According to Ken Pomeroy and Mr. Picklesimer (anybody else read “Picklemiester” every time?).  UNC is still slightly favored in a head-to-head matchup, but Kansas has an easier path.  Of course, I suspect this doesn’t include UCLA’s home state advantage should they meet the Jayhawks in the Elite 8.  I might be rooting for Pittsburgh next round.

These were done, as always, with data from www.kenpom.com.  Each column is the team’s chance of advancing to that round.  They take into account the fact that these games are being played at the Ford Center in Oklahoma City- all Ok. St.’s games are considered “semi-home”.

A couple specifics of interest- Kansas beats Texas A&M 57.5% of the time, and beats Texas 77.9% of the time.  They beat Colorado 98.9% of the time by an average of 29.2 points (although that may or may not be of interest).

Click here for the preview that actually gives you some ideas about how this game’s going to be played. Read on for the one with pretty graphs and hand waving. Format is the same as last time, so you can skip the next paragraph unless you need a refresher. (And for reference, here is the original post that kind of explains what I’m doing).

After the break, for both teams I’ve included a graph that charts the offensive and defensive ratings for each game of the season. Keep in mind that for the defensive rating, lower is better. For both offense and defense, I’ve included a trendline showing roughly how each unit has progressed over the year. The dotted line shows the national average efficiency. I’ve also included the average ratings for their last ten games, to give a snapshot of how the team is playing right now. To give these numbers some context, I show where this would rank in the full-season stats, and what team’s full-season rating is the closest. (more…)

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I posted an efficiency laden preview of the Ohio St vs. Wisconsin game over at yocohoops. I’m going to do the same thing here for the KU-OU game, but with less explanation of the numbers, since you PB readers have had a couple posts to get used to them. For reference, here is the original post that explains what I’m doing. There’s not going to be a lot of analysis, just numbers and graphs. Sorry about that, but I feel Hoopinion and Chalmersfan do a much better job of that than I do.

After the break, for both teams I’ve included a graph that charts the offensive and defensive ratings for each game of the season. Keep in mind that for the defensive rating, lower is better. For both offense and defense, I’ve included a trendline showing roughly how each unit has progressed over the year. Also, the dotted line shows the national average efficiency.

I’ve also included the average ratings for their last ten games, to give a snapshot of how the team is playing right now. To give these numbers some context, I show where this would rank in the full-season stats, and what team’s full-season rating is the closest. (more…)

Recently I posted some game-by-game adjusted efficiency ratings for Kansas, derived from Ken Pomeroy’s Game Plan and season efficiency ratings. The Hawks’ numbers looked good, but Jeremy asked for some context on how the numbers were changing as the season progressed, and how this compared to other top teams. So I ran the game-by-game numbers for Pomeroy’s top 11 teams. (Why top 11? I’ll explain Michigan State’s case later on.) Just showing you a mess o’ single game numbers doesn’t do a whole lot of good - there’s a lot of game to game variation. To smooth that noise out and get a better idea of a team’s general trend, we can look at a moving 10-game snapshot.

Graphs after the jump… (more…)

It has seemed to me like Kansas has gotten their act together a little since the Texas Tech loss. They’ve stopped letting inferior teams hang around, they’ve pushed the tempo, and their offense seems to have benefited. I wanted to see what the stats said about this, so I played with Pomeroy’s.

His Game Plan pages list raw game-by-game efficiency stats on offense and defense. These tell you only half of the story, though. You can see a team’s output, but you need the context of that output. 1.1 points per possession against Texas A&M is excellent. Against Baylor, eh. To get that context, you need the opponent’s seasonal adjusted efficiency stats. Taking those two pieces of the puzzle, I worked backwards from the formulas and parameters Pomeroy lists on his site to obtain adjusted game-by-game efficiency stats.

So, was my perception correct? Has KU’s offense been on an uptick? Here are the game-by-game adjusted efficiency numbers since the Texas Tech loss. “Equiv Rnk” indicates what their Pomeroy Rating rank would be if they played like that every game… OR what rank team they could be expected to beat on a neutral court if they performed at that level.

The offense has indeed taken a step forward. A full season Adj Off Eff of 125.1 would rank 2nd in the country (behind Georgetown). The defense has slipped a little - 84.6 would only rank 6th. One caveat, though - the one game where they needed to play like a top-5 team (vs. Texas A&M), they didn’t.

One other caveat - I cherry-picked this data to show only their recent warm streak. How do the Hawks stack up if I do the same for the other top teams? For each team, I used their most recent 5 to 10 games, whatever gave them the best results. I looked at the top 10 and a few other teams I suspected might be able to crack the top, so there’s a chance I missed some team on a ridiculous tear. But I think these are the 10 hottest teams. “.99+” is the number of .99+ games in the past 10.

