MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Viking Mike]

Augie women's game against North Park at the Carver Center cancelled for Tue night and rescheduled as part of a doubleheader with the men on Wed, Feb 2nd.

Will North Park really have a chance to get out to Rock Island on Wednesday afternoon?

Would love to see this game played. on Wed though........... do not want anything to disrupt the momentum these Augustana Vikings have right now!!!

[John Gleich]

Offensive and Defensive Efficiency numbers per 100 possessions


Offense
1. Carthage          113.3
2. Ill Wesleyan     108.9
3. Augustana        104.2
4. North Park        102.3
5. North Central    102.1
6. Wheaton          99.3
7. Elmhurst           96.3
8. Millikin               82.2


Defense
1. Augustana        89.3
2. Wheaton           99.3
3. North Central    99.8
4. Ill. Wesleyan     99.9
5. Carthage          102.0
6. North Park        102.4
7. Elmhurst           103.7
8. Millikin               108.3


Combine offense + (200 - defense)

1. Augustana        214.9
2. Carthage           211.3
3. Ill. Wesleyan     209.0
4. North Central    202.3
5. Wheaton           200
6. North Park        199.9
7. Elmhurst           192.6
8. Millikin               173.9


--IWU plays at the fastest pace in the league but probably not by a significant amount, everyone but Millikin plays games within 10 possessions of IWU.  A remarkeby similarly paced league.

--Augustana's defense probably ranks among the best in D3, for an unbeaten team the offensive eff is pretty low

--Judgeing from these numbers, Carthage has probably underperformed in league play

--As you probably all suspected, these number confirm Millikin is a very bad basketball team right now.  Their offensive eff is atrocious and might be the worst I've ever seen at this level.

Did you use conference-only stats or the whole season, including non-con?

I started doing the WIAC last week before I left for vacation but I couldn't figure out how to combine them... your combination solves that, thanks!

Prior to Saturday's games, I had Stevens Point at 86.1, River Falls at 91.8, and Platteville at 93.1, just for comparison.  If I have time this week, I'll post these on the WIAC page.

[sac]

Did you use conference-only stats or the whole season, including non-con?

I started doing the WIAC last week before I left for vacation but I couldn't figure out how to combine them... your combination solves that, thanks!

Prior to Saturday's games, I had Stevens Point at 86.1, River Falls at 91.8, and Platteville at 93.1, just for comparison.  If I have time this week, I'll post these on the WIAC page.

The whole season.

I started to do the WIAC last night but got tired.  I did SP and River Falls, pretty sure I had the same numbers.  Its on a different computer that's a little moody right now.

I was thinking of doing the top 25.

[Titan Q]

I assume at some point this morning the IWU @ NCC women's game tonight will be cancelled.  They are going to try to do a women's/men's doubleheader Wednesday evening.  If that is cancelled, the makeup date will be Monday, February 14 (at least for the men...not sure about the women).

Columbia, Mo is now very much in The Storm.  It is really coming down here, and supposed to snow continuously until about 5:00am.  We're looking at 18-22 inches..and this thing is heading straight to Chicago.

Stay safe!

[dansand]

Offensive and Defensive Efficiency numbers per 100 possessions


Offense
1. Carthage          113.3
2. Ill Wesleyan     108.9
3. Augustana        104.2
4. North Park        102.3
5. North Central    102.1
6. Wheaton          99.3
7. Elmhurst           96.3
8. Millikin               82.2


Defense
1. Augustana        89.3
2. Wheaton           99.3
3. North Central    99.8
4. Ill. Wesleyan     99.9
5. Carthage          102.0
6. North Park        102.4
7. Elmhurst           103.7
8. Millikin               108.3


Combine offense + (200 - defense)

1. Augustana        214.9
2. Carthage           211.3
3. Ill. Wesleyan     209.0
4. North Central    202.3
5. Wheaton           200
6. North Park        199.9
7. Elmhurst           192.6
8. Millikin               173.9


--IWU plays at the fastest pace in the league but probably not by a significant amount, everyone but Millikin plays games within 10 possessions of IWU.  A remarkeby similarly paced league.

