconsin             36
18. Indiana               36* 2022
19. Ohio State            35
    Purdue                35

* Round of 68 wins

Note the gap between Kentucky and Michigan State. That top four’s been in a league of its own historically speaking.

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Hoping for a bare minimum of official reviews

(NCAA.com)

Any worthwhile Final Four preview should provide an informed forecast of events.

This will be the first Final Four in three long years with fans.

Jim Nantz loves referencing past Final Four locations and he will mention that this is the 40th anniversary of Michael Jordan’s game-winning shot against Georgetown, which also occurred at the Superdome. He may also mention that this is the 35th anniversary of Keith Smart’s game-winning shot against Syracuse, which also occurred at the Superdome. He will definitely mention that this is the 29th anniversary of North Carolina’s 1993 national title, which was also won at the Superdome. There would seem to be no particular reasons to mention the 2003 title won by Syracuse or the 2012 championship captured by Kentucky, both of which also occurred at the Superdome, but you never know.

Bill Raftery will make self-deprecating remarks about his coaching and playing days. In fact he was a good coach and an even better player. He was La Salle’s leading scorer as a sophomore in an era when sophomores were the youngest players on the floor.

Grant Hill may sound unduly self-deprecating in tone with reference to his playing days even though he was a first-team All American in 1994. He will say you don’t need a three here.

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Let’s never speak of shooting backgrounds again

Brady Manek is averaging four made threes per tournament game on 47 percent shooting. He is the exception to the rule in 2022. (Maggie Hobson, goheels.com)

The Superdome is about to welcome the Final Four for a sixth time, which means the site is moving up the all-time rankings for most national title games hosted. Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City is still the leader with nine, and at the final horn on Monday night the Superdome will officially be tied with Louisville’s Freedom Hall for second place among structures that still exist. (“Old” Madison Square Garden hosted seven NCAA title games, though these weren’t what we would today call “true” Final Fours. Read more!)

Should one or more of the upcoming three games feature ugly three-point shooting, there’s a fair chance the shooting background in the notoriously cavernous New Orleans edifice will be cited as a factor. Then again we’ve already seen 64 tournament games played, and none of them took place in a venue that can host an NFL game. Last weekend’s regionals, for example, occurred in NBA arenas occupied by the Warriors, Bulls, Spurs, and Sixers. To this point, the 2022 tournament has played out exclusively in basketball venues.

Which is interesting, because the three-point shooting in the tournament this year has been historically awful.

(Data from the indispensable sports-reference.com. Pay no mind to that automatically generated 2020 label.)

No, don’t blame that new ball that was rolled out for this year’s men’s and women’s tournaments. Shooting on free throws has held up just fine on the men’s side (73.0 percent) compared to last year’s tournament (72.3). It would be an odd ball indeed that poses no problem on free throws but becomes belligerent on threes.

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Villanova’s quest for free throw glory

Harvard’s Bob Ferry, right, defends Duke’s Johnny Dawkins in 1984. (Sean Kardon/Associated Press)

The one guaranteed source of drama in Villanova’s round of 32 game against Ohio State today will be watching what Jay Wright’s team does at the free throw line.

If the Wildcats were to go 7-of-10 at the line and be eliminated from the bracket by the Buckeyes, for example, then Villanova’s name will go down in the record books. Conversely, going 6-of-10? A forgotten season. That’s how close this thing is.

“This thing” is the record for the most accurate free throw shooting team of all time. The record has been held for decades by Harvard’s 1984 team, which converted 535 of its 651 tries for a success rate of 82.18 percent. Today, 38 years later, Villanova enters its game against OSU at 82.53. The Crimson of 1984 may watch today’s game in a state of high anxiety.

For a time it looked as if the record might fall last year. Both Colorado and Oral Roberts came close to setting a new standard, and the New York Times ran a piece on the free throw chase by Ken Plutnicki, who averaged nine points for that Harvard team.

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Your 2022 bracket should be shot volume-aware

Keegan Murray gets many chances to score. (Brian Ray/hawkeyesports.com)

Iowa is an offensive juggernaut despite the fact that the team did not shoot as accurately from the field as Purdue in conference play. The Hawkeyes also came in behind Ohio State in terms of effective field goal percentage. Indeed, Fran McCaffery’s group was less successful at getting the ball into the basket than the Boilermakers, the Buckeyes, Michigan, Illinois and Michigan State in Big Ten play. Yet Iowa had the league’s best offense.

We see this same paradox at work in the whole-season results at KenPom. The Hawkeyes rank No. 2 in the nation for adjusted offensive efficiency behind only Gonzaga. (Grab those precious pre-tournament numbers today while you still can! There are just a few hours left, otherwise you’ll have to root through Ken’s CSV formatting from here to eternity.) Iowa achieved this lofty status despite the fact that there are 32 teams nationally that shot more accurately than the Hawkeyes this season. Shooting is so overrated.

No, actually, making shots is a good thing. It will always will be No. 1 with a bullet among the four factors in terms of importance. (Free throw rate, by stark contrast, is purely adverbial. Ask Virginia about 2019.) Because I’m basically lazy and because I grew fatigued with always having to juggle four factors, a few years back I decided to shrink the group down to just three factors. Don’t tell Dean Oliver.

By combining turnover and offensive rebound rates into one number, we get a nifty little item that correlates quite well with points per possession.

