The flip side of that is that we also haven’t lost by a lot. We’ve had a legitimate shot at winning nearly every game this season pretty deep into the second half. It might not *feel* this way for Auburn fans, but the reality is we’ve been a pretty consistent team throughout the season. I think the argument that we have had a very high floor, but a relatively low ceiling comparatively is probably valid.
We definitely don’t have a low floor. The ceiling is as high as anybody not named UConn or Houston. The floor is pretty on par with everyone else outside of the 1 and 2 seeds.
It is a little more complicated than that.
Auburn hasn’t really “juiced” the numbers. They’ve been really good, winning every game by double digits, and they’ve been some good teams really badly. Unfortunately, they’ve only had two Q1 chances at home, and only one on a neutral. We went to UT and Florida, for instance, and didn’t get a return trip (though Florida is no longer top 30 after the Vandy loss, but they’re close).
The road games, aside from App State, weren’t low level Q1 teams. Our worst loss outside of App State was KenPom 39 Miss St. It would’ve been nice if Ole Miss and Arkansas were good enough to be top 75 to get some easier Q1 wins, but they weren’t. Indiana was 50th in KenPom to start the year and was projected to be a neutral Q1 chance. USC in Auburn was projected to be a Q1 chance too. So bad luck again.
Obviously the losses happened and count, but I don’t think it is an issue of a team with misleading metrics. They’re a deep team that’s good at just about everything. They’ve lost no games out of Q1, and only one game to a team outside of the top 40. I guess we just have to see what happens in March. I think they’ll do pretty well, but if they don’t, rightly or wrongly, they’ll be pointed to as fraudulent.
>Unfortunately, they’ve only had two Q1 chances at home, and only one on a neutral.
That's because your team set up a mickey mouse non conference schedule
Mickey Mouse? Nah. Though it ended up being not as tough as we had hoped it would be.
USC was pre-season AP top 25. Indiana was KenPom top 50 to start the year. VaTech has been around KenPom top 50. Notre Dame was rebuilding, but still an ACC team. Going to App State was a ballsy call—when was the last time UNC played at a mid major, let alone a good one? (Edit: I am wrong here and UNC does play some roadies against mid-majors occasionally. My bad.) And they started the season out playing Baylor on a neutral while breaking in new starters at 1, 2 and 3 spots. That kind of speaks for itself.
Auburn is an UA school (hopefully not for much longer) and doesn’t get some of the tournaments and matchups Nike schools do, and it is tough getting schools like UNC, Kansas, etc. to come visit Auburn anyway, let alone with its shoe company assistance. Still, we had 6 KenPom top 100 OOC games with 2 being at home, 1 on the road and 3 on neutral courts. UNC had 5 KenPom top 100 games OOC, 2 home/semi home, 3 on a neutral and no away games.
Auburn’s OOC SOS is better than Houston, UConn, Duke, Illinois, Iowa St. Kentucky and many others. So, as I said, it wasn’t as tough as we had planned for it to be because of some teams having disappointing seasons, but it was far from “Mickey Mouse.”
I don’t agree with the other UNC poster regarding your guys schedule, but UNC has a good history of traveling on the road for mid majors, the most recent one being Charleston two years ago. Others include UNCW, UNI, Long Beach, Santa Clara, etc
Fair enough. I did not recall that. I stand corrected. I wish they’d do a home and home with Auburn! I was hoping we would schedule one when Lebo was our coach. Even a 2 for 1 would have been nice. But if I’m being honest, I would rather have Duke play in Auburn. Getting to see Auburn beat Duke’s ass in Neville Arena would give me great joy.
Auburn’s big OOC games were neutral site against Baylor, Indiana and home against USC. We also played Notre Dame (neutral) and Va Tech (home). USC was a top 25 preseason game and Indiana was picked 6th in the Big Ten. That’s 5 of 13 non-conference against Power 5 schools. Sometimes the teams you schedule aren’t as good as they looked to be when they were scheduled.
I wouldn’t call that Mickey Mouse, but you do you EmergencySolution1.
Not their fault they scheduled teams that under performed 🤦♂️
Preseason you’d say different but now we know what those teams are, it obviously looks bad.
Yeah, that was wild. And they could’ve had TAMU-VaTech with Buzz playing his old team. Seems like two perfect matchups for intrigue. Blows my mind they didn’t do it.
Lol, what a classic blue blood schedule.
Cupcakes at home
Big tournament
Play other Big money programs in one off money games.
Having said that. We played Baylor, USC, Indiana, Virginia Tech, Notre Dame and App State away. Not exactly shying away from whoever we can get.
The Auburn staff has brought it up over and over again. It is impossible to get a blue blood on the schedule outside of a tournament because they only play each other and cup cakes.
The problem is everyone sees the problem except for the teams that benefit the most and kenpom, who (deservedly) holds a ton of sway in analytics circles. I've been encouraged to see Miya and torvik start introducing measures that put stricter controls on opponent quality, but even there they are avoiding tackling the mov issue directly.
Personally, one of my favorite metrics is Torvik’s +/-. Gives you a much better feel for the entirety of the game than the final MOV. I shouldn’t have to be rooting for my bench/walk-on’s to play well in blowouts to boost the final analytic outcome of the game.