--Augustana's defense probably ranks among the best in D3, for an unbeaten team the offensive eff is pretty low

--Judgeing from these numbers, Carthage has probably underperformed in league play

--As you probably all suspected, these number confirm Millikin is a very bad basketball team right now.  Their offensive eff is atrocious and might be the worst I've ever seen at this level.

Here are the numbers using league games only (thru 8 games):

Team   Off
NCC.....   109.3
Carthage   107.0
IWU.....   106.7
Wheaton.   105.6
Augie...   104.1
NPU.....   97.0
Elmhurst   93.6
Millikin   86.6
CCIW Avg   101.4
   
Team   Def
Augie...   83.7
Carthage   98.5
NPU.....   99.3
IWU.....   100.5
NCC.....   101.2
Elmhurst   105.4
Wheaton.   109.3
Millikin   114.2
CCIW Avg   101.4

Combined
Augie...   220.4
Carthage   208.5
NCC.....   208.0
IWU.....   206.2
NPU.....   197.7
Wheaton.   196.3
Elmhurst   188.2
Millikin   172.5

I think it was RogK on the women's boards who expressed some reservations about the accuracy of the free throw multiplier. In looking at a handful of box scores, I tend to agree, but until I see a better formula, this one will have to do.

[sac]

I think it was RogK on the women's boards who expressed some reservations about the accuracy of the free throw multiplier. In looking at a handful of box scores, I tend to agree, but until I see a better formula, this one will have to do.

Somewhere out there in cyberland is a well thought out reasoning for the FT multiplier but I can't find it or remember where I even found this formula anymore.

If I recall right it has something to do with the 1 for 1 situations, and taking into account teams intentionally fouling at the end of games.


Also, I've tried doing this for women's basketball but the numbers are so brutal it makes me depressed.

[Gregory Sager]

Augie women's game against North Park at the Carver Center cancelled for Tue night and rescheduled as part of a doubleheader with the men on Wed, Feb 2nd.

Will North Park really have a chance to get out to Rock Island on Wednesday afternoon?

Doubtful. The NWS travel advisory is on until 3 pm Wednesday afternoon, and the NPU bus has to leave the corner of Foster & Kedzie no later than noon in order to have sufficient time to reach Rock Island and allow the women's team to get dressed and warm up. In other words, the blizzard will still be raging when the bus is supposed to be traveling across northern Illinois, and the roads will not be safe.

In speaking with Paul Brenegan last night, he sounded doubtful that the games will be played tomorrow night. My guess is that the NPU @ Augie women's game will be postponed for the second day in a row, and that the NPU @ Augie men's game will thus be postponed as well. Thursday night would be the only realistic night for the doubleheader, seeing as how Augie has moved its road trips to Bloomington (both women and men) to conference tournament week.

[shepherd]

Wheaton College
Wednesday's men's and women's basketball games at Carthage have been postponed to Thursday
http://athletics.wheaton.edu/news/2011/2/1/MBB_postpone.aspx

[Titan Q]

I would be shocked if any games get played tomorrow.  It started snowing hard here in Columbia, Mo. at about 8:00am CST.  We're about 8 hours in and have about 14 inches on the ground, and it looks like we're only about halfway through the storm.

I believe the front edge of this just hit Chicago.  I'm guessing it is not bad there yet, but it will be soon...and for a long time.

I've never seen anything quite like this.  The funny thing is that the Weather Channel has a guy in downtown St. Louis (120 miles away) and it has barely snowed there all day.

[Gregory Sager]

A must win for both teams at the Shirk Centier tonight. Regarding strength of league: I think it is down this year. Nothing compared to the 05/06 season when 4 teams were very good to great (IWU, Wheaton, NCC, and Elmhurst).

No, the gold standard for the CCIW was two years ago; in 2008-09 the league went 73-19 (.793) in non-conference play. Sure, there were four very good teams at the top of the league in 2005-06, but the bottom four stunk; Wheaton, Carthage, Millikin, and NPU combined to go 17-27 in non-conference play, dragging the league as a whole down to a pedestrian (by recent CCIW standards) 63-34 (.649).

