Pool C

[Pat Coleman]

Hope was a bit ridiculous with their schedule this year. Eight games were non-D3. That IS a lot.

The MIAA schools in general schedule by that philosophy but Hope does seem to be on the high end even with that in mind.

Kevin Vande Streek was an active participant in the webinar on scheduling and the selection process that the D-III selection committee put on last spring. If they take that trip somewhere where they can get administrative region 2 games, they'll be in good shape. For example, for teams that come to the D3hoops.com Classic, we work really hard to get them two regional games. Not always possible with the mix of schools we get but we work really hard.

At Vegas, I think the Gustavus/Transylvania game we had, while it was non-region, got Gustavus in the tournament.

[smedindy]

They're not as isolated as some teams are, but there's no other game in town in Michigan for D-3 schools. However, nothing like jaunts down 75, 69 or US 31 to build character!

[sac]

Hope was a bit ridiculous with their schedule this year. Eight games were non-D3. That IS a lot.

The MIAA schools in general schedule by that philosophy but Hope does seem to be on the high end even with that in mind.

Kevin Vande Streek was an active participant in the webinar on scheduling and the selection process that the D-III selection committee put on last spring. If they take that trip somewhere where they can get administrative region 2 games, they'll be in good shape. For example, for teams that come to the D3hoops.com Classic, we work really hard to get them two regional games. Not always possible with the mix of schools we get but we work really hard.

At Vegas, I think the Gustavus/Transylvania game we had, while it was non-region, got Gustavus in the tournament.

You do understand you can't go to Florida every year.......like say Hope maybe did in 2008 and 2011

[Pat Coleman]

You do understand you can't go to Florida every year.......like say Hope maybe did in 2008 and 2011

I do, of course. It isn't necessary to be so defensive. I am not the enemy here. (Heck, my post you quoted was basically about Calvin, wasn't it?)

When a team travels, travel for in-region games, not to Washington or Arizona. At least in Vegas we understand the in-region concept. We got the maximum number of in-region games for teams, and it would have been more except a couple of teams there were in the same conference.

[smedindy]

Hope was a bit ridiculous with their schedule this year. Eight games were non-D3. That IS a lot.

The MIAA schools in general schedule by that philosophy but Hope does seem to be on the high end even with that in mind.

Kevin Vande Streek was an active participant in the webinar on scheduling and the selection process that the D-III selection committee put on last spring. If they take that trip somewhere where they can get administrative region 2 games, they'll be in good shape. For example, for teams that come to the D3hoops.com Classic, we work really hard to get them two regional games. Not always possible with the mix of schools we get but we work really hard.

At Vegas, I think the Gustavus/Transylvania game we had, while it was non-region, got Gustavus in the tournament.

You do understand you can't go to Florida every year.......like say Hope maybe did in 2008 and 2011

Hence the jaunts down the highways to Indiana and Ohio, or are you scared of the OAC, HCAC and NCAC???

[sac]

Hope was a bit ridiculous with their schedule this year. Eight games were non-D3. That IS a lot.

The MIAA schools in general schedule by that philosophy but Hope does seem to be on the high end even with that in mind.

Kevin Vande Streek was an active participant in the webinar on scheduling and the selection process that the D-III selection committee put on last spring. If they take that trip somewhere where they can get administrative region 2 games, they'll be in good shape. For example, for teams that come to the D3hoops.com Classic, we work really hard to get them two regional games. Not always possible with the mix of schools we get but we work really hard.

At Vegas, I think the Gustavus/Transylvania game we had, while it was non-region, got Gustavus in the tournament.

You do understand you can't go to Florida every year.......like say Hope maybe did in 2008 and 2011

Hence the jaunts down the highways to Indiana and Ohio, or are you scared of the OAC, HCAC and NCAC???

Yeah that's it. 

[smedindy]

Well, come on down! Home-and-home baby!

[Ralph Turner]

Well, come on down! Home-and-home baby!

Easily done...home-and-home in a two-year contract.

[sac]

[Ralph Turner]

Sorry sac, not Barbara Eden... 