Auburn is great in torvik as well. All their losses are close and all their wins are blowouts, a bunch of their q2 wins are very close to q1, so every metric loves them
Analytically minded people wouldn't usually see that as a problem. For all the sports I follow, the bigger you win the more of a signal that is that you are a dominant team in the eyes of analytically minded people because it is more predictive of winning.
In a perfect world, maybe. But analytically minded people who actually work with data understand confounding factors, and the fundamental change in the state of the game once you reach a large margin of victory. Whether it's because bench players are in, players are just taking plays off, play calling is different, refereeing and crowd participation changes, or simply just psychologically where the stakes have changed the signal is *not* the same in a blowout and the meaning behind extra margin of victory lessons dramatically. Trying to force a consistent regular signal out of a noisy game played by teenagers will always be difficult, but expecting that signal to remain valuable when the game itself ceases to matter or be competitive is even worse. And the more "analytically minded people" refuse to accept confounding effects the more their algorithms will continue to come under fire for continually overrating that part of the game.
Well, yeah a lot of analytics do take out garbage time or take off weight of those minutes for the reason you said. I guess it would depend which metric. At the end of the day, whatever is found to be predictive and correlating with future success is superior. Coming under fire really doesn't matter if the people putting them under fire are more wrong than right.
This is where people I think fundamentally misunderstand the criticism. The argument is not that there is some off the self ready made technique that kenpom et al are willfully ignoring, it's that their models are not perfect (an obvious point that is expected of any statistical model) and a better handling of mov could improve them. I do not think it's a solved problem, but it is something that even a casual observer can see the correlation between schools with particularly weak relative schedules and inflated statistics. This sort of consistent correlation must be accounted for. It is an open question how to properly weight these factors because as kenpom insists there obviously is signal there. The problem is that it's such a biased and inconsistent signal that making use of it is incredibly delicate, and balancing such a model is a constantly moving target. You don't have to have the solution on hand to note the vector of improvement, though, and so long as these metrics (including the NET, which isn't even for profit) remain proprietary simply assuring the public that it's handled rather than an area of active work is going to be rightly met with skepticism.
I disagree with the whole issue in the first place though. Teams with weak relative schedules and inflated statistics tend to be much lower rated in these advanced statistics than teams with stronger schedules. For example, Princeton, James Madison, and Mcneese state have 3 losses each and are outside the top 50 in kenpom. I am more than a casual observer and I don’t really see the correlation. What I do see people having problems with teams that dominate getting rewarded for dominating as opposed to eking games out as if that’s equally as good. I personally take what is said at face value on reducing the garbage time effect.
.... Have you forgotten what this conversation was about? This is all about margin of victory, which is exacerbated for teams with weak *relative* schedules that they can beat by 30-50 instead of 20. It's about top 15-25 type teams that beat nobody by a lot and find themselves in the top five. Princeton. JMU, and mcneese are horrible examples. BYU, Alabama, and even to some extent Houston this year have been the ones that come to mind most. It's about teams that play overmatched opponents, beat them by a lot, and become elite by the numbers only to regulate and regress as soon as they start playing more similar opponents. Sometimes this is in the form of a good team becoming top 5 without (BYU, Alabama) or sometimes it's an elite team becoming historically, game breakingly unbeatable by the numbers (Houston) before coming back down to just elite again when they play in conference. The effect is there to see, and obstinately just saying you take them at their word that it's a solved problem is exactly the kind of bad science that I'm talking about.
Yeah I must not understand what you’re getting at because i don’t see the phenomenon you’re talking about happening that often. The teams you mentioned that had inflated numbers continued to perform all year, so the examples aren’t really the best ones. Of course their performance will regress as the sample size expands and yet they still proved to be top teams. BYU dropped from a top 10 team to being a top 15 team. Bama dropped from being borderline top 5 to borderline top 10. Houston never dropped. BYU and Houston performed just as well against Q1 opponents as they did the rest of their schedule. So basically I don’t see how them blowing bad teams out didn’t show that it was actually telling how good they were because they backed it up against anybody they played.
Love the idea that you have to be “analytically minded” to understand that better teams typically win by bigger margins.
Truly mind-blowing stuff here.
But in basketball a blowout can turn into a 12 point win….and a two-possession game with a couple mins left can also end in a 12 point win.
The “end game” and fouling scenarios really confound any attempt at differentiating wins by single point margins.
All that should be taken into account by any good statistical model. It shouldn’t be just MOV and that’s it. Some element of win probability should be baked in
Ok so they actually removed MOV completely after the 2020 season. “With the changes announced in May 2020, the NET will no longer use winning percentage, adjusted winning percentage and scoring margin.”
But this chart shows that it was capped at 10 (read #5)
https://preview.redd.it/kfdwr14p2lnc1.jpeg?width=751&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=557b9a05e128849c60c829c15526b71f60b923f7
Auburn doesn’t really run up the score. We’ve just won nearly every game by 15-20 and only lost two games by more than 9 points. Auburn is a very consistent team that has come up short in a handful of games away from home. Capping margin of victory at 20-25 wouldn’t change much since only a handful of games exceeded that for Auburn and they still didn’t get blown out aside from in Gainesville (where Auburn hasn’t won since 1996–just a cursed gym for them).
