Luckiness Wins Championships; The Onion on The Tourney vs. BCS

Hey hoop heads, get yourself on over to Kenpom.com for some discussion about the stats. Now we’d all like to be able to predict the winners of the remaining three basketball games, but we’ve got something that will help you out. One of the more obscure stats that they use is a thing called “Luck.” Basically, luck is a numerical value obtained from comparing your actual record to the record you probably should have had when you compute game scores with the Correlated Gaussian Method. Trust us. This is good stuff. So which Final Four team is the luckiest? According to the stats, here’s how it breaks down.

Final Four Teams (Luck/Rank)

Michigan State (+0.084/No. 7)
Connecticut (+0.027/No. 75)
Villanova (+0.014/No. 107)
North Carolina (-0.081/ No. 188)

Also, if you haven’t had enough of April Fools Day yet, you should head on over to The Onion, because they’re talking about the NCAA Tournament and making fun of the BCS. If you love the playoff system in basketball and wish it were similar in basketball, you should take a look.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on April 2, 2009 - Post a comment

John Calipari Goes to Memphis for Top Coach Salary

John Calipari is expected to leave his coaching job at Memphis for another vacant position at Kentucky. Calipari, who has been highly successful with the Memphis Tigers (going to the national championship game last year and the sweet sixteen this year, plus other tournament appearances in his nine-year stay in Memphis), has decided to up his pay grade and his coaching pedigree. Allegedly, the offer from Kentucky will be the highest salary for any NCAA basketball coach, eclipsing other high-yield coaches like Billy Donovan of Florida. He’s expected to make roughly $35 million (with bonuses) over the next eight years.

Do you think Calipari should have stayed, or do you think that he did the right thing by going to Kentucky?  Clearly Kentucky has a couple of things going for it- the winning tradition, the more powerful conference, and of course, the money. However, if he stayed at Memphis  he could have led the team to even more success and gone on to have his name become synonymous with the program, like Coach K at Duke or John Wooden at UCLA.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on April 1, 2009 - Post a comment


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