[sac]

Sorry sac, not Barbara Eden... 

best I could do looking for that pose.  Its a very strange hole in the internet.

[Hugenerd]

Disclaimer:  If all this SOS number crunching stuff bugs you, might as well skip this post 

Lately there has been a bunch of talk about the SOS and if it's fair, etc., etc.  I wanted to take a look at the modifier that is being used to weight home and away games.  The current modifier is 1.25 for away games and 0.75 for home games.  I'll steal an example from Hugenerd that shows how these two games are practically viewed as equals when the weighting is used:

23-2 played at home:  0.92 OWP x 0.75 = 0.69 OWP
14-11 played on the road: 0.56 OWP x 1.25 = 0.70 OWP

So, the NCAA is basically saying that playing these two teams in different locations causes the difficulty of the games to be nearly equal...I can then interpret that to mean that they would expect the same outcome (win/loss) in either situation (or atleast the same chance to win or lose).  With my database of games, I was able to explore this question.

Since the OWP calculation is done with the teams' current winning percentages, that is waht I used to evaluate this (instead of using the win % at the time of the actual game).  I took all 4529 games between Division III teams that are in my database as of today.  I looked strictly at what the home and away teams' winning percentages were and which team won the game.  I first looked at a 0.500 WP team (actually all teams slightly above and below this).  I analyzed each of their games and looked at how often they won vs. other teams over a range of winning percentages.  I also broke these results up into home and away games.  So out of this I get how often a 0.500 team beats any other team rated by the opposing team's winning percentage.  I could also find the break even point where a 0.500 team should be expected to win half their games.  Here is what I found:

For a 0.500 WP team, they can be expected to win half of their games against teams with the following winning percentages:

When at home:  0.617
When on the road:  0.417

This makes complete sense that they should beat better teams at home and struggle more on the road.  If I have analyzed this correctly, then factors around 1.19 and 0.81  would be appropriate to account for this difference.

I also wondered if this same value would hold for good and bad teams.  So, I tried this for teams near 0.75 WP and teams near 0.25 WP.  Here is what I have found:

A 0.750 WP team can be expected to win half of their games against:
When at home: 0.857
When on the road: 0.650

This spread would come out with factors of 1.14 and 0.86

A 0.250 WP team can be expected to win half of their games against:
When at home: 0.317
When on the road: 0.172

This spread would come out with factors of 1.28 and 0.72 

In the end, I think the weighting factors of 1.25/0.75 are a bit too extreme but not terrible.  I think the results from the 0.250 WP set are a bit skewed so I discount those more than I do the other two sets of data.



Another way I looked at it was by taking these same three teams (0.25,0.50, and 0.75) and seeing how likely they would be to beat a 23-2 team at home or a 14-11 team on the road.  If we use the NCAA's weighting factors then we should see them have an equal likelihood of winning the games...but we don't.

Team	Chance of beating 23-2 @ home	Chance of beating 14-11 on road
0.25 WP	< 1%	9%
0.50 WP	20%	35%
0.75 WP	45%	57%

This is fantastic.  My only question is, why cant someone at the NCAA do this? And, instead of just using one season, why cant they do it over a 5-10 year period to get a larger data set.  This would give some justification to the modifier, rather than just guessing one and hoping it sticks (I think we all remember that last year the modifiers were 1.40 and 0.60, which were absolutely outrageous).

What I take from this data is that the current modifier is really only valid for bad teams, when the likelihood of winning or losing is low.  However, the modifier should not really be catered to this subset of teams, as they are not the ones that need to be conisdered for the postseason, or even the 0.500 group.  Therefore, based on just this analysis (I would feel more comfortable if the NCAA would do one spanning more seasons), I think a home/away factor of 1.15/0.85 would probably be most appropriate, considering that most teams that are in the postseason discussion will have records of ~0.75 or better.  Or, better yet, they could find the average record of teams that make the postseason (which may or may not be higher than 0.75) and calculate the modifier based on teams with a record similar to that.