In 2022, Iowa looks beautiful in terms of the nifty little item.

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The trouble with committees

Until last night, you could subscribe to a Whig history of NCAA tournament selection and seeding even if you doubted the wisdom of using a committee for that process. Yes, the history ran, there was a bad three-letter sorting metric in the old days, but now there’s a sound three-letter sorting metric.

The committee appeared to be growing more savvy. See? the committee would say. You don’t need to replace us with the wealth of insightful metrics of the 2020s. We love them! We use them and we know how to step in when one metric disagrees with another. You need us.

Then last night happened. The trend up until this year had been to put together the top of the bracket in a manner that year by year was becoming progressively more aware of measures of team strength. Then, down at the cut line, measures of win value would make the tough decisions.

It didn’t work out that way in 2022. A stronger team was given a No. 3 seed at the expense of a weaker team’s spot on the No. 2 line. At the at-large cutoff, bids and one near-invite (that would have been actual had there not been a bid thief in the Atlantic 10) were awarded like golden tickets at the Wonka factory. The reason cited was good wins.

Really?

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Stop worrying about “top 25 in both offense and defense at KenPom”

How did this happen? (Tim Nwachukwu/Getty)

As conference tournaments take over the calendar, a different rite of March entirely is with us once again. All during Champ Week and especially next week when brackets are being completed, you may hear this team praised or that one doubted because it does or does not “rank in the top 25 at KenPom for adjusted efficiency in both offense and defense.”

Being one of the nation’s best teams on both sides of the ball is surely a good thing. All of us would like our team to make this list. Furthermore, teams meeting this specific top-25 definition of performance ambidexterity have indeed won a flock of national titles over the past two decades.

Nevertheless, there’s a curious quality of wheel-reinvention at work here. In fact, the first sentence on the warning label for this evaluative rule is that it’s 0-for-1 over the past 12 months. The dual-top-25 thing ruled out Baylor as a potential national champion last year.

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How the entire season will benefit from bringing selection out of the dark ages

(NCAA.com)

The selection process for the NCAA tournament predates the shot clock and the three-point line. While the members of the NCAA men’s basketball committee are conscientious and, happily, they now have a wealth of insightful data at their fingertips, selection still comes down to 12 people going into a room and making a bracket.

It’s remarkable that we still do it this way. Someday we’ll look back on the committee era and marvel that a 1960s-vintage process survived as long as it did.

Instead of creating a bracket in March, the men’s basketball committee should convene in May or June or July and make a completely team-blind determination of how the tournament field will be selected and seeded. The committee will then sit back and let the season select its own postseason field.

Whether the committee chooses to select and seed the field according to this set of metrics or that one will be a weighty matter for the men and women charged with making the decision. That importance, however, is likely to be overstated and ultimately misconstrued by two otherwise dissimilar populations of onlookers.

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Age and college basketball

In terms of roster age, Duke’s as young as past one-and-done-heavy teams. What that will mean when pretty much the rest of Division I is older than normal remains to be seen. (goduke.com)

The population of men’s Division I college basketball rosters as a whole in 2022 may be older than it’s been at any time since first-year students were granted athletic eligibility in the 1970s. If this is indeed the case, the geriatric shift has been brought about by allowances in eligibility granted in response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it’s possible we already started seeing the consequences of this demographic adjustment last year. With the benefit of hindsight, Baylor looked pretty old last spring even for a national champion in the one-and-done era not named “Duke” or “Kentucky.”

The pandemic may have expanded our definition of “old”
National champions, average age weighted by minutes (AAWM)

                              AAWM
2012    Kentucky              19.7
2013    Louisville            21.7
2014    UConn                 21.7
2015    Duke                  20.1
2016    Villanova             21.1
2017    North Carolina        21.6
2018    Villanova             21.2
2019    Virginia              21.4

2021    Baylor                22.3

Age on March 1 of title season

Poor Gonzaga. The Bulldogs arrived at the 2021 title game sporting a very late-2010s-looking AAWM of 21.0, doubtless thinking it was business as usual in the world of college basketball actuarial tables.

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These are the teams taking the most or least shots in 2022

The Big Ten places a premium on shot volume. The Big 12 not so much. (uwbadgers.com)

Wisconsin is ranked No. 11 in the AP poll and the Badgers are currently being projected as an NCAA tournament No. 3 seed by the bracket hive mind. Greg Gard’s team has achieved this lofty status in spite of the fact that this very same group barely cracks the top 30 at KenPom and, indeed, has outscored its Big Ten opponents by an average of just 0.6 points per game over the course of 11 outings.

What can account for this disparity? Start with the usual February suspects, such as Wisconsin’s almost Providence-like wizardry in close games. The Badgers are 12-1 in contests decided by single digits, with the only close loss coming at the hands of the aforementioned clutch Friars.

It is also the case, however, that Johnny Davis and his mates are actively and wantonly deceiving our eyes. When you watch a Wisconsin game or when a studio analyst breaks down some UW half-court sequences at the intermission, it’s possible that neither of you will remark upon the fact that Gard’s charges recorded hardly any turnovers. Yet that very fact is a significant ingredient in how the sausage gets made in Madison. The Badgers own the lowest turnover rate of any major-conference team in league play, and that allows them to attempt an exceptionally high number of shots.

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