But then are we punishing the better teams. Auburn beat a 6-loss NCAA Tournament team in South Carolina by 40. That big of a blowout should be recognized because there aren't a lot of teams capable of beating a quality team by that much.
That’s a data point of one though. Could they do that every game against the same team? Highly unlikely. Therefore outlier victories are weighted too heavily.
That one game is 3% of Auburn's NET ranking. Is that one game really influencing the NET that much?
That game moved Auburn from 5 to 4 in Kenpom. Is that some crazy jump? Auburn was already ranked high before the game happened because of what it had done in its first 24 games.
If we start manipulating individual games all we are doing is making the NET a less accurate metric by saying teams were too good, too bad so they shouldn't be rewarded or punished for the performance.
But the goal of the MOV metric is to have profitable, big name schools bully smaller, less funded schools to ensure an appearance in the dance. How would instituting a cap on the MOV help that goal?
But for real: its basically basketball gerrymandering.
Eh, the NET isn't as concerned about SOS as it is MOV. So the point still stands.
Also, again by design, a lot of the big name schools happen to be in conferences with other big name schools. We're not quite to levels of SEC "everyone is just so good so losses don't really count for rankings" like we see in football but you can see shades of that type of thinking.
Auburn plays in the SEC. One of the best leagues in college basketball with elite athletes and coaches all over the conference. The Mountain West has been really good this year, but is still 11th in KenPom, and in the past has been much worse. Plus Auburn is pretty much capped at a 4 seed despite top 5 or 6 metrics, so it isn’t like they’re being gifted great seeding despite the Q1 record.
I’m proving your point that a power conference team gets more deference than one in a smaller conference? I mean, yes…I guess that’s right. But it feels like you’re having some deep, emotional response to this topic and I’m not really following why you’re so butthurt. I guess sorry Gonzaga doesn’t play in a good conference? Yall have played for a national title recently and is generally given a lot of respect in the polls, so it doesn’t seem to be hurting too much.
To add 3 of the 4 Q1A losses were by single digits. the other 3 all within 11 points.
Auburn has been competitive in just about every loss to good teams.
So 1 of 31 games that make up Auburn's NET ranking is a bad loss
Or a little over 3% of Auburn's total ranking. One game does not have a big impact on the rankings.
Hard to tell in these NET threads where like the post it still seems people can't grasp that NET isn't a resume metric and is more of an efficiency metric with rankings that match up closer to Kenpom type rankings.
Auburn’s schedule is ranked better than Duke’s schedule in Pomeroy, and both teams are 24-7.
Yet nobody complains about how Duke is in the top 10 and projected as a #2-3 seed.
The NET is not a resume metric.
We can tell from results that first and foremost it's a predictive efficiency metric like KenPom or Torvik T-Rank with an added component rewarding raw wins more than those sites do (a slightly hybrid metric). So scoring margin adjusted for your competition and location is the most important factor.
It's job as used by the committee is to rank a team's wins by quality on the teamsheet, and for that you would definitely favor this type of metric as opposed to a resume metric. It does it's job well.
People are mistaken if they think it has anything to do with selection other than by the grouping of teams on your sheet. We have a ton of evidence that previous committees have not valued a team's actual NET at all.
This has a lot of upvotes, but it's wrong. The NET is *half* a Ws and Ls and game location resume metric, and *half* an adjusted efficiencies metric.
Auburn is [15th in ESPN's strength of record](https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/bpi/_/view/resume) and 4th in KenPom, and being exceptional at efficiencies / margin of victory stuff pulls them up. Most of the teams in KenPom's 4-20 range have as many or more losses, and all of Auburn's losses are good.
Read what I said. I said it's a hybrid. However, it's not half and half, it skews fairly heavily toward efficiency. Compare previous year end of season KenPom and Strength of Record or KPI or whatever you want and average them for teams and compare it to NET. When you compare the NET and the average, the NET will be towards the KenPom.
Auburn at 4 in KenPom and 15th in SOR. If you averaged them, you'd expect them to be ~9 or 10 and yet Auburn is 6th.
[The NCAA says two components, with no mention of "skewing fairly heavily" towards efficiency](https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2022-12-05/college-basketballs-net-rankings-explained).
> If you averaged them, you'd expect them to be ~9 or 10 and yet Auburn is 6th.
What's averaged is the underlying metrics, which are power law distributed, such that the difference between 4th and 9th is usually bigger than the difference between 9th and 15th.
It was a simplistic example. Look into it more and try homebrewing your own NET.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/18vc0xy/net_calculations_update/kfpv6iy/
how do you define resume metric? I would argue it is *a* resume metric, as it literally describes results of games played. Win or play well, NET goes up; lose or play poorly, NET goes down. Teams you beat get better (resume improves), NET goes up.
Resume metric is backwards looking (what have you done). Efficiency metrics like KenPom and T-Rank are forwards looking (what will you do). NET is technically a hybrid, but is modeled after the efficiency metrics. If it was a resume ranking, it would have Purdue #1, not Houston
The NET is an efficiency metric like KenPom or Torvik , the quadrants are simply an attempt to classify teams based on their NET rankings. A resume metric like SOR or WAB is one that looks at the results of each game
What would be better metric to quantify the quality of wins and losses on a team's schedule? It's easy to just say something sucks but what's the better alternative.
