How Important Is Winning Your Conference Tournament?

In the last few days we've seen many a high seed fall in conference tournaments. Kansas and Oklahoma fell in the Big 12, while UConn and Pitt fell in the Big East, and that's only a few.

The question that must be asked, however, is just how important these tournaments are for a team's national championship hopes. I'm not talking about schools from one-bid conferences, or bubble teams, but rather teams in the top fifteen or twenty teams in the nation that are already guaranteed a spot in the dance.

I took a look back at the last twenty seasons, this season not included, to see how NCAA finalists did in their conferences prior to the season. It turns out that, in this 25 year window, only nine of twenty-two teams that played in a conference with a tournament won that tournament prior to winning the title. Similarly, six of twenty-two runner-ups won their tournament that season.

So in total, only about a third of the finalists from the last 25 seasons have won their conference tournament (when possible) in that same year. It's good to have, but by no means a necessity or a predictor of future successes.

While it seems obvious that regular-season conference championships would be a good predictor of tournament success, since there's at least two dozen games involved, I took a look for that same same of 25 winners and runner-ups.

A notably higher 17 of 25 winners and 12 of 25 runner-ups won at least a share of their conference title for that year, as one would expect. Still, this still means over 40% of finalists didn't win the regular season either.

The last four years, however, have been a bit of a different story. Seven of eight finalists, with the 2005 champion UNC team as the exception, won both a share of the regular season title and the conference tournament.

So, maybe these tournaments are important after all? Do these highly ranked teams with early losses have something to be worried about?

This post also appeared on [BleacherReport]

Looking back - The new three point line in college basketball

Note: All data referred to is accurate as of 4pm Saturday Feb 14th, because that's when I started running the numbers.

Following the 2007 NCAA Basketball Tournament, the rules committee decided it was time to move back the three-point line. Not to the NBA distance, or the international distance, but who's counting. The women's line remains at the original spot, creating the odd look on collegiate floors across the country.

The goal of this shift was two completely different things depending on who you ask. One answer was that shifting the line back would lessen congestion in and around the lane, and provide quicker and more interesting game-play with room to operate.

The other answer is that everyone and their mother thought they could shoot the old three, leading to boring, low-percentage chuck-fests which were a pretty poor display of the game, so moving the line back should be a deterrent.

So I decided to do a direct comparison between last year and this year in terms of three-point shooting, to see if there's been a notable shift. I looked at makes and attempts on a per-game basis, standard 3Pt%, and the percentage of a teams points that come from made three point shots.

Summary results are as follows. In general, the high and low are outliers, so note the three middle categories.

One thing you can definitely say from this data is that those in the second line of reasoning for the rule change were entirely correct. Attempts, makes, and the trey's importance in a team's scoring are all down this year. At the same time, overall percentage still dropped, so maybe there's still some adjustment to be had in strategies, and usage could drop even further.

On the whole these numbers more that anything else just reinforced what was expected, but some of the other trends I noticed in the process were also interesting:

- Out of the top 25 teams in attempts per game each year, only one team in 07-08 and two teams in 08-09 are actually in the top 25 in three-point percentage.

- In 07-08 Utah State managed to be in the 10th highest percentage shooting team despite being in the bottom 25 of more than 340 teams in attempts. No such anomaly occurred in 08-09.

- In both years, the corelation between reliance on the 3pt shot and overall points per game was less than 5%, or negligible at best. 3P% held a higher correlation to points, around 45% both years, but still not a damning cause-and-effect.

- Nationwide variance in 3pt percentages jumped more than 25% from 07-08 to 08-09, while the range of percentages increased more than 35%, though standard deviation only increased 12%

If anyone is interested in playing with the numbers in a more mathematically savvy way than I have, here's my source data: [Download]

Duke falls from #1, America exhales

Tonight in Winston-Salem NC, #4 Wake Forrest survived, despite blowing a 8pt lead at home with 4:07 left, to beat #1 Duke on a layup with under a second left.

