Category Archives: in many ways the work of a critic is easy

Basketball’s most important factor feels eclipsed

Brynn Anderson/AP

During the men’s national championship game this week, TBS showed a graphic stating that UConn was shooting 48 percent and Purdue was connecting at a 46 percent rate. I winced as I always do when I see straight field goal percentages. Upon further reflection, however, my winces possess varying basketball connotations.

At this late date when an announcer still mentions rebound margin, for example, I wince on three separate yet uniformly unimpeachable grounds. Not only is the metric in question a perfect storm of statistical noise that can yield up-is-down, left-is-right results. Not only was there never a time when this was a useful statistic.

As if these reasons weren’t sufficient by themselves, there’s a perfectly good alternative that other announcers use all the time. This season I heard Bill Raftery, Jay Bilas, Dan Shulman and who knows how many others repeatedly and correctly offer variations on: Purdue rebounds almost 40 percent of its misses. Boom, you’re done. It’s easy!

Field goal percentage is different. It’s prohibitively noisy in the three-point era, of course, but the sport didn’t always have a three-point era. There was a time, 50 years ago in the NBA and 40 in the college game, when field goal percentage was a commendably sound stat. You can see why there was a desire to hang on to something similarly handy with the introduction of the three-point line.

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Why “selection”?

The first selection committee: Ned Irish, pictured in 1943. (Associated Press)

I said this:

Naturally, this begs the question of what we should do instead.

The problem’s in the very term “selection,” isn’t it? True, the NCAA’s decision making body doesn’t really carry that name. It’s not the selection committee, it’s the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. But we say Selection Sunday and “the selection show,” and we’ve done so for years.

No one bats an eye when we say “selection” because we’re using the term accurately with regard to the NCAA tournament. Selection’s precisely what is happening. Selection is exactly what should not occur, however, in anything rightly understood as sports. Selection renders that which is being selected a passive vessel.

In other sports, teams make the playoffs or qualify for the Champions League. We even talk like this in college basketball when we see teams win their conference tournaments. What we call an “automatic bid” is a euphemism for mere sports normalcy.

Instead of selecting teams in March we should choose criteria in May.

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Reduce the number of timeouts

Anyone with the effrontery to suggest improvements for Division I men’s college basketball in 2024 should begin with the welcome elephant in the room. The game is flourishing. Arguably it’s never been better.

Scoring is up because efficiency has increased markedly. Back in the aughts when “points per possession” first started to be bandied about online, it was a notable occurrence to run across an offense clocking in at 1.07. Now the major conferences collectively score points at that rate in league play.

The change to the block/charge rule this season has been a spectacular success. Offensive fouls per game have declined from 3.7 in 2021-22 to 2.2 this year. Turnovers are down significantly across D-I. Scarcity in giveaways means abundance in points. Ours is truly a golden age of shot volume.

Many fans of the game clamored for reform on this front, often in anguished posts on social media. Then the NCAA stepped in, made the change, and suddenly the issue has subsided drastically. Now everyone can promptly set about finding other things to complain about, like for instance there being too many timeouts. Be that as it may, the new block/charge rule has been a triumph. Take a bow, NCAA.

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Preserving madness

Mark Norris/Houston Public Media

One of the many joys of the NCAA tournament is that it can be savored as two distinct events. There is of course the desire to see the strongest teams with the best records settle this question head-to-head. This dynamic emerges over the second weekend and can on occasion shine forth to brilliant effect at the Final Four.

The first weekend’s radically different. The last five brackets in particular have shown how fully the round of 64 embraces the term March Madness.

Over that time we’ve seen two No. 1 seeds fall in the round of 64. We’re on a three-year streak of a No. 2 seed losing to a No. 15 each March. These are upheavals that “should” occur just one and seven percent of the time, respectively. We’ve been awash in rarity since 2018.

The round of 64 holds two qualities that are scarce if not wholly absent anywhere else in team sports as media properties. First there’s the sheer volume of the knockout round: 32 games in 36 hours, give or take. Often there are four games happening at once and every one constitutes the most important 40 minutes of the season to the teams and their entire fan bases.

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Major conferences as evaluative labor-savers

We hardly knew ye. (Photo: Shelly Hanks)

Recently at ESPN.com I offered some forecasting on what shape college basketball may take next year when the term “power five” is, at last, accurate in basketball. In summary, the Big 12 might continue to swagger smugly around the top of the KenPom leader board, the ACC may again bring up the rear, and in between these poles the already fast-improving SEC could be strengthened further still by virtue of expansion alone.

Whenever pieces concerning the major conferences are posted, it is customary to field responses saying this or that additional league should also be regarded as meriting the label in question. Fair enough. Here is one working definition:

Over a five-year period the mean of a major conference’s performance will be equivalent to outscoring an average Division I opponent by at least 10 points over 100 possessions.

Scoring margin over 100 possessions is of course a nod to what’s shown as AdjEM (adjusted efficiency margin) at KenPom. Tracking this over five-year windows prevents one-season outliers from wagging the dog, and for that the ACC is thankful. Otherwise the unsightly +8.58 the league coughed up last year would have resulted in the ACC’s major-conference membership card being revoked.