Well done superfan, hopefully someone at the NCAA is reading this or that the idea of substantiating the multiplier by using an actual empirical analysis is considered.  It would be nicer to have some defense of the numbers that are used, rather than having to listen to certain posters coming on here and repeatedly 'justify' the multiplier by saying 'thats how it is defined in the handbook' or those two numbers are clearly significantly different.  I would even take it a step further and have the NCAA do more than compare just OWP/OOWPs arbitrarily.  Why not expand the SOS formula further?  We have computers now, right? Is truncating at the 2nd term (OOWP) a good approximation?  I am pretty sure if you get someone who knows how to code, you could have them numerically compute a more true SOS by doing a numerical sum that expands out many more terms.  Also, if so much weight is going to be given to SOS, why not look seperately at SOS in wins compared to just overall SOS?  Does it make sense to give teams tons of credit in a primary criteria for playing teams they cant beat?  If you have over a 0.540 SOS overall, but only a 0.440 SOS in wins, is that really telling us you can beat good teams?  With the way the mulipliers are setup now, there are many examples that can be given where this is in fact the case.

Obviously its too late for this year, but hopefully the NCAA will be more rigorous in their methodology in the years ahead.

Hey augie,

Just thought I would follow up about this.  I really think that if you did a full-fledged study about SOS modifiers over, lets say, the last 5 years, it would be publishable somewhere like here:

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?page_id=462

Also, for those of you doing your own mathematical rankings/game predictions, you may enjoy this paper that was published at the Sloan conference this year:

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Using-Cumulative-Win-Probabilities-to-Predict-NCAA-Performance-Bashuk.pdf

[Greek Tragedy]

HERE'S A LIST OF THE REGIONAL RANKED TEAMS THAT MADE THE TOURNEY AND WHO'S LEFT.

Guess they got it right with IWU!

Scranton is the only unranked regional team to make it to the second weekend.

ATL

WK3   TEAM

#1   Staten Island*

#2   William Paterson

#3   St. Joseph's (LI)*

EAST

WK3   TEAM

#1   Hartwick*

#2   Oswego State*

#3   Hobart*

#4   NYU

#5   Medaille*

GL

WK3   TEAM

#1   Hope*

#2   Wittenberg*

#3   Wooster

#4   Ohio Wesleyan

#5   Bethany (W.Va.)*

MA

WK3   TEAM

#1   Cabrini*

#2   Franklin & Marshall*

#3   St. Mary's (Md)*

#5   Messiah*

#6   Misericordia*

MW

WK3   TEAM

#1   Washington U.*

#2   Wheaton (IL)

#3   Transylvania*

#5   Illinois Wesleyan

#7   North Central (IL)*

NE

WK3   TEAM

#1   Amherst*

#2   Middlebury

#3   MIT*

#4   Rhode Island College

#5   W. Connecticut

#6   E. Connecticut*

#9   Albertus Magnus*

#11   Becker*

#12   Salem State*

STH

WK3   TEAM

#1   Mary Hardin-Baylor*

#2   Virginia Wesleyan*

#3   Birmingham-Southern*

#4   Randolph-Macon

#5   Christopher Newport*

WST

WK3   TEAM

#1   Whitewater*

#2   Whitworth*

#3   River Falls

#4   Stevens Point

#5   Claremont-Mudd-Scripps*

#6   St. Thomas*

#7   Gustavus Adolphus

[AO]

What about adjusting SOS to account for different numbers of conference games between conferences?  Does anyone know of conferences without a balanced schedule?

Simply take Team A's non-conference SOS and add the strength of the conference.

Team A would not be penalized for playing in a good league that plays a lot of conference games and Team B would not be helped by playing in a very poor league that plays a lot of conference games.

I assume we would give greater weight to the strength of the conference, maybe 75%.

[sac]

What about adjusting SOS to account for different numbers of conference games between conferences?  Does anyone know of conferences without a balanced schedule?

Simply take Team A's non-conference SOS and add the strength of the conference.

Team A would not be penalized for playing in a good league that plays a lot of conference games and Team B would not be helped by playing in a very poor league that plays a lot of conference games.

I assume we would give greater weight to the strength of the conference, maybe 75%.

A couple I'm aware of.

NESCAC--does not play a round-robin schedule

NCAC--plays an imbalanced schedule