Pool C

[Hugenerd]

After catching up on the recent discussion on this thread regarding the new SOS formula, I can onbviously say that I hadn't thought about the new formula deeply enough initialy.  And, although I understand the NCAAs intent behind the new formula, I agree with Knightslappy and others that it was implemented incorrectly and is just flat out wrong.  I know there have been numerous examples of how you can come up with illogical SOS trends, or have the multipler cancel out given the proper circumstances, but the root of all these examples, I believe (although I could be wrong, it is late right now) is that the way the multipliers are used in the new method dont make any sense to begin with.  The whole point of the multiplier is to give credit because it is harder to win on the road than it is at home and, vice-versa, it is easier to lose on the road than it is at home.  Therefore, why do you use the same multiplier for both Raw wins and Raw losses for an opponent (examples to come, if this isnt clear)? Take the case of calculating an OWP for a team who has played a single opponent on the road, at home, or on a neutral court with a 0.500 record (I know Knightslappy has already shown this).  It doesnt matter how many games they have played, 1-1, 5-5, 100-100, you get the same weighted OWP regardless of where the game was played (home: 1-1 record, Raw Ws = 0.75, Raw Ls = 0.75, OWP = 0.5; away: 1-1 record, Raw Ws = 1.25, Raw Ls = 1.25, OWP = 0.5....the same is true no matter how many games they played for this single opponent).  It seems that the weighting factor should not be equal for Ws and Ls, to make an away game count for more than a home game (which is the intent of the factor to begin with, it seems). For example, if you played a team on the road, use a multiplier of 1.25 for that teams wins and 0.75 for that teams losses, and if you played that team at home you would use 0.75 for wins and 1.25 for losses to come up with Raw Ws and Raw Ls.  In this case, the example I showed previously for calculating an OWP for a team with a single opponent would result in the following: (home: 1-1 record, Raw Ws = 0.75, Raw Ls = 1.25, OWP = 0.375; away: 1-1 record, Raw Ws = 1.25, Raw Ls = 0.75, OWP = 0.625).  This seems more in line with the true intent of the weighting factor.

With that said, here a two approaches to improve the SOS calculation, given what my assumptions about the intent of the NCAA are, then you guys can go to town on why these are also terrible ideas:

Assumption 1:  NCAA wants to weight the OWP and OOWP calculation to adjust for the difficulty of away games vs. home games (hence the 1.25/0.75 multiplier).

Assumption 2: NCAA wants to also weight the OWP and OOWP calculation to take into account the number of in-region games that opponent has played.


Simplest approach:  Just do a weighted average OWP and OOWP. 
For simplicity, just take the case an OWP calculation for a team that has played 4 opponents:
Game 1: Away vs. (3-1) team
Game 2: Home vs. (16-4) team
Game 3: Neutral vs. (6-6) team
Game 4: Home vs. (2-8) team

1.Original method (1.25/1.0/.75 weighting, averaged over all games)
(0.75*1.25+0.80*0.75+0.50*1.0+0.20*.75)/4 games= 0.549 OWP

In this method, you dont take into account at all that your road game against a 0.750 team has only 4 games played that 'count,' while you have played other teams with a lot more games.  It seems that the NCAA feels Game 1, in this example, is being emphasized too heavily and artifically bring up the OWP.  Therefore, thw proposed #2 below, which actually causes the OWP to increase even more!

2.New 'Incorrect' Method:
(check my math): Raw Ws =23.25, Raw Ls = 16.25, OWP = 0.589

In this case, Game 2 gets over-emphasized because they have the most in-region games, especially the way the multipliers are implemented (which seems incorrect).

3.Weighted Average (weighted by total number of opponents games):

Here, you calculate each teams' raw OWP as you would in 1 above, but you weight each team by the number of region games. If every one of your opponents had the same number of region games, #1 above and this method would be equivalent.

[(0.75*1.25)*4 games+(0.80*0.75)*20 games+(0.50*1.0)*12 games+(0.20*.75)*10 games]/46 games = 0.505 OWP

Because the SOS is weighted by games, the win against the 3-1 team doesnt count as much as the other games, because that opponent only has 4 games played that 'count.' 