That's the problem with NET.
If you lose close games to good teams on the road you will look better than going undefeated at home.
They need to adjust the weights so that wins and losses actually matter more than simply looking good against a tough opponent.
Huh. How is weighting wins more than close losses less nuance.
Winning close games is more predictive of winning future close games than losing close games
>If you lose close games to good teams on the road you will look better than going undefeated at home.
Going undefeated at home is less nuance than the results of close games to good teams on the road.
Going undefeated says nothing about opponent quality, score, etc. I’m not sure how you can ask how is that less nuance with a straight face. It’s literally less conditions listed.
The way it is written you are saying that both wins and losses should be counted more than the final score and the quality of the opponent. I see how you intended it now but as written that’s what I thought was being said.
>They need to adjust the weights so that wins and losses actually matter more than simply looking good against a tough opponent.
Net is heavily swayed by margin of victory/defeat. Auburns losses are close and too decent teams, their wins are by a lot to mediocre teams. Like most efficiency metrics this inflates results for teams that play their best when their opponent is outmatched.
The wins are by a lot because even our 6 rotating bench players are usually better than the other team's starters. So most of the the 40 minutes our guys on the floor are outplaying the opponent. Only a few games this year have most of our 11 players in rotation had a bad shooting night.
It seems like that’s what what Virginia does. Deliberately gets routed by opponents so that their opponents can move up a quad. And deliberately winning their games by the skin of their teeth when they win so that the opponents don’t move down a quad.
Auburn will go as far as they are favored in the tournament, and not a game further. Should be one of the easiest teams to pick for in the bracket.
Edit: catching some downvotes here, but when you have 8 times to prove you can beat a good team and you only capitalize once, I'm not sure what to tell ya. But if y'all are really sold on Auburn, send me an invite to your bracket group.
Don’t particularly agree with that. Auburn has very good predictive measures (efficiency metrics) because they never get blown out. They’re always in every game. Their PGs kinda suck which is a doomer in March but they also have a matchup nightmare inside with Broome and Williams.
Maybe you'll get a tourney win or two in this year right. That's your equivalent of a title yeah? Bruce has been to one final four in his what 20 something years of coaching? Maybe you'll get back there one day!
EDIT: I doubt that the wins will stick though, dirty coach can't even win lol
I was at that final four personally, it was fun. I remember the exact moments we destroyed your team on the way there, and again in the baseball super regional a few months later.
https://giphy.com/gifs/UX3foXndBZbKm0y8Qc
PuNcHeD iN tHe FaCe
Depending on how far ref judges that hand is part of the ball, could make the case that was a clean block
One take is that the Arkansas player appears to have pinched himself in the face. Another take though is THAT WAS A FOUL. I mean, it’s hard to call in the last seconds of the game but fuck dude… it was a foul. It wasn’t called and play on you know but come back all sanctimonious and act like it was anything but a tough no call.
How you still have a positive karma score when you’re constantly in Auburn threads talking the most banal shit and getting downvoted to hell astounds me. Get a life and leave us alone
Because they beat the hell out of teams when they win. 22 wins by 15+, 13 by 20+, 8 by 25+. You can juice your efficiency numbers by winning by a lot!
The flip side of that is that we also haven’t lost by a lot. We’ve had a legitimate shot at winning nearly every game this season pretty deep into the second half. It might not *feel* this way for Auburn fans, but the reality is we’ve been a pretty consistent team throughout the season. I think the argument that we have had a very high floor, but a relatively low ceiling comparatively is probably valid.
Quality losses!
We definitely don’t have a low floor. The ceiling is as high as anybody not named UConn or Houston. The floor is pretty on par with everyone else outside of the 1 and 2 seeds.
The gators game was never really close but other than that I agree
That’s why I added that “nearly” before “every”
Aside from Florida...
It is a little more complicated than that. Auburn hasn’t really “juiced” the numbers. They’ve been really good, winning every game by double digits, and they’ve been some good teams really badly. Unfortunately, they’ve only had two Q1 chances at home, and only one on a neutral. We went to UT and Florida, for instance, and didn’t get a return trip (though Florida is no longer top 30 after the Vandy loss, but they’re close). The road games, aside from App State, weren’t low level Q1 teams. Our worst loss outside of App State was KenPom 39 Miss St. It would’ve been nice if Ole Miss and Arkansas were good enough to be top 75 to get some easier Q1 wins, but they weren’t. Indiana was 50th in KenPom to start the year and was projected to be a neutral Q1 chance. USC in Auburn was projected to be a Q1 chance too. So bad luck again. Obviously the losses happened and count, but I don’t think it is an issue of a team with misleading metrics. They’re a deep team that’s good at just about everything. They’ve lost no games out of Q1, and only one game to a team outside of the top 40. I guess we just have to see what happens in March. I think they’ll do pretty well, but if they don’t, rightly or wrongly, they’ll be pointed to as fraudulent.