Until a loss to Virgina Tech last week, the team's only loss of the season, WF had held the #1 spot, but this didn't stop the students from rushing the court, of course.

Wake had been in control for seemingly the entire second half, building up a lead of 13 at one point, while shutting down the three-point game, always a Duke staple, to the tune of 18.2%, along with inside shooting of under 41%. Aside from a slight rebounding edge, everything was tilted in WF's favor, including home-court advantage.

And yet the Blue Devils Duke'd their way back into the game, nearly pulling out a big come-from-behind road win in-conference on national television, which wouldn't have shocked anyone.

This is why most of us hate this team.

Now, in this country there's a longstanding tradition of shifting from indifferent to hateful of a team that's very successful, regardless of the sport. The Yankees, USC, the Cowboys, and the Lakers are good examples of this.

But Duke is on another level in this regard. The Blue Devils are far more hated than NCAA basketball legacies such as UNC, UCLA, Kentucky, and UConn, despite not being notably better over the last 25 years.

You'll notice a common thread among the other schools I've listed. They're all public universities. This plays into the other side of the Duke mystique that sparks national hatred: Privilege.

It's easy to hate people we perceive getting things handed to them. We see Duke University, on their quaint little southern campus, playing in a quaint little gymnasium filled with rich scrawny white boy students who, despite going to an expensive private school with a top academic reputation, have the time to camp out for tickets to a basketball game for weeks at a time.

We see a coach with an impossible name to spell, managing to bring in the only good white players in the country, working the referees into handing him half a dozen iffy charge calls a game.

We see a team that always sees the preseason top 10, despite actual team talent, and seems to regularly pull out outrageous comebacks despite awful play, like almost occurred tonight.

We see the most annoying sportscaster in the game salivating over every second he gets to talk about the team, to the point where they made him do an NBA game this year to get him away from it.

It's easy to hate this team, it's fun to hate this team, and I, along with most of the country, will continue to hate this team until they go the way of Notre Dame football and it's just no fun anymore.

Tebow and Hansbrough: The Pro Shortcomings of a College Legend

It's hard not to draw the comparison between Tim Tebow and Tyler Hansbrough. Both are goofy half-redneck white boys, the motor of their respective teams, have piles of accolades, have loyal followings and outright haters.

They also have another thing in common: They're going to be very underwhelming professional athletes. Don't get me wrong, they'll both eventually go pro, and more than likely be drafted in a respectable but not spectacular position. Despite being dominant in the college ranks, both have obvious shortcomings that will hinder them at the next level.

Hansbrough, at 6'9" 250lbs, is big enough to bump around in the lane for rebounds and tough baskets in the college game. In the pros, however, players of that size that stay in his natural Power Forward position, such as Tim Thomas and Rasheed Wallace, have a much more developed outside game and lateral quickness and coordination, to make up for a lack of dominating power, that the clumsy hustle of Hansbrough can't match.

Tebow, on the other hand, has quite the opposite problem. Quarterbacks don't tend to be 6'3" 230lbs of neckless force in the NFL. Linebackers do. The experiment of Tim Tebow the pocket passer didn't work at Florida leading up to their only loss of the season, so why would it work in the NFL? The experiments of Vince Young and Tavaris Jackson show running quarterbacks are not the path to success in the league.

This isn't to say that these two players' inability to dominate at the next level diminishes their achievements in college. Hansbrough already has the career scoring record for UNC, a school with such prolific scoring players as Michael Jordan and Bob McAdoo, and is a NCAA poster-boy, staying in school four years after winning freshman of the year.

Tebow, with one Heisman on the shelf and the most 1st place votes in this year's crazy Heisman race, could easily finish his career with three championships, two (and a half) Heismans, 100 passing TD's and 60 rush TD's with less than 20 INT's, he could surpass Vince Young (if he already hasn't) as the most transcendent college QB of this era.

But that's where these legends will end. Like any of us that were great athletes in high school to be obsolete come college, or playground heroes as kids to find our names not on the freshman team roster, they can only achieve so high.

The difference, and some consolation?

At least their grandkids will believe their legends.