It's finally here. It seems like yesterday I was putting out the introductory article yet here we are. I'm going to post everything in this article, so all the information will be in one spot. I'll also make the section headings larger than normal so you can find what you're looking for while scrolling.
With the conference regular season coming to a close, what a 'perfect' time to post a study of conference regular season results and how they foretell outcomes in the NCAA tournament. I personally believe that the conference regular season is the most important component of a team's resume. It's roughly a ten-week, two-game-per-week gauntlet against the teams with which you are most familiar. A game plan can be put together for any opponent on the schedule, but when you know an opponent inside-and-out, their strengths and weaknesses, their tendencies and values, all from the 1-3 schedule-collisions each and every year, the game plan goes to a deeper level. Surely, the in-depth understanding between conference opponents and the results from their contests should reveal valuable insights into the true quality of those teams, and that's what I hope to extract with this study.
If you are a consistent reader of my work, you may have an inclination that I like Overseed/Underseed models. I believe many upsets are just mis-seedings and mis-evaluations by the Selection Committee. If I can devise models that create alternative methods of evaluating team rankings or even a method that evaluates the "perception of team rankings," then I can find these upsets before they actually become upsets.
With our second of three looks at the 2022 QC, there's a lot to uncover, so here's what you can expect:
I've been working on a lot of stuff (three of which were college basketball related) since the two updates on the January QC. Of the three college basketball related projects, one of those has been an attempt to identify a National Champion from among the many contenders/pretenders (seems like mostly the latter). Last year was a fairly easy task: A two-horse race between GONZ or BAY (apologies to third-wheeling HOU, your numbers were never on the same level as these two). In all honesty, I was on BAY the whole year up until their Covid-pause, and the before-and-after change was too scary to go all-in on them. I liked them because BAY reminded me of an even-more consistent 2019 UVA and they were playing with a similar composition in a much-weaker 2021 field. This year, I keep doing mental gymnastics and still cannot identify a gold-medal winner. However, I still like this type of project because it allows me to go backwards in time when basketball was actual basketball (not the low-skill variant played today) and it allows me to pay homage to my mentor as he was fond of these types of analysis. So let's have a look.