Greg, I don't know how you can start your post with "No" when you don't even know what Lanny is intending by his statement.  If he is meaning how well the CCIW did in the post season, I would think that the '06 season was better than the '09.  If not for the perfect whistle that Adrian Adaire received, the Titans would have been national champions in '06.  The season you did mention was very good in the pre-conference, but does that mean the CCIW was that good...or they didn't play the best competition?  I don't think you get a great feeling for how the conference is on a national basis until the post season.  Just a lurker's opinion.

A few thoughts here in response, Mike:

1) Illinois Wesleyan lost to Virginia Wesleyan in the semifinals, not the finals. You have no idea how a theoretical IWU vs. Wittenberg championship game might've turned out, so you can't claim that IWU would've been the national champions if the Titans had beaten the Marlins.

2) Roughly half of the CCIW non-conference schedule remains the same from year to year, with minimal variation in overall difficulty level, in large part because there's such heavy interleague traffic between the CCIW and the NAthCon and MWC. If we really wanted to go into it in detail, I suppose that we could dissect the OWP of that season as opposed to other seasons -- once Pat reinstalls the past-seasons data for the various teams on d3hoops.com, that is. So the competitive baseline for 2005-06 is roughly the same as 2008-09's and for the other seasons surrounding those two (including this year's).

3) The post-season is a good test for a conference's relative strength. But the overall non-conference performance of a league is a better test, for two reasons. One, there's a lot more games involved, so the database is much bigger. Two, you don't only measure a league's strength by its top teams; you measure it from top to bottom. The bottom four is just as relevant to a league's overall strength as is its top four. It's not as though you get a mulligan for having really bad teams at the tail end of your standings. If you did, then the NCAC (Wooster and Wittenberg) and the MIAA (Hope and Calvin) would be considered to be much better conferences than they actually are, since the teams at the top are almost always successful on the national scene.

4) I know perfectly well what Lanny intended by his statement. He and I have had this argument several times before, both online and in person. And he's been wrong every time that we've had it.

I am completely with Veteran Fan and Titan Hammer on this.  In gauging the strength of the league, I personally like to look at how good the top 4 teams are.  Just having 1 or 2 great games is certainly not enough for me to consider it a great year in the league...but having 4 is.  The elite leagues, in my opinion, are the ones that, every few years, can have one of those seasons with 3 legitimate Top 25-caliber teams and then maybe another in the Top 25 discussion.

You guys continually seem to forget that this is an eight-team league, not a four-team league. And in 2005-06, the bottom half of the league was terrible.

I can illustrate this by showing the combined non-conference records of the CCIW's bottom four teams every year since 1992-93 (the first post-Carroll season):

season	W-L (pct)	# of bottom four teams w/ losing non-con records
2009-10	23-21 (.523)	2 out of 4
2008-09	34-10 (.773)	0 out of 4
2007-08	27-17 (.614)	0 out of 4
2006-07	31-13 (.705)	0 out of 4
2005-06	17-27 (.386)	3 out of 4
2004-05	28-16 (.637)	1 out of 4
2003-04	28-15 (.651)	1 out of 4
2002-03	24-20 (.545)	3 out of 4
2001-02	20-24 (.454)	3 out of 4
2000-01	30-14 (.682)	0 out of 4
1999-00	27-17 (.614)	1 out of 4
1998-99	24-20 (.545)	1 out of 4
1997-98	16-28 (.364)	2 out of 4
1996-97	18-26 (.409)	3 out of 4
1995-96	11-32 (.256)	3 out of 4
1994-95	20-24 (.454)	2 out of 4
1993-94	20-23 (.465)	2 out of 4
1992-93	24-19 (.558)	1 out of 4

As you can see, the 2005-06 season sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to the years around it. It has more in common with the CCIW of the 1990s -- a down era for the league as a whole -- than it does with the CCIW of the 2000s. In terms of the bottom half of the league it's dramatically worse than any of the years surrounding it before or after. Put that together with the very strong upper half of the league that year, and it evens itself out.

