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NCAA Basketball Analytics - Updated - 12/11/2024

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The core idea behind this site is two key principles.

The first is that the final score of a game can be very misleading. There are lots of ways to win by six - and by calculating a cumulative win probability, we can resolve this problem and better understand just how close a game was.

The second key principle is a belief that we draw too many conclusions based on the outcome of a game. It is unfortunate that the end result of a game has to "collapse" into one of two values - a win or a loss. I understand that 30% of a team can't move on in a single-elimination tournament (I'm typing this a few minutes after the 2014 Round of 32 Wichita St - Kentucky game), and that there is a single winner - but the outcome of a single play (perhaps a contested long 3 pointer) should not cloud our judgment of how good a specific team is or how well they played.

The original research behind this system was presented at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. A copy of research paper can be found here.

A brief word about me: I was born in raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and attended college at Vanderbilt University. I graduated with degrees in Mathematics and Physics, and then took a BI/ETL/Data Warehousing job in Atlanta with RaceTrac Petroleum. I spent 5 years at RaceTrac before moving out to the San Francisco Bay Area to work in a similar role for the Oakland Athletics.

You can find me on twitter, @tbbBaseball, or follow a more college-basketball focused feed, @SevenOvertimes.


Copyright: Mark Bashuk, 2024
E-Mail: sevenovertimes@gmail.com
Twitter: @SevenOvertimes