Three things jump out at me:

• Georgetown’s offense is unstoppable.
• If not for the letdown against NC St, I’d be calling UNC’s defense unbreakable.
• It’s UNC and everyone else.

I’m sure I’ll mess around with this sort of thing more as we get closer to the tournament. For now it’s nice to see that KU can get as hot as any almost team in the country.

[Was going to wait and post this as a comment to Hoopinion’s usual preview, but I don’t know if I’ll be at the computer at the right time.] I’ve looked at the ratings on the Massey comparison page (plus the Dunkel), and compiled predictions for those that either list them or give explicit instructions on how to calculate them. So, here is what the computers (and Vegas) think about tonight’s game. (Game scores are rounded, so may not match score margins. And I used Sagarin’s “pure points.”)

• Greenfield … +9.3 … 83.1%
• Dokter … +12.5
• Dolphin … +13.3 … 88.4% (79-65)
• Sagarin … +14.5
• Vegas … +15.5 … (79-64)
• Dunkel … +16
• Ashby … +16 … (78-62)
• Pomeroy … +16 … 92% (80-64)
• Lynch … +18.3
• Moore … +22.9

Mean: +15.4 … Median: +15.8 … right in line with Vegas.

Over on Ken Pomeroy’s site, a reader sent in Big East and ACC tournament predictions based on his Pythagorean Ratings. (Thanks to Jeremy for pointing this out.) They’re about what you’d expect: the only teams with a better than 10% chance of winning their tournaments are Duke and UNC in the ACC and UConn and Villanova in the Big East. I thought it’d be fun to do the same with the Big 12 tournament:

At first I was surprised how unbalanced the Big 12 tournament is compared to the other two. The lowest chances of any team in the Big East or ACC tournaments is Georgia Tech, with a 0.42% chance. Meanwhile here in the Big 12, there are 4 teams with worse shots. Then I realized that the spread from best to worst in the Big 12 is a lot larger:

Big East: UConn - Seton Hall = .955 - .783 = .172

ACC: Duke - Georgia Tech = .954 - .731 = .223

Big 12: Texas - Missouri = .967 - .582 = .385

Nebraska, Texas Tech, and Baylor are all also worse than Georgia Tech (the worst team in either of the other two tournaments). No wonder people are dumping on the Big 12 so much this year. The bottom teams are really, really bad.

I was also a little surprised that Texas’s odds are so much better than Kansas’s, but take a look at their most likely opponents for each round.

Texas: KSU (.802), Tex A&M (.865), Kansas (.953)

Kansas: OSU (.823), OU (.864), Texas (.967)

Regardless of the stats, it’s clear that Texas are the two solid favorites to take home the trophy. Although if KU wins, the Big 12 may forget to give one to them.

ESPN has us as a three seed (effectively ranked #11) in their latest Power 16, and the silver tongues are wagging our way:

Yes, KU is blasting people left and right, but aside from a one-point W over Oklahoma, is this streak a product of a mediocre Big 12? We’ll know more Saturday, but I think that answer is no.

Check out the individual voter’s breakdowns here.

Luke Winn is sprouting flightless wings this week, naming the Baby Jays the 8th best team in the nation. His sailor-tongued missive on our own Julian Wright is a must read:

Damn, Julian Wright! The Jayhawks’ freakishly athletic point/power forward scored 20 points in 22 minutes on Tuesday in a win over Baylor — on 10-of-11 shooting. It was Wright’s breakout performance this season, his first time over 15 points in a game. And according to the Kansas City Star, it was the best percentage (90.9) a KU player had shot in a Big 12 game since the venerable Mark Randall made 11 of 12 attempts against Oklahoma State in 1989.

Dunkel says 3rd best.

Pomeroy says 7th, 4th and 4th.

Sagarin Predictive says 6th.

Dolphin Predictive says 4th.

Is this team that good or do we just know how to play to make computers love us?

Not terribly meaningful, but KU is #1 in the country over the last five games. We’re 9th overall for the season. For the last month, we’ve been consistently in the top 5.

This is the first year I’ve followed Pomeroy’s ratings very closely, but I’d rather be first than worst.

SI says that KU’s student section is the 6th best in the country. I’d be inclined to thinking KU students would be higher, but after last night’s no-show, we’re probably lucky to be there.

Ken Pomeroy’s latest RPI projection has KU at 38th, which is important since we’ve now passed that mythical 40th parallel.