In 2005-06 there were 4 legitimate Top 25 teams in the CCIW (Augustana, IWU, NCC, Elmhurst) -- and I believe, all 4 were legitimate Sweet 16-caliber teams.  I look at 2005-06 as one of the CCIW's outstanding seasons in recent memory.  IWU went to Salem and lost in the final minute of the national semi-final game to the eventual champ...but that incredibly talented IWU team (1st Team All-Americans Dauksas, Amelianovich, Freeman) went just 9-5 in CCIW play and lost to each of the other top teams.  For me, that is a great season in the league.

It's a great season for the top half of the league. For the league as a whole, it clearly averaged out to something relatively unremarkable.

I like to look at the strength of the top 4 in evaluating how good the CCIW is.  I honestly am not impressed at all by gaudy non-conference records anymore, because in general, the CCIW's non-conference schedule has become extremely weak over the course of the last decade or so.  (Dramatically less # of games vs scholarship schools, and less marquis Division III matchups.  The in-region thing, quite frankly, has encouraged some terrible schedules.)

I would argue that the decline in non-conference schedule strength goes back farther than the last decade; the CCIW of much of the 1990s didn't play a dramatically better non-conference schedule, but the comparatively awful performance of the league outside the circuit was more a case of the league's strength as a whole being down.

But even if we adopt your view, for the sake of argument, that it's only been since 2000 or so that the CCIW has played weak non-conference schedules (IIRC, that was when the pools system and the in-region-only ranking/seeding principle was adopted by D3), your point still isn't germane. The data remains relevant in the sense that it is relational; in other words, the seasons immediately preceding and succeeding 2005-06 were seasons in which the non-con strength of schedule was roughly the same as 2005-06's. And that, again, highlights just how badly the bottom half of the conference performed in 2005-06.

Now, I might look at a bad non-conference record as a sign the league is down (as I started doing with the CCIW in about mid-December or so this year)...but a .700+ record (or whatever % stands out as great) really doesn't mean that much to me anymore.  The CCIW should have a gaudy cumulative non-conference record against these schedules.

But it didn't in 2005-06, and that's the whole point. Even with the strong non-conference performance that the CCIW got from its four first-division teams both in pre-conference and postseason play in 2005-06, the league still posted its third-worst non-conference record of the decade. The mean average of the CCIW's non-conference winning percentage in the Oughts was .703, and the median average was .700/.702. The CCIW performed at a .649 clip in 2005-06, and that includes the 7-3 combined performance of Illinois Wesleyan, Augustana, and North Central in the postseason.

[Gregory Sager]

I believe the front edge of this just hit Chicago.  I'm guessing it is not bad there yet, but it will be soon...and for a long time.

There's been a light snow all day, but over the past hour it's increasingly gotten heavier here on the city's North Side. It's not a white-out yet, but it's getting there. Just as importantly, the wind is picking up; we're expecting gusts of up to 60 miles per hour over the next 24 hours.

[Viking Blue]

CPS shut down school tomorrow for the first time in 11 years.  That ought to give you an indication of just how bad it's supposed to get....

[Gregory Sager]

NPU has cancelled all classes for both tonight and tomorrow.

[dansand]

I think it was RogK on the women's boards who expressed some reservations about the accuracy of the free throw multiplier. In looking at a handful of box scores, I tend to agree, but until I see a better formula, this one will have to do.

Somewhere out there in cyberland is a well thought out reasoning for the FT multiplier but I can't find it or remember where I even found this formula anymore.

If I recall right it has something to do with the 1 for 1 situations, and taking into account teams intentionally fouling at the end of games.

Trying not to get too "nerdy" about this, intentional fouling shouldn't affect it, but 1-and-1 and and-1 situations do. I think one of the problems is that the .475 figure is derived from NBA games and bonus opportunities in the NBA are 2-shot and not 1-and-1. It's a small difference, but probably has an effect. I think the factor should be higher for college ball, but I'm not sure how much higher (.525-.550?). I don't think the disrepancy should affect one team too differently from another though, so looking at how teams in a league stack up against one another is still relevant.

Also, I've tried doing this for women's basketball but the numbers are so brutal it makes me depressed.

[Titan Q]

Mr. Sand and my Vikings friends, a radar check shows that the really heavy stuff that has pummeled mid-Mo is coming directly towards the Quad Cities (more so than Chicago - although Chicago is going to get pounded too).  Gonna get nasty there!