B1G: Talent and Experience

In the ACC, recruiting was a simple thing.  Duke and North Carolina would have their pick of the litter. Latter-day Gary Williams would rarely put together a top class.  NC State, under both Sid Lowe and now Mark Gottfried, was the only other program to consistently put together top classes

The B1G is, or at least could be different, so I figured it's probably interesting to look at next year's B1G and see how Maryland's 13 new rivals have fared in recruiting in recent years.  The numbers will change, and I'll attempt to update them as more players turn pro or transfer into the league.  Ohio State's LaQuinton Ross and Indiana's Noah Vonleh have already declared for the draft, sure to be followed by a couple of other underclassmen.  Meanwhile, Purdue and Indiana have both experienced losses due to transfers. And most of the 14 teams will be active in the transfer market this spring, whether for graduate transfers or for undergraduate transfers that teams hope will get a waiver to play immediately.  This is a snapshot in time of what each roster looks like next year.

I broke recruiting rankings down into the following tiers: top 25, top 75, top 150 and unranked recruits.  I make no claim that those tiers are perfect, but they do reflect general truths in recruiting.  You have your top recruits who everyone knows, everyone wants, and who are destined (allegedly) for the NBA in short order.  The next group are guys who will stick around to see their upperclass years and contest for all-conference honors then.  Tier three is the diamond in the rough territory.  The true heavy hitters have mostly scooped up the players from the first two tiers, but here there are still quality players, and those big boys will round out their class there while competing with lower-tier major programs and top mid-majors.  After that you get the true reaches.  Sure, a Frank Kaminsky emerges here every so often, but living in this territory is dangerous.

First we look at Tier 1:



Surprise #1 is just how little success the B1G has had at the top of the heap the past four cycles.  We know that no program in the league recruits at the level of Kentucky or North Carolina, but Indiana and Ohio State, among others, have reputations as forces on the recruiting trail.  Just six players on next year's rosters were top 25 recruits.  No incoming recruit for 2014 is in this group, and 2013's only entrant was the already-departed Noah Vonleh.  This might look even worse in a few weeks if/when Glenn Robinson III declares.

This is crucial for Maryland.  Maryland has plenty of tier 2 talent, as I'll show next, but none here.  If no one else in the league has premium talent, the Terps should be able to compete - on paper - with anyone in the league.  Of course need to caveat once again about the imperfections of rankings.  Nick Stauskas, for instance, was the leagues POY, and no one would question his talent.  But while other teams might overachieve, there's no reason to think that Maryland can't also do that.

Here's Tier 2.  Note that this includes all players in the top 75, not just those outside of the top 25.

 



 

The Terps clean up here in tier 2.  9 of next season's 13 scholarship players ranked inside the top.  Only three of Ohio State's 11 players on scholarship next year aren't in this group, and one of them is recent grad transfer Anthony Lee, whose performance at Temple against high-level competition certainly belies his recruiting ranking.

Two other notes from this graph.  Michigan State has five players between 90 and 115 in the rankings meaning that their low total is something of an artifact of the boundaries drawn.  Meanwhile, Illinois has four player in this set.  John Groce has had some early success at a school with a rich basketball history and fertile recruiting ground not always mined well by the Illini.  His program is worth watching.

Schools are allowed 13 scholarships.  Only Ohio State and Maryland have at least half of those tied up in top 75 recruits for next year.  Almost any B1G team can be successful next year by cleaning up in the "next 75" range - the tier 3 recruits.  But who isn't even getting those players?  Which schools are feasting on tier 4 - sub-150 - players?



It's not much of a surprise that Penn State, Northwestern, and Nebraska, three of the four worst programs historically in the league, are doing most of their recruiting here.  On paper, Tim Miles did an incredible job to get the Cornhuskers back to the tournament for the first time in 16 years with such an unheralded group.  Purdue, despite recent struggles on the court and personnel losses, doesn't have a lot of under the radar recruits, though most of those came in the 2014 class.  Bo Ryan has a great system, and either he can fit any recruit to it, or more likely, he knows exactly who he needs to be successful.  Sam Dekker was a 5*, but where would the Badgers be without Josh Gasser and Frank Kaminsky?