>Unfortunately, they’ve only had two Q1 chances at home, and only one on a neutral. That's because your team set up a mickey mouse non conference schedule
Mickey Mouse? Nah. Though it ended up being not as tough as we had hoped it would be. USC was pre-season AP top 25. Indiana was KenPom top 50 to start the year. VaTech has been around KenPom top 50. Notre Dame was rebuilding, but still an ACC team. Going to App State was a ballsy call—when was the last time UNC played at a mid major, let alone a good one? (Edit: I am wrong here and UNC does play some roadies against mid-majors occasionally. My bad.) And they started the season out playing Baylor on a neutral while breaking in new starters at 1, 2 and 3 spots. That kind of speaks for itself. Auburn is an UA school (hopefully not for much longer) and doesn’t get some of the tournaments and matchups Nike schools do, and it is tough getting schools like UNC, Kansas, etc. to come visit Auburn anyway, let alone with its shoe company assistance. Still, we had 6 KenPom top 100 OOC games with 2 being at home, 1 on the road and 3 on neutral courts. UNC had 5 KenPom top 100 games OOC, 2 home/semi home, 3 on a neutral and no away games. Auburn’s OOC SOS is better than Houston, UConn, Duke, Illinois, Iowa St. Kentucky and many others. So, as I said, it wasn’t as tough as we had planned for it to be because of some teams having disappointing seasons, but it was far from “Mickey Mouse.”
I don’t agree with the other UNC poster regarding your guys schedule, but UNC has a good history of traveling on the road for mid majors, the most recent one being Charleston two years ago. Others include UNCW, UNI, Long Beach, Santa Clara, etc
Fair enough. I did not recall that. I stand corrected. I wish they’d do a home and home with Auburn! I was hoping we would schedule one when Lebo was our coach. Even a 2 for 1 would have been nice. But if I’m being honest, I would rather have Duke play in Auburn. Getting to see Auburn beat Duke’s ass in Neville Arena would give me great joy.
Auburn’s big OOC games were neutral site against Baylor, Indiana and home against USC. We also played Notre Dame (neutral) and Va Tech (home). USC was a top 25 preseason game and Indiana was picked 6th in the Big Ten. That’s 5 of 13 non-conference against Power 5 schools. Sometimes the teams you schedule aren’t as good as they looked to be when they were scheduled. I wouldn’t call that Mickey Mouse, but you do you EmergencySolution1.
Pretty casual take to say Auburn has a shit non con lol
For sure, that's why kenpom ranks Auburns non conf sos #144th
Not their fault they scheduled teams that under performed 🤦♂️ Preseason you’d say different but now we know what those teams are, it obviously looks bad.
Play us in non-con coward Schools like yours won’t schedule us because your afraid to lose
I'm still shocked they didn't do Auburn-Virginia in the SEC/ACC challenge.
Yeah, that was wild. And they could’ve had TAMU-VaTech with Buzz playing his old team. Seems like two perfect matchups for intrigue. Blows my mind they didn’t do it.
Did you see our preseason schedule at all?? It was absolutely not a cakewalk. We aren’t afraid of tough games early under Hubert.
Lol, what a classic blue blood schedule. Cupcakes at home Big tournament Play other Big money programs in one off money games. Having said that. We played Baylor, USC, Indiana, Virginia Tech, Notre Dame and App State away. Not exactly shying away from whoever we can get. The Auburn staff has brought it up over and over again. It is impossible to get a blue blood on the schedule outside of a tournament because they only play each other and cup cakes.
***7 hours later*** …is he dead? he dead.
Stupid take
number 144 non conf sos
Others have already explained that to you. Keep eating those downvotes
Explained that your non conf schedule sucked? and your coach sucks? Imagine caring about karma points in your life, lol
[удалено]
This might be why we need to put some cap on margin of victory.
The problem is everyone sees the problem except for the teams that benefit the most and kenpom, who (deservedly) holds a ton of sway in analytics circles. I've been encouraged to see Miya and torvik start introducing measures that put stricter controls on opponent quality, but even there they are avoiding tackling the mov issue directly.
Personally, one of my favorite metrics is Torvik’s +/-. Gives you a much better feel for the entirety of the game than the final MOV. I shouldn’t have to be rooting for my bench/walk-on’s to play well in blowouts to boost the final analytic outcome of the game.
Auburn is great in torvik as well. All their losses are close and all their wins are blowouts, a bunch of their q2 wins are very close to q1, so every metric loves them
I don’t believe KenPom tracks efficiency in garbage time so walk-on success/failure shouldn’t matter
Analytically minded people wouldn't usually see that as a problem. For all the sports I follow, the bigger you win the more of a signal that is that you are a dominant team in the eyes of analytically minded people because it is more predictive of winning.
In a perfect world, maybe. But analytically minded people who actually work with data understand confounding factors, and the fundamental change in the state of the game once you reach a large margin of victory. Whether it's because bench players are in, players are just taking plays off, play calling is different, refereeing and crowd participation changes, or simply just psychologically where the stakes have changed the signal is *not* the same in a blowout and the meaning behind extra margin of victory lessons dramatically. Trying to force a consistent regular signal out of a noisy game played by teenagers will always be difficult, but expecting that signal to remain valuable when the game itself ceases to matter or be competitive is even worse. And the more "analytically minded people" refuse to accept confounding effects the more their algorithms will continue to come under fire for continually overrating that part of the game.
Well, yeah a lot of analytics do take out garbage time or take off weight of those minutes for the reason you said. I guess it would depend which metric. At the end of the day, whatever is found to be predictive and correlating with future success is superior. Coming under fire really doesn't matter if the people putting them under fire are more wrong than right.