More complex approach: Use unequal scaling factors (Home and Away scaling factors are different for Ws and Ls, eg 0.75/1.25 and 1.25/0.75, respectively), as I mentioned in the first paragraph, and continue calculating Raw Ws and Raw Ls like the NCAA is doing now.  With the previous example, this would result in:

Game 1: Away vs. (3-1) team   (Scaling 1.25/0.75)  Raw Ws: 3.75, Raw Ls: 0.75
Game 2: Home vs. (16-4) team (Scaling 0.75/1.25) Raw Ws: 12, Raw Ls: 5
Game 3: Neutral vs. (6-6) team (Scaling 1.0/1.0)    Raw Ws: 6, Raw Ls: 6
Game 4: Home vs. (2-8) team (Scaling 0.75/1.25)   Raw Ws: 1.50, Raw Ls: 10

OWP: 23.25/45 = 0.517

You end up with something closer to the game-weighted approach in #3 above.

[Titan Q]

This type of discussion and analysis just doesn't happen on a D1 board.

[Charles]

This type of discussion and analysis just doesn't happen on a D1 board.

That's becasue this board has strange powers that can help or hurt college teams and their athletes.

[KnightSlappy]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

[ronk]

This type of discussion and analysis just doesn't happen on a D1 board.

Right, but someone facing two batters back to back isn't going to be more likely to give up a hit to the person who had more at-bats.

Thing is, that just isn't what we're measuring here. We're measuring a team's batting average, akin to what sac said:

I'm not sure I see the horribleness, when you figure out a baseball teams batting avg you don't avg the percentages, nor do you average the percentages of a player to find the career average.

We're not predicting how a team would do when playing Adrian (like we would predict this pitcher facing two batters), we're measuring how a group of teams performed (a group of batters). And if one team happened to play more measurable games than the other, so be it. It should count more.

If I play a 20 game schedule, some games should count for more then 1/20th and some less than 1/20th? That is exactly what happens when the SOS calculation depends on the total number of games each individual opponent has played. And that is my issue.

You have to remember the home and away weighting also, an away game is already weighted 2/3 higher than a home game, so your argument about each game counting toward 1/20th of the SOS doesnt make sense to begin with. 

I tend to like the new system better because it takes each of your opponents games as an individual event.  Therefore, for every game your opponent plays (that counts according to the NCAA criteria) you get either 1.25, 1.0, or 0.75 points (Home, Neutral, Away) towards your OWP statistic in either the Win or Loss column.  Then, you average over all events to give the OWP statistic.  In the previous method, whether your opponent played 4, 10 or 20 games, they were all treated the same.  As the number of events increase, the certainty of the statistic also increases.  Meaning that I have more confidence that a 12-12 team is a 0.500 team, than a 1-1 team, a 2-2 team, or even a 5-5 team, because we just dont have a lot of information on those teams yet.  The same analogy can be drawn to baseball as has already been discussed.  Do you have more confidence in someone who has gone 1-3 on the season to get a hit or someone who has gone 33-99?  The same thing is true here. When you have such small samples of data, your certainty in that team's WP is low. Thats why I have a problem with the previous batting average examples, you are never going to get 600 observations in basketball games for a single team in a season.  By averaging the WP for each opponent, you collapse the number of observations to the number of regional games played. Conversely, by doing it this way, you approximately square the number of observations.    As the number of events increases, your confidence in the true OWP of that team increases.  Scaling linearly with the number of events is the easiest way of doing this (which the NCAA has incorporated) and it could be debated whether it is the best way.  For example, in statistics, critical values for a t-stat are not linear, above 20 or 30 events you begin to approach the infinite observation t-stat.  However, for this purpose, I have absolutely no problem with what the NCAA is doing and think it is definitely an improvement on the alternative that is being debated.

I doubt these points are being expressed over on the D1 message boards.

That was my point before; in addition, our discussers only missed the game(Amherst/Middlebury)/discussion because they were teaching/taking a class themselves.

[AO]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

Silly Calvin, they should have embraced the D3 philosophy and flew to Emory and Birmingham-Southern to find SOS boosting regional games.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

Silly Calvin, they should have embraced the D3 philosophy and flew to Emory and Birmingham-Southern to find SOS boosting regional games.

They could have driven to Ohio a few times.  Five hour drives aren't fun, but they're also not completely outrageous.

[Greek Tragedy]

My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

I either stay up really late (I was up until 12:30 when I work at 6 am) and/or get up really early (up at 4:30) to avoid such situations!   

[smedindy]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

Silly Calvin, they should have embraced the D3 philosophy and flew to Emory and Birmingham-Southern to find SOS boosting regional games.