What will the future hold for the Terps?  Who knows.  Mark Turgeon's coaching is still a question mark, at least to the armchair basketball coaches among us, but there's no doubt that the talent should be there to compete early on in the Big Ten.

#1s in Close Games, or Is Florida Fine?

Everyone has Florida going far.  Half of the entrants of Yahoo's bracket challenge had the Gators coming out of their region to the Final Four, and over 36% had them winning the National Championship.  Even Ken Pomeroy's computer guaranteed us that they were the second most likely champion in the field.  And why not?  The team is deep, talented, experienced, and good on both ends of the floor.   Plus they've won 26 straight heading into the tournament.

Then you watched them play today against Albany, the fourth place team out of the America East conference, one which had to win Tuesday night in Dayton just to get to Orlando to be the ritual sacrifice to Florida.  Only Florida didn't quite manhandle the Great Danes the way everyone expected.  The game was tied several minutes into the second half, and though Florida pulled away late, they didn't cover the Vegas line of 21.5, or even kenpom's more modest 16 point MOV prediction.

Same thing with Virginia.  Coastal Carolina led them at the half, and while UVA played much better after the break, they didn't take control until the latter half of the period when they pulled away from the Chanticleers.  It would be hard to think that the average viewer walked away from that game impressed by Virginia's prospects to beat teams which are actually supposed to be competitive with them later in the tournament.

So if given the chance, would it be a good move to scramble and scratch out those predictions of Florida or Virginia in the later rounds of the tournament because of their lackluster performance in their first game?



Well, maybe not.  There's no real clear relationship between how well a #1 seed does in Rd 1 and how many wins they'll eventually have.  R-squared here is just 0.05 so little relationship in the data from 1985-2013.  Kansas beat Prairie View A&M by a staggering 58 back in 1998 before losing two days later to Rhode Island.  On the flip side, Illinois' stacked team led Fairleigh Dickinson by a point at the break and won by just 12 before playing for the National Championship just over two weeks later.

Of course looking at the entire sample of games may obscure some of what we're trying to find out.  The difference between a 20 point win over an under-seeded team might be no more predictive than a 35 point win over a sub-.500 team which got hot in its conference tournament.  So what I did was to look at only the truly close games.  I defined "close" as a) MOV of less than 15 points and b) a deficit of 7 or less for the underdog at halftime, i.e. competitive in the first half.  I am sure that this definition may miss a case or two which could be called close, and is subjective at the very least, but on we go.

On the average, a #1 seed will win 3.37 games in the tournament, so another 2.37 after they win their 1-16 game.  The 17 cases that fit the above criteria averaged about half of a win less, at 2.82 wins.  Of note was that the group of 17 included four of the 15 #1 seeds which lost their second game, as compared to 11 of the other 99 one seeds losing their next game after playing a "noncompetitive" first round game.  The sample size is hardly large, but the difference is one in four compared to one in nine.



So the verdict?  It's tough to draw too many conclusions, but we'd be hard pressed to say it's a good thing to let a 16 seed hang to close

The Conference Tournament Effect

If you're a fan, conference tournaments are fun.  They start the wall-to-wall tournament basketball of March with a good mix of mid and low-majors fighting for their conferences lone bid, power conference teams fighting for an at-large bid, and heavyweights duking it out one last time before March Madness officially begins.

But what those conference tournaments mean in the long run, aside from seeding, is up for debate.   Some folks believe in momentum.  To them, winning the conference tournament is a launching pad to great things.  The winning team is "hot" and has proven its mettle in the unique, high-pressure tournament atmosphere of March.  You can't succeed there if you've never been there.

Others will scoff at that assertion.  Sure, it's better to win the conference tournament all else equal, they'll say, but it takes a toll.  Teams play three, and sometimes four or even five, games in as many days against top competition.  College athletes aren't used to playing that type of schedule, especially turning around four or five days later and playing their biggest games of the season.  Even the crucible of March Madness, after all, requires them to win only two games in a weekend to advance onto the next phase of the tournament.