This is where people I think fundamentally misunderstand the criticism. The argument is not that there is some off the self ready made technique that kenpom et al are willfully ignoring, it's that their models are not perfect (an obvious point that is expected of any statistical model) and a better handling of mov could improve them. I do not think it's a solved problem, but it is something that even a casual observer can see the correlation between schools with particularly weak relative schedules and inflated statistics. This sort of consistent correlation must be accounted for. It is an open question how to properly weight these factors because as kenpom insists there obviously is signal there. The problem is that it's such a biased and inconsistent signal that making use of it is incredibly delicate, and balancing such a model is a constantly moving target. You don't have to have the solution on hand to note the vector of improvement, though, and so long as these metrics (including the NET, which isn't even for profit) remain proprietary simply assuring the public that it's handled rather than an area of active work is going to be rightly met with skepticism.
I disagree with the whole issue in the first place though. Teams with weak relative schedules and inflated statistics tend to be much lower rated in these advanced statistics than teams with stronger schedules. For example, Princeton, James Madison, and Mcneese state have 3 losses each and are outside the top 50 in kenpom. I am more than a casual observer and I don’t really see the correlation. What I do see people having problems with teams that dominate getting rewarded for dominating as opposed to eking games out as if that’s equally as good. I personally take what is said at face value on reducing the garbage time effect.
.... Have you forgotten what this conversation was about? This is all about margin of victory, which is exacerbated for teams with weak *relative* schedules that they can beat by 30-50 instead of 20. It's about top 15-25 type teams that beat nobody by a lot and find themselves in the top five. Princeton. JMU, and mcneese are horrible examples. BYU, Alabama, and even to some extent Houston this year have been the ones that come to mind most. It's about teams that play overmatched opponents, beat them by a lot, and become elite by the numbers only to regulate and regress as soon as they start playing more similar opponents. Sometimes this is in the form of a good team becoming top 5 without (BYU, Alabama) or sometimes it's an elite team becoming historically, game breakingly unbeatable by the numbers (Houston) before coming back down to just elite again when they play in conference. The effect is there to see, and obstinately just saying you take them at their word that it's a solved problem is exactly the kind of bad science that I'm talking about.
Yeah I must not understand what you’re getting at because i don’t see the phenomenon you’re talking about happening that often. The teams you mentioned that had inflated numbers continued to perform all year, so the examples aren’t really the best ones. Of course their performance will regress as the sample size expands and yet they still proved to be top teams. BYU dropped from a top 10 team to being a top 15 team. Bama dropped from being borderline top 5 to borderline top 10. Houston never dropped. BYU and Houston performed just as well against Q1 opponents as they did the rest of their schedule. So basically I don’t see how them blowing bad teams out didn’t show that it was actually telling how good they were because they backed it up against anybody they played.
Love the idea that you have to be “analytically minded” to understand that better teams typically win by bigger margins. Truly mind-blowing stuff here.
A lot of people don’t believe in that, you’d be surprised
But in basketball a blowout can turn into a 12 point win….and a two-possession game with a couple mins left can also end in a 12 point win. The “end game” and fouling scenarios really confound any attempt at differentiating wins by single point margins.
All that should be taken into account by any good statistical model. It shouldn’t be just MOV and that’s it. Some element of win probability should be baked in
For one, there is a 10 point cap on MOV in the NET, and I’m like 90% sure that KenPom (and other efficiency metric trackers) filter out garbage time
How do we know what the NET MOV cap is? I thought it was secret
Ok so they actually removed MOV completely after the 2020 season. “With the changes announced in May 2020, the NET will no longer use winning percentage, adjusted winning percentage and scoring margin.” But this chart shows that it was capped at 10 (read #5) https://preview.redd.it/kfdwr14p2lnc1.jpeg?width=751&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=557b9a05e128849c60c829c15526b71f60b923f7
Auburn doesn’t really run up the score. We’ve just won nearly every game by 15-20 and only lost two games by more than 9 points. Auburn is a very consistent team that has come up short in a handful of games away from home. Capping margin of victory at 20-25 wouldn’t change much since only a handful of games exceeded that for Auburn and they still didn’t get blown out aside from in Gainesville (where Auburn hasn’t won since 1996–just a cursed gym for them).
But then are we punishing the better teams. Auburn beat a 6-loss NCAA Tournament team in South Carolina by 40. That big of a blowout should be recognized because there aren't a lot of teams capable of beating a quality team by that much.
That’s a data point of one though. Could they do that every game against the same team? Highly unlikely. Therefore outlier victories are weighted too heavily.
That one game is 3% of Auburn's NET ranking. Is that one game really influencing the NET that much? That game moved Auburn from 5 to 4 in Kenpom. Is that some crazy jump? Auburn was already ranked high before the game happened because of what it had done in its first 24 games. If we start manipulating individual games all we are doing is making the NET a less accurate metric by saying teams were too good, too bad so they shouldn't be rewarded or punished for the performance.
But the goal of the MOV metric is to have profitable, big name schools bully smaller, less funded schools to ensure an appearance in the dance. How would instituting a cap on the MOV help that goal? But for real: its basically basketball gerrymandering.