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Loving an always changing game

The NCAA tournament is shockingly close to perfect because fairness is sacrificed so ruthlessly and deliberately at the altar of drama. Every March without fail we learn again that literally any team can lose in a single-elimination bracket that requires six or seven wins for a championship. Possibly this isn’t the fairest method for determining a national title. Well, sports aren’t fair. The tournament’s a national treasure.

Incrementally and miraculously, the NCAA tournament evolved over the years into an iconic event worthy of Naismith’s game. The defining features of the tournament are access and single elimination. Limiting access to the top 68 teams in any given rating system would effectively kill the magic. You would still have a compelling win-or-go-home bracket populated by the top teams, it just wouldn’t be March Madness.

If hoops had been around in Talleyrand’s day he would have said smoothing out the randomness by eliminating single elimination would be worse than a crime, it would be a mistake. The randomness that governs which teams lose one time is the point. Then, in the compensatory fashion of any trustworthy dialectic, the teams that emerge without losing even once turn out to be not quite so random after all.

Access and single elimination are the unchanging sinews of a championship event for a changing game. This tournament is irreplaceable, no less so because the evolution of the sport itself has completely changed the content of its championship event.

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On the size, strength, and selection of the field

Where have you gone, Harold Olsen?

Tonight the 2023 NCAA tournament will open with a matchup ranked No. 10 for KenPom Thrill Score on an evening when there are just 10 Division I men’s basketball games being played nationally. March Madness is tipping off with what projects to be the worst game in the country.

Partly this is what transpires (or at least what we expect to transpire) whenever a No. 16 seed’s in action. Actually, the Thrill Scores for Thursday’s 16-vs-1 games are even lower than what we have on tap tonight. But we’re happy to tolerate 16-vs-1 matchups when we have three other simultaneous games from which to choose. Conversely tonight’s opener has the Madness floor to itself.

The number 68 is to blame for this. The number is not especially compatible with a single-elimination format. We can and likely should advance automatic qualifiers straight past Dayton to the round of 64, as is often proposed. Then again the AQ leagues currently recording what are strictly speaking NCAA tournament wins in Dayton aren’t necessarily enamored of that proposal.

Nevertheless, assume for the sake of discussion that Dayton is retrofitted to host nothing but at-larges. Then we would be opening the 2023 NCAA tournament with Mississippi State vs. Pitt, tonight’s No. 1 game in the nation for Thrill Score. This nominal “best” game, however, has earned that distinction by a numerical hair over a virtually identical score posted by Yale vs. Vanderbilt in the NIT.

We can do better. The start of the NCAA tournament can be just as good as Thursday has always been. All we need is a better number than 68. Happily, most even numbers are better than 68.

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How the postseason can value the regular season

The value of the regular season can depend on your conference. (unipanthers.com)

Recent talk of potentially expanding the NCAA tournament bracket has produced at least three instances of salutary clarification. First, it is abundantly clear that, notwithstanding a few noteworthy exceptions, the overwhelming majority of people who talk and tweet and write about college basketball don’t want the field to expand. Second, it is increasingly apparent that the NCAA itself has little or no interest in a larger bracket.

Finally, discussing the shape of the tournament field has brought to the surface foundational assumptions on how we should go about doing men’s Division I college basketball as a whole. Not merely the postseason, mind you, but the whole ball of wax, from November through the first Monday in April.

In particular, the belief that putting more teams into the bracket would by definition cheapen the regular season appears to have attained the status of conventional wisdom. In this line of thinking “there are real concerns about devaluing the regular season, and frankly, there aren’t many more deserving teams.”

Whenever the powers that be talk gravely about devaluing the regular season, that sound you hear is 78 percent of D-I bursting into laughter. For teams in 26 of our 32 leagues, the regular season tends to be an afterthought while the conference tournament is most often everything. Ask last year’s outright champions of Conference USA and the Missouri Valley about “devaluing the regular season.”

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Expand the field

Sam Owens/Courier & Press

[NOTE: This was posted three hours before the NCAA Division I transformation committee published its recommendation to create larger championship fields.]

When expanding the NCAA tournament to 64 teams was first discussed seriously in 1981, NCAA men’s basketball committee chair Dave Gavitt made plain that he was opposed to the proposal. “I am personally very much against expansion,” he said that year. “I’m prepared to speak against it. I’m prepared to vote against it. Whether I have the prevailing opinion, I don’t know.”

Gavitt did not have the prevailing opinion. Two years later when it appeared increasingly likely that expansion would be approved, he sought to make the best of the situation. “I’m not anti-64,” Gavitt said. “But I am greatly concerned about what it will do to the quality of in-season play. It scares the hell out of me.” Nevertheless, the NCAA men’s basketball committee approved the 64-team field by an 8-to-1 vote on December 3, 1983. Gavitt’s was the lone vote in opposition.

The field expanded to 65 in 2001, but basically the tournament retained its essential structure for a quiet quarter of a century. Then expansion reared its head once again in the 2009-10 season, at least topically. Retired head coach Bob Knight made headlines that December not only by questioning the “integrity” of a certain unnamed head coach recently hired at Kentucky but also by coming out against all this talk he and everyone else was suddenly hearing about a 96-team bracket.

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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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