So what's the real deal?  Let's look at the data.  I went back to 1985 and looked at the six power conferences: ACC, Big East, SEC, Big 8/XII, Big Ten, and Pac-10/12.  The Big Ten only just began holding a postseason tournament in the late '90s, and the then-Pac-10 revived its postseason tournament in 2002 after its initial run from 1987-1990.  That's a sample of n=148.

Next I took the expected wins by seeding from this handy article (credit: Cardiac Hill) and compared actual and projected wins.  The conference champions in the sample exceeded expectations by 0.117 wins, i.e. a little better than one win every two years for the six power conference champions, with weak statistical significance (z-test score: 0.20).

There was significant variance between conferences, but the only one where sample data showed winning the conference tournament had a negative effect on NCAA tournament advancement was in the Big 8/Big XII where Kansas significantly under-performed a  #1 or #2 seed several times under Roy Williams, as did Oklahoma on multiple occasions.

Looking at just the past ten years (n=60), teams gained approximately 0.285 wins, but again with weak statistical significance.

Winning the conference tournament might have an effect on how a team plays later in March, but if it does, I'm not going to be the one who finds it.

 

Where have all the good teams gone?

One of the most common refrains you'll hear in the world of college basketball as January turns to February turns to March is how "the bubble is weak this year".  That's a corollary to the truisms most often heard in pro sports about there being "no great teams" (TM: Joe Morgan) or the season having "a lot of parity".  Usually I'm unswayed by those claims because we hear them every year, but in this basketball season, it sure seemed as if  there was more parity.  Bubble teams seemed to lose left and right, throwing away every chance they had to establish position in the latter part of the season.  Was it true?

I took a quick look at the last four years - the 68 team tournament era.  At least if we can call four years an era, or if we want to enshrine the expanded monstrosity in such a way.  I looked at two things - average losses by the at-large field and average losses by the RPI top 50.  Both have their disadvantages.

If underdogs disproportionately pulled off  upsets in their conference tournaments one year, better teams were in the at-large pool, driving down the average losses just a bit, whether it be via mid-major bid thieves or power conference teams on the top lines.  With the top 50 RPI criteria, a few extra mid-majors "gaming" (I use those quotes decidedly) the system a bit more and bumping into the top 50 could skew things.  But anyway, without further rambling:



So in other words, while this year might have displayed a bit more parity than the past couple, you'd have to go all the way back to...2011 to see a season that was had more losses by teams at the top of the heap.  That year a ridiculous 5 teams made the field of 68 with 14 losses - Michigan State, Marquette, Tennessee, Penn State, and USC (in a First Four game).  Only six other teams outside of 2011 had made the field with so many losses, none since that year, and only two of the others in the past 20 years.

What actually happened as this season came to a close was the bubble shrinking more and more as Championship Week continued.  The only somewhat controversial selection (compared to a few questionable seeding decisions) was 13-loss NC State getting a bid to Dayton for the Opening Round over 23-9 SMU, but that was met with relatively little consternation.   Even Dick Vitale, whose "heart break[ing]" for the kids getting a "raw deal" is an annual tradition each Selection Sunday at 7PM, had little to say about this.  So while the teams on the outside might well have been worse than normal, there were enough good teams that the delineation between the haves and haves-not was clear.

The Turgeon Files

The story of this year isn't really that Maryland is likely to miss the NIT for the 3rd time in 4 seasons, or that this team might be the first in over 20 years not to finish over .500.  No, the story is rapidly turning into a "what could have been" season.  The latest heartbreaker to add to the collection was a double OT loss at Clemson.  There's no shame in that, but when added to last possession losses to UConn and George Washington early, plus Duke and Syracuse in conference play, it's tough to swallow.  You can even add in the game against UVA down in Charlottesville where the Terrapins had an honest shot to win or force OT late in the game.

Regardless of all that, it's now clear that the Terps will miss the NCAA Tournament for the third time in Mark Turgeon's three seasons at the helm.  The reasons for that can be debated until next season starts and beyond, but the fact remains - no tournaments.  So the question is, given a coach missing the tournament in his first three seasons at a power conference school, what does his future typically look like.