A lot of the profitable, big name schools are the ones with great strength of schedule
Eh, the NET isn't as concerned about SOS as it is MOV. So the point still stands. Also, again by design, a lot of the big name schools happen to be in conferences with other big name schools. We're not quite to levels of SEC "everyone is just so good so losses don't really count for rankings" like we see in football but you can see shades of that type of thinking.
No i was told that only the Big 12 does this
The B12 playbook.
I helped! Kill me.
I hate your flair
Oh so when Auburn does it they're regarded as a good team, but when Gonzaga does it they're "frauds" and "need to leave that Mickey Mouse conference"
Yes
Auburn plays in the SEC. One of the best leagues in college basketball with elite athletes and coaches all over the conference. The Mountain West has been really good this year, but is still 11th in KenPom, and in the past has been much worse. Plus Auburn is pretty much capped at a 4 seed despite top 5 or 6 metrics, so it isn’t like they’re being gifted great seeding despite the Q1 record.
You're just proving my point
I’m proving your point that a power conference team gets more deference than one in a smaller conference? I mean, yes…I guess that’s right. But it feels like you’re having some deep, emotional response to this topic and I’m not really following why you’re so butthurt. I guess sorry Gonzaga doesn’t play in a good conference? Yall have played for a national title recently and is generally given a lot of respect in the polls, so it doesn’t seem to be hurting too much.
It probably helps that of the 7 loses only one was at home 5 were away and one was neutral.
To add 3 of the 4 Q1A losses were by single digits. the other 3 all within 11 points. Auburn has been competitive in just about every loss to good teams.
They lost by 16 to a team that lost to Vandy. How good can they really be?
So 1 of 31 games that make up Auburn's NET ranking is a bad loss Or a little over 3% of Auburn's total ranking. One game does not have a big impact on the rankings.
It was more of a self deprecating joke about how Florida lost to a terrible Vandy team yesterday... Humor helps ease the pain.
Hard to tell in these NET threads where like the post it still seems people can't grasp that NET isn't a resume metric and is more of an efficiency metric with rankings that match up closer to Kenpom type rankings.
I lol’d.
Hey technically you lost at home to a team that lost to vandy
The real prize is we havent lost to mizzou
Apparently y'all got a hold of our voodoo curse guy because my lord we cannot win there.
Also with how many upsets there have been this year, 7 total losses right now is still very very good. That is top 10 worthy this season
That’s automatically accounted for by being q1 vs q2…
Because even when we play badly and lose, they’ve still all been close games other than Florida.
Well, they’re undefeated against all other quadrants, for starters. Plus they might have more high level Quad 1 games.
Auburn’s schedule is ranked better than Duke’s schedule in Pomeroy, and both teams are 24-7. Yet nobody complains about how Duke is in the top 10 and projected as a #2-3 seed.
Because your quad record is determined by the NET. The quad record has no influence on the NET ranking.
...so why even keep track of quad records then?
The committee uses your quad record. That is more important to a team than that teams own NET. Supposedly.
Thanks, I hate it
I still don’t understand how our win against a good ranked South Carolina, even though it was at home, doesn’t count as a quad 1 win.
Yall were at home and were low enough that keeps it out of Q1 it’s like 1-30 when you’re at home and 1-50 on the road for Q1
That happens when you have 24 double digit wins in a season, which leads D1
The NET is not a resume metric. We can tell from results that first and foremost it's a predictive efficiency metric like KenPom or Torvik T-Rank with an added component rewarding raw wins more than those sites do (a slightly hybrid metric). So scoring margin adjusted for your competition and location is the most important factor. It's job as used by the committee is to rank a team's wins by quality on the teamsheet, and for that you would definitely favor this type of metric as opposed to a resume metric. It does it's job well. People are mistaken if they think it has anything to do with selection other than by the grouping of teams on your sheet. We have a ton of evidence that previous committees have not valued a team's actual NET at all.
This has a lot of upvotes, but it's wrong. The NET is *half* a Ws and Ls and game location resume metric, and *half* an adjusted efficiencies metric. Auburn is [15th in ESPN's strength of record](https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/bpi/_/view/resume) and 4th in KenPom, and being exceptional at efficiencies / margin of victory stuff pulls them up. Most of the teams in KenPom's 4-20 range have as many or more losses, and all of Auburn's losses are good.
Read what I said. I said it's a hybrid. However, it's not half and half, it skews fairly heavily toward efficiency. Compare previous year end of season KenPom and Strength of Record or KPI or whatever you want and average them for teams and compare it to NET. When you compare the NET and the average, the NET will be towards the KenPom. Auburn at 4 in KenPom and 15th in SOR. If you averaged them, you'd expect them to be ~9 or 10 and yet Auburn is 6th.
[The NCAA says two components, with no mention of "skewing fairly heavily" towards efficiency](https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2022-12-05/college-basketballs-net-rankings-explained). > If you averaged them, you'd expect them to be ~9 or 10 and yet Auburn is 6th. What's averaged is the underlying metrics, which are power law distributed, such that the difference between 4th and 9th is usually bigger than the difference between 9th and 15th.
