March Madness

[peplaw06]

You're so ridiculous I doubt a post this ridiculous even warrants a response, but here it goes.

Neil Paine at the relatively new College Basketball at Sports-Reference site takes a statistical look at Duke's path to the title. It is pretty long and uses some real "dork poll analysis", but I think as long as you have the info that (SRS) stands for Standard Rating System and is a basic metric that uses point differential and schedule strength to rank teams you should be set.

He looks at the last 30 national champs and compares things in a couple of different ways, but the take home message is that Duke 2010's path was neither easy nor hard but just about in the middle of the pack (roughly 13th). An interesting side note is that no matter which of the three ways that he looks at it 2009 UNC's path was easier than 2010 Duke.

I know that rational things like "math" don't combat most of the irrational Duke hate out there, but I like numbers and found a quantitative look at Duke's path to the 2010 title quite interesting.

Man, that's a great analysis.

And I don't know if ABQ is watching this thread or not, but it gives at least some backing to my opinion from last year that 2001 Duke was better than 2009 UNC as well. In fact, according to that analysis, 2001 Duke was the 2nd best team in the past 20 years behind only 1996 Kentucky.

 

[peplaw06]

bastids

Really, no matter where the starting point is, the company is pretty strong--we are talking two of the top 5 or 6 all-time best programs.
In no particular order
Kentucky, UCLA, UNC ,Duke, Kansas, Syracuse, Indiana....

Some of the other programs can say they've had more than one coach win a title and that the program transcends the coach. But no objective person can deny Coach K's greatness....imo.

I'm with ya. I love the rivalry. Even when UNC has an all-time terrible year, the games are still competitive... That one at Chapel Hill this year was a nail biter for me.

The great thing is out of those top all-time programs, Duke and Carolina are the only ones in the same conference.

 

[peplaw06]

Heels won two of the previous five. They had a down year, it happens. Dook is losing three starters and possibly a fourth if Singler is smart and goes pro. After the tournament he had, he should leave early, his stock will not go up (and yes I thought Hansbrough should have gone after his junior year too). Smith is staying and you still will have the Plumlee boys, along with Dawkins and Curry the transfer plus some others coming in. Still though Dook will lose a lot this year, not as much as the Heels the year before, but quite a bit.

Singler's coming back for his senior season FYI...