They could have driven to Ohio a few times.  Five hour drives aren't fun, but they're also not completely outrageous.

Indiana as well.

[ziggy]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

Guys, don't miss the point here. This isn't about Calvin specifically or the particular opponents, it is about the methodology by which the NCAA determines the overall strength of a schedule.

The Calvin example here is a real world example (obviously) that has nothing to do with the geographical/regional curiosities that have been discussed ad nauseum. The underlying issue says Calvin would have been better off (for SOS purposes) playing Manchester, Finlandia and Wabash at home instead of road-road-neutral.

The way the home/road multiplier is applied and the SOS calculation is carried out, it magnifies the losses of poor road opponents (and minimizes the losses of poor home opponents) that it leads to a number that says a schedule containing a weak home opponent is stronger than a schedule containing a weak road opponent (as seen in KnightSlappy's example). That is an issue not caused by geography or fixed by driving to Ohio. [add: Or even playing more games. More games would water down the effect of this issue but it doesn't fix it. Again, the dissent from me, and KnightSlappy, has nothing to do with Calvin in specific. It is about challenging a methodology that is plain wrong.]

[AO]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

And to bring all my examples back to Calvin , had they played Manchester, Finlandia, and Wabash all at home (instead of road-road-neutral), the "new" calculation method would have increased their SOS by .008.

Is it still possible to defend the NCAA on this?

Silly Calvin, they should have embraced the D3 philosophy and flew to Emory and Birmingham-Southern to find SOS boosting regional games.

They could have driven to Ohio a few times.  Five hour drives aren't fun, but they're also not completely outrageous.

Indiana as well.

You can fly to Virginia and Alabama in far less than 5 hours.  Where are these schools not embracing the D3 philosophy that these stupid regional rules are based upon?  Who is missing class time?  Who is being harmed by playing NAIA teams? You're just penalizing the teams in out of the way geographic areas, not changing their scheduling philosophy.

[oldknight]

My final rant on the "new" OWP calculation method with what I think is "definitive proof" that's it's being implemented incorrectly.

http://tomaroonandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/definitive-proof-that-ncaas-new-sos.html

Also, yeah, sorry about the rough writing. My wife was giving me "the look" that maybe spending hours at game then coming home to do blogging wasn't quite approved.

I feel your pain.

[smedindy]

Can you fly to VA and AL in less than five hours from MI? If you have a private jet, yeah. But you're at the mercy of airline schedules and connecting flights. Never fun.

[Ralph Turner]

SOUTH
RNK1	RNK2	TEAM	CONF.	REG/OVERALL	SCHEDULE
1	1	Ham-Syd	ODAC	17-2, 21-2	LOST to Virginia Wesleyan 78-77; at Emory and Henry 2/16
2	2	MHB	ASC	20-3, 20-3	vs. Howard Payne 2/14; vs. Sul Ross State 2/16
5	3	Emory	UAA	15-6, 15-6	vs. Case Western Reserve 2/15; vs. Carnegie Mellon 2/17
6	4	Vir. Wes.	ODAC	14-5, 17-6	WON at Hampden-Sydney 78-77; vs. Lynchburg 2/16
4	5	Concordia (TX)	ASC	16-4, 18-5	vs. Sul Ross State 2/14; vs. Howard Payne 2/16
3	6	Chris Newport	USAC	14-5, 15-5	BEAT North Carolina Wesleyan 93-67; at Averett 2/16; at Ferrum 2/17
n/a	7	Randolph	ODAC	13-4, 19-4	WON at Lynchburg 58-49; at Randolph-Macon 2/16
n/a	8	Texas-Dallas	ASC	17-6, 17-6	BEAT University of the Ozarks 67-50; vs. LeTourneau 2/16
		DROPPING OUT
7	n/a	Lynchburg	ODAC		LOST to Randolph 58-49; at Virginia Wesleyan 2/16
8	n/a	Guilford	ODAC		BEAT Emory and Henry 73-65; at Bridgewater (Va) 2/16

Wow!  UMHB is in the driver's seat for the #1 seed unless the committee values a sweep of the ODAC by HSC more than a sweep of the ASC by UMHB.  UMHB probably gets two more ranked opponents (UTD and CTX in the conference tourney.)

[AO]

Can you fly to VA and AL in less than five hours from MI? If you have a private jet, yeah. But you're at the mercy of airline schedules and connecting flights. Never fun.

riding a bus for 5 hours sounds like a lot of fun too....