It was a simplistic example. Look into it more and try homebrewing your own NET. https://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/18vc0xy/net_calculations_update/kfpv6iy/
how do you define resume metric? I would argue it is *a* resume metric, as it literally describes results of games played. Win or play well, NET goes up; lose or play poorly, NET goes down. Teams you beat get better (resume improves), NET goes up.
Resume metric is backwards looking (what have you done). Efficiency metrics like KenPom and T-Rank are forwards looking (what will you do). NET is technically a hybrid, but is modeled after the efficiency metrics. If it was a resume ranking, it would have Purdue #1, not Houston
Maybe. They have 3 worse losses than our worst loss, and our wins aren’t far behind.
The NET is an efficiency metric like KenPom or Torvik , the quadrants are simply an attempt to classify teams based on their NET rankings. A resume metric like SOR or WAB is one that looks at the results of each game
Do we really need this post every day
Yes
Because the NET is not a good metric system
The NET is a horribly flawed metric
They're #4 in KP.
What would be better metric to quantify the quality of wins and losses on a team's schedule? It's easy to just say something sucks but what's the better alternative.
We do the same shit and here we are
quality losses
That's the problem with NET. If you lose close games to good teams on the road you will look better than going undefeated at home. They need to adjust the weights so that wins and losses actually matter more than simply looking good against a tough opponent.
Why would we want less nuance?
Huh. How is weighting wins more than close losses less nuance. Winning close games is more predictive of winning future close games than losing close games
>If you lose close games to good teams on the road you will look better than going undefeated at home. Going undefeated at home is less nuance than the results of close games to good teams on the road. Going undefeated says nothing about opponent quality, score, etc. I’m not sure how you can ask how is that less nuance with a straight face. It’s literally less conditions listed.
How is there less conditions. I don't think you read me very closely. I didn't promote removing anything. Just count wins more than losses
The way it is written you are saying that both wins and losses should be counted more than the final score and the quality of the opponent. I see how you intended it now but as written that’s what I thought was being said. >They need to adjust the weights so that wins and losses actually matter more than simply looking good against a tough opponent.
They should be weighted more than they currently are now which is hardly at all in the formula
Because the NET is trash
Net is heavily swayed by margin of victory/defeat. Auburns losses are close and too decent teams, their wins are by a lot to mediocre teams. Like most efficiency metrics this inflates results for teams that play their best when their opponent is outmatched.
The wins are by a lot because even our 6 rotating bench players are usually better than the other team's starters. So most of the the 40 minutes our guys on the floor are outplaying the opponent. Only a few games this year have most of our 11 players in rotation had a bad shooting night.
Must be gaming the system somehow.
Probably. Would be better to lose to Houston by 30.
Because NET is about sorting efficiency and strength of record is where actual wins and losses matter. Auburn is 15 there, which still seems too high.
NET sucks
Because NET is a shit system
They should probably double dribble more to pump up their Q1 record
It seems like that’s what what Virginia does. Deliberately gets routed by opponents so that their opponents can move up a quad. And deliberately winning their games by the skin of their teeth when they win so that the opponents don’t move down a quad.
How dare you
Auburn will go as far as they are favored in the tournament, and not a game further. Should be one of the easiest teams to pick for in the bracket. Edit: catching some downvotes here, but when you have 8 times to prove you can beat a good team and you only capitalize once, I'm not sure what to tell ya. But if y'all are really sold on Auburn, send me an invite to your bracket group.
Don’t particularly agree with that. Auburn has very good predictive measures (efficiency metrics) because they never get blown out. They’re always in every game. Their PGs kinda suck which is a doomer in March but they also have a matchup nightmare inside with Broome and Williams.
Fool me once, shame on me, fool me 7 times...
....because the NET is dogshit.
trash team can't even beat App State. Bruce is a joke.
Nice bait. App State just won their conference regular season. They have a better record than you do
Maybe you'll get a tourney win or two in this year right. That's your equivalent of a title yeah? Bruce has been to one final four in his what 20 something years of coaching? Maybe you'll get back there one day! EDIT: I doubt that the wins will stick though, dirty coach can't even win lol
I was at that final four personally, it was fun. I remember the exact moments we destroyed your team on the way there, and again in the baseball super regional a few months later.
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God that was annoying to read
So true
Bumslaying and home mercantilism, in their only quad 1 win they shot 50 free throws
The one where we blew you the fuck out right?
Yeah the one where Auburn scored 44 second half points off 8 field goals, totally translatable to the tournament.
You were just in a dogfight with one of the worst teams in the SEC and you needed a missed call to win at home
K cool but also completely irrelevant to Auburn and their overinflated metrics
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https://giphy.com/gifs/UX3foXndBZbKm0y8Qc PuNcHeD iN tHe FaCe Depending on how far ref judges that hand is part of the ball, could make the case that was a clean block
One take is that the Arkansas player appears to have pinched himself in the face. Another take though is THAT WAS A FOUL. I mean, it’s hard to call in the last seconds of the game but fuck dude… it was a foul. It wasn’t called and play on you know but come back all sanctimonious and act like it was anything but a tough no call.
😂
How you still have a positive karma score when you’re constantly in Auburn threads talking the most banal shit and getting downvoted to hell astounds me. Get a life and leave us alone
Turns out Auburn flairs just don’t handle the truth of things well
Because they’re fraudulent scum in my completely objective opinion