Since the tournament expanded to 64 teams back in 1985, 83 coaches fall into that group, including Turgeon.  Depending how this seasons ends, a couple of Turgeon's class of 2011 peers - Ed Cooley, Cuonzo Martin, Mike Anderson - could also join this list.

The first thing to notice is that in terms of WP%, Turgeon is at the top of this peer group:

Andy Kennedy	MISS	0.610
Doc Sadler	NEB	0.579
Mark Turgeon	MD	0.576
Jim Boylen	UTAH	0.571
Mark Gottfried	BAMA	0.567

It's not an encouraging peer group, however.  Sadler never made a tournament, Kennedy made just the one last year with Marshall Henderson, and Jim Boylen got just one more (poor year at Utah).  Gottfried's overall record isn't terrible, but I doubt that's a comparison many Terps' fans want to make, especially with NC State trending down in years 2 and 3.

Realistically, the expectations for Turgeon coming in - right or wrong - were Final Fours at some point.  Four of the coaches in the group of 83 actually would go on to take that program to the Final Four.  The most prominent of those was Gary Williams.  The situation was obviously much different back then with a postseason/TV ban hitting as part of the school's probation, but Gary took until year 6 to even make the tournament.  Lon Kruger took Florida to the Final Four in season 4, following that up with a .500 record in his final two seasons before taking the Illinois job.    Richard Williams took Mississippi State to the Final Four in his 10th season at the helm.  In 12 years in Starkville he made just three tournaments overall.

The best hope in these comparisons is probably Jay Wright.  Like Turgeon, Wright took over a National Championship program that had faltered, mixing good and bad seasons in the years before his arrival.  Wright made the NIT his first three seasons in Philly, but his second and third resulted in a combined .500 overall record.  Most disappointing was probably his third season.  Again, like Turgeon, Wright had laid the foundation for success by improving the overall talent level of the program.  The top five scorers were from a rather famous sophomore class that would go on to lead Villanova to new heights in their final two seasons - Allan Ray, Randy Foye, Mike Nardi, Curtis Sumpter, and Jason Fraser.  While 'Nova hasn't always been among the top 10 in the country as they were by those players' senior years, this will make their 9th tournament appearance in 10 years since then under Wright.

Who had the most success overall at that school after their first three years?  Here's the top 10 percent based on future wins:

 

COACH	SCHOOL	AFTER WIN
Gary Williams	MD	412
Kevin Stallings	VANDY	241
Rick Stansbury	MISS ST	241
Jay Wright	NOVA	230
Al Skinner	BC	215
Danny Nee	NEB	203
Leonard Hamilton	FSU	190
Scott Drew	BAY	177

Once again Gary ranks at the top of the list by far.  Kevin Stallings and Rick Stansbury built a couple of solid SEC programs with Stallings reaching a pair of Sweet 16s so far and Stansbury winning 5 division titles in the usually-weaker SEC West.  Leonard Hamilton has recruited well, puts together a premier defensive team most years, and won an ACC Championship a couple years back. Skinner mined relatively under-the-radar gems (Tyrese Rice, Craig Smith, and Jared Dudley) for years.  Scott Drew has done a masterful job turning around Baylor after years of terrible basketball and scandal, coming close to a Final Four multiple times, even if his peers do claim he doesn't do it the right way.

The peer group had an average (not games-weighted) winning percentage of .455 in their first three years, and a .509 winning percentage (again, average) thereafter.  I used the average WP across the group so as not to bias the "after" number too high since the worse coaches would typically contribute fewer future years to the sample.  Again Turgeon ranks at the top of the first three years group, but we'd probably want to look at a more advanced metric (kenpom, or at least RPI) to make that specific a comparison.

This group lasted about 4 years (average: 3.8) after missing the tournament the next three years.  Can Turgeon rise to the top of this group in the coming years?  The initial results and the recruiting trend say yes, but there's a lot of history that says that missing the tournament three straight seasons to start your tenure doesn't portend good things.