Sorry if a repost, but good read if you are a Mizzou fan... they are setting us up for one of our heartbreak seasons we love so much.
http://uponfurtherreview.kansascity.com/?q=node/616
Tiger fans can
wear their stripes
with pride this season.
Meteoric Mizzou: THIS is why you pay attention to statistics
In two weeks, Missouri has gone from the in college basketball's most underrated team to the team that suddenly has everybody's attention.
In the polls released Monday, the Tigers are ranked 10th and 11th, respectively. Two weeks ago, Mizzou was unranked. That's an ascension that Charles Foster Kane would be proud of. However, if you paid any attention to the numbers, you already knew this was going to happen.
Missouri has been ranked in the top 20 of
Ken Pomeroy's ratings for pretty much the entire season. Ken's numbers loved the Tigers through the Illinois debacle, through the free-throw meltdown against Xavier, the offensive drought against Nebraska and the best-shooting night of the season by Kansas State. The numbers were why I knew that the loss in Manhattan was
more meaningful for the Wildcats than the Tigers. The numbers were why I knew over two months ago that the Tigers were a tournament-caliber team.
Pomeroy ranks teams based on adjusted winning percentages. He measures the points per possession scored and allowed for each opponent, adjusts each for quality of component, then calculates the new winning percentage based on those efficiency margins. The adjusted winning percentage is called the Pythagorean percentage. This percentage can be taken literally, meaning that Missouri's .9585 Pythagorean score means that the true quality of the Tigers this season is that of a team which should win 95.85% of its games against average D1 teams at neutral sites. Why do I hype Pomeroy's ratings so much?
Because they work.
I pen that justification for tempo-free basketball statistics as justification for a little bit of analysis. Now that the perception (the polls) has caught up to the reality (power rankings), what does the latter suggest about the Tigers' eventual March destiny?
Let's assume that Missouri maintains its current Pythagorean rating, which certainly is no given being that two of the its final five regular-season games are in Lawrence and at home against Oklahoma. Pomeroy has Pythagoran ratings going back three seasons prior to this one, so it gives us an OK sample of how teams that play at this level fare in the NCAA tournament. However, it won't be a large enough sample to be conclusive.
TOURNAMENT RESULTS OF >.9585 TEAMS
|
| Year | Teams | S16 | E8 | FF | NC | CH |
| 2006 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2007 | 11 | 8 | 7 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| 2008 | 11 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| TOT | 28 | 21 | 17 | 10 | 5 | 3 |
| %CHANCE | 75% | 61% | 36% | 18% | 11% |
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Again, this is a small sample size, Tiger fans, so don't go thumping your chests just yet about the imminent trip to the Final Four. However, it's pretty obvious that Mizzou is entering rarified air. Of the 28 teams the last three years that have played at this level, 21 (75%) reached the Sweet 16 and 17 (61%) made the Elite 8. The group also accounts for the last three NCAA champions, five of the six teams to reach the championship game and 10 of the 12 Final Four squads.
The NCAA tournament is still a month or so away, but, for Tiger fans, there may really be a reason to go mad this March.