Unverified Voracity Wishes It Was Rocky And Arid Comment Count

Brian

"A fertile ground for dangerous upstarts lately." That's the accurate, expected, still painful knife Doctor Saturday gently slips between Michigan's ribs in his latest premature assessment, this of the UConn team that will inaugurate Michigan's luxury boxes and possibly clock year three of the Rodriguez era on the head before it can even kick over some MAC team's sand castle.

The assessment doesn't exactly live up the DocSat's foreboding tweet, which said he would be the first person to jump on the bandwagon of a "serious contender in the Big East." That sounds bad. It's not quite that bad in the final analysis, though:

The Huskies are a couple playmakers away from standing out as a conference favorite, and one of those guys may emerge on one side or the other. Unless they come up with more firepower on both sides, though, the existing talent level makes it hard to forecast anything better than 8-4. That's not a breakthrough, exactly, but it is a more generous guess than they've ever gotten before at this time of year.

UConn suffered through a series of painfully close losses before a breakthrough-ish game against Notre Dame launched them on a four game win streak. Syracuse, USF, and South Carolina were the other victims. In any case, UConn returns a crap-ton of starters from an 8-5 team that saw the breaks go against it last year. I don't think they'll end the year #2, but the specter of that Utah game has been duly raised.

Hypothesis damage. It's not like losing Manny Harris is going to help the team, especially if it continues to shoot zero point two percent, but I can't be the only person who has glanced at Harris's relatively meh efficiency numbers (47.7 eFG, basically equivalent to Novak) and thought that replacing him might not be the mountain it appears to be.

Here is a chart that slaps that idea in the face and tells it to sit in the corner. Presenting the top ten Big Ten players in John Hollinger's comprehensive PER stat:

RK PLAYER GP MPG AST TO USG ORR DRR REBR PER
1 Evan Turner, OSU 28 35.4 22 15.5 26.8 6.6 24.8 15.7 31.3
2 Robbie Hummel, PUR 27 30.3 12.9 6.5 19.6 6.5 21 13.7 28.31
3 Draymond Green, MSU 32 25.4 22.6 12.8 18.1 10 22.1 16.1 25.85
4 Damian Johnson, MINN 34 25.5 18.6 10.7 16.6 6.8 12.5 9.6 25.36
5 DeShawn Sims, MICH 32 32.1 5.2 8.4 23 12.7 18.6 15.6 25.2
6 Manny Harris, MICH 31 36.1 17.3 12.1 24.4 6.8 15.4 11.1 24.76
7 JaJuan Johnson, PUR 32 31.1 4.6 11.4 19.7 9.3 18.1 13.7 24.66
8 John Shurna, NW 33 36.3 12.7 9.9 21.8 6 16.1 11.1 23.68
9 Zack Gibson, MICH 32 10 6.8 13.5 15.1 12.1 16.2 14.1 23.66
10 Trevon Hughes, WIS 31 32.5 14.2 10.4 23.5 4.6 13 8.8 23.3

One-grunt observations on the three bolded folk: obvs, guh, wha?

Okay. I think that Michigan playing super small at all times skews this towards the players on the team who actually haul in rebounds. Still, this is one statistical measure that passes the sniff test—check out the top of the national leaderboard for Enter Samhan, Some UNI Guy, and Argh Running 40-Footer—that disagrees with the various Kenpom measures that declare Manny Harris a prolific but inefficient scorer.

Also… holy jeez maybe we could have figured out a way to put Gibson on the floor a bit more.

(HT: Inside The Hall.)

Money money money. Bleed Scarlet shouldn't feel too bad about missing USA Today's most recent FOIA rampage, a January database of revenue and expenses at public division I schools. It seems like the entire blogosphere whiffed on. I certainly hadn't seen it.

Anyway, this perked my ears up:

The vast majority of sports programs — even those that purport to support themselves — receive significant financial backing from their institutions to operate. Of the 99 institutions in the table below, all but four — Louisiana State, Ohio State, and Purdue Universities, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln — reported receiving at least some revenues in the 2007-8 fiscal year from one of four categories of “allocated” revenues: student fees, direct state or government support, direct institutional support (general fund money), or indirect institutional support (facilities, energy costs, etc.).

Eh? Really? No Michigan? A quick zip over to the database provides an answer. It is not earth-shaking:

image

As of 2008, six hundredths of a percentage point of Michigan's athletic department funding comes from the university. This is not a one-time fluke, as direct support went from zero in 2005 to about 30k the next year and 50k the year after before landing at its current totally insignificant amount. What is it? I asked SID Bruce Madej:

This is how we are required to report when we receive funds to pay for work study students who assist us during the year.