We’re up to 9th overall in his season-long ratings and nestled comfortably at 5th in his last 5 games rating (oddly enough, UNC is number 1 in that rating - good job Roy). By the way, KP’s now predicting 13-3 in conference, with a lone loss at UT.

Dunkel has us at 4th in the country in his latest index, behind Duke, UT and UConn (before last night’s game).

We’re up to 19th overall and 6th in the pure points rating over at Jeff Sagarin’s place (the pure points is more important to Vegas).

Dolphin hasn’t updated yet, but I’ll try to remember to update that later.

You might be interested to know that the composite of bracket projections has us at a #6 seed. Most of the latter day brackets have us as a #5, but some of the less frequently updated brackets have us as an #8 or #9, so we’re averaged up a little. I think if we win out while losing impressively at UT, we have a very good shot at a #4. If we beat UT, I think a #2 is still *possible, but very very unlikely. A 4-6 is most likely at this point. I would almost prefer a #6 at this point to avoid a possible run-in with UConn, Duke or Villanova.

Thoughts?

It’s the day after a game, so it’s time to look at how KU is doing in the predictive power ratings, most of which I have become so fond of that I would happily let the whole lot of them live in a Utopian commune in my backyard.

Without further ado:

Let’s start with Pomeroy, whose statistical burgers are thick and plentiful. In his main Pomeroy ratings, we’ve moved from 14 to 13 after yesterday’s win. We’ve held our position as the 4th best team in the country over the last five games, but oddly, the company ahead of us is different - we’re now behind UConn, Georgetown and Oklahoma!

We’re also still 4th in the country in Pomeroy’s Pythagorean rankings and his efficiency numbers behind only Texas, Duke and UConn.

Dolphin hasn’t updated his stats since Friday, but we’re still 5th in the predictive ratings (it will probably be updated later today)

Sagarain hasn’t updated yet either, but I don’t expect a lot of movement, so we’ll still likely be 7th in that (pure points) rating. Update, we’ve moved up to 6th.

Dunkel hasn’t updated either, so we’re still 4th there.

So this meaningless exercise has proved to be nearly Ecclesiastically meaningless, quite nearly a chasing after a wind which doesn’t even end up being there. But that fact has never stopped me in the past, so you would be return-to-your-vomit foolish to expect that anything will change.

The long and short is that KU is a top 15, and perhaps a top 10 team in the country, right now. Given our youth, we may crash into some wall - physical or emotional - and end this season in a blaze of disappointment.

I don’t think that’s very likely though, because I’m not sure we’re old enough to have learned about walls, physical or otherwise. I expect this team to win out the regular season with the lone exception of our game at Texas, which I believe will be a great one.

Looking ahead, we will almost certainly be ranked for the first time this year when the polls come out tomorrow.

Here’s how the teams in front of us did:

#17/#18 Boston College Two wins on the road in the ACC this week should move them up a little.

#18/#19 Iowa - Lost to Northwestern, and deserve to plummet for that, but they’re leading the Big 10 and they knocked off Indiana in Bloomington, which should keep them from falling too much.

#19/#17 Ohio State Couple of wins this week, including one at Ann Arbor. They will probably creep up, and deservedly so.

#20/#20 OU They will probably stay where they are after two good wins this week, and I don’t think voters will count the KU loss against them.

#21/#23 Washington How on earth they stayed in the polls after losing three straight is beyond me, especially in the Pac-10, but two wins this week, including one over UCLA, should prevent them from falling out of the top 25.

#22/#22 Michigan Michigan can say good bye to their ranking after losing three straight by a combined 51 points. They will go down, and they will go down hard.

#23/#24 North Carolina For losing to Duke by 4, I don’t think they’ll get dropped. If they lose to Miami tonight, which is certainly possible, they will drop.

#24/#21 Indiana Like their B10 counterpart Michigan, Indy will fall after having lost three straight.

#25/#28 Northern Iowa A loss yesterday to Missouri State is plenty to drop them significantly.

#33/#25 Colorado That Colorado stayed ranked after getting run out of the gym by Iowa State is an embarrasment to the Coach’s poll. A loss to the Texas Aggies this week won’t help their case.

#26/#26 LSU LSU is a good team, but their loss yesterday to Florida will keep them out of the top 25.

I think three teams will drop in each poll, leaving the door open for up and comers like KU, Bucknell, Cal and UAB in the cool kid’s club.

I think KU will be ranked as high as #19 and as low as #22 in the polls. A lot more pundits began noticing KU this week and the fact that we’re 14-2 in our last 16 isn’t being lost on most folks.