RE: All Time Winning Percentages, Tournament Bids, Final Fours
I love the data threads.
This may sound silly, but I think overall win percentage might just be overrated. Hear me out:
Duke, UNC, Michigan St, Ohio St, Syracuse, UConn, Louisville, Kansas, Arizona and UCLA are all top 20 programs of all-time. How often do one of them lose 14+ games in a season? Like, one of them a decade, if ever? But what if they were in the same conference together? Someone is going 4-14 in conference play.
I mean zero disrepect to anyone here, but in another thread, I posted Xavier and Bonaventure's OOC win percentages. As dominant as Xavier has been for 20 years in the A-10, their OOC win pct is "only" like 50 points higher than the Bonnies. Because Bonaventure schedules knowing "We're probably going 8-8 in the A-10, so we need 7-9 wins OOC" and Xavier schedules knowing "We're only playing 3-6 games vs NCAA teams in the A-10, so we need to play Cincy, Butler, Vandy, Gonzaga, Memphis and Tennessee."
DePaul schedules OOC like Bona now. When DePaul was in C-USA, they didn't think "we're going to get hammered in conference." They thought "We're going to beat ECU, Tulane, Houston, Southern Miss, split SLU and Charlotte, lose 2 of 3 to Memphis/Cincy/Louisville and that's 10-6 and an NCAA bid."
Long story short: your record comes from your schedule. Your schedule has two parts: Non-Conference which changes every year and can be manipulated for RPI reasons; and Conference, which is changing to whatever the C7 decide it will be.
Obviously, we want good basketball teams, and winning percentage kind of determines who's a good basketball team. But it's kind of like listing the measurements of Victoria's Secret models so we can decide who's got a nice body: Xavier, Butler, Dayton, Saint Louis, VCU, Wichita State, Creighton, Gonzaga, etc wouldn't be on the runway if they didn't have nice bodies.
(This post was last modified: 01-04-2013 03:27 PM by JPSchmack.)
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