That mystery solved. 

Now let us ask the eternal question: why does Eastern Michigan have a football program? 86% of athletic department "revenue" comes as a subsidy.

Etc.: Hidden in the night game announcement is a two-year break in the M-ND series in 2018 and 2019, which an mgoblog user picked out and MVictors confirmed was a new development. DocSat on the "cult of the bracket."

Comments

Yostal

March 23rd, 2010 at 11:43 AM ^

Is it possible that the two year break is scheduled in an effort to get Notre Dame as a road game in odd numbered seasons instead of even numbered seasons, which means you would, under the current schedule, pair Ohio State and Penn State, and then you would pair Michigan State and Notre Dame, both offering attractive options for ticket buyers?

Then again, the Penn State conundrum came about because Penn State went off the schedule in cycle 6 of 6 of the Big Ten's rotation and then was slated into the home games in odd years run beginning in 2005, so in 2015, theoretically, we might see a switchback to the old system. That said, this all becomes moot if Big Ten expansion messes with the schedule.

Don

March 23rd, 2010 at 11:46 AM ^

Just as a fr' instance: For 2007-08, Alabama gets over 22% of its income or support from "Other." Michigan gets just over 2% from "Other."

Just to give some meaning to those percentages: Michigan's 2% came to just under $2.6 million.

Alabama's 22% came to over $27 Million.

Just what in the hell is "Other" at Alabama?

PhillipFulmersPants

March 23rd, 2010 at 11:53 AM ^

Interesting to note Draymond Green at #3. Though I'm not a fan of State, I like this kid. Lucious hit the shot against Maryland, but IIRC, Green hit the clutch jumper on the prior possession, and he was the one who took the ball to the other end with time winding down and hit Lucious for the winner. The big doughy guy with a nice smile can play.

No sign of any other Michigan player in the Top 50. No surprise, I guess. C'mon back, Manny, for a shot cracking the top 5.

pz

March 23rd, 2010 at 12:01 PM ^

Are kind of awesome.

I vote to add them to our tracking over the course of next year to give a bit of a contrast to the KenPom ratings - which are generally very good as well, but seem to be more accurate for team-wide analyses.

Nice find.

Also, DeMarcus Cousins... WOW! They always talk about his "adjusted 40-minute #s" being out of this world - guess this sort of speaks to that.

Brick

March 23rd, 2010 at 12:32 PM ^

It appears that the PER doesn't use FGM in any of its calculations. The player gets credit for FGA so this seems like a number calculating how involved a person is in the offense with extra credit for getting rebounds and a penalty for turnovers. I think anyone who watched a Michigan game this year can tell you that pretty much every play ran through Harris and Sims so these calculations are not a surprise except for Gibson being that high.

champswest

March 23rd, 2010 at 12:34 PM ^

noone else in the top 50? And we finished 7th in the Big 10 standings. Does that mean that the others (Stu, Zach, DM and LLP) were the ones bringing us down?

Zone Left

March 23rd, 2010 at 1:57 PM ^

Eastern's numbers make me continue to question the wisdom of those lower tier schools continuing to field D-1A football teams. Maybe it's a pride thing, but I suspect that states are going to get more serious about whether they need to use their increasingly scarce tax revenues to field college football teams at the top levels. It's not like Eastern has ever been a great team or had a large following.

Also, is it safe to assume that the $20 million in conference distributions include the Big 10's TV deals? It seems like the only logical way Michigan only earned $2 million from broadcasting.

champswest

March 23rd, 2010 at 4:51 PM ^

and IMO we would not have beaten them last year, even in the Big House. I don't know how many key players they lost from last years squad, but I don't think that this is going to be a cake walk for UM. Hopefully, the year of experience, some reinforcements and another season of Barwis will make a large enough difference to get us off and running in 2010. GO BLUE!

Flood

March 23rd, 2010 at 4:38 PM ^

...so it would be "...wishes it were rocky and arid," right?

Please don't hate me; I'm currently in John Rubadeau's English 425 class and I'm programmed to do this every Tuesday and Thursday

Feat of Clay

March 23rd, 2010 at 5:30 PM ^

Does that mean that those four schools do not employ any work-study students? Or do they just interpret the reporting requirement differently?

If it's the latter, it's just one more example (out of 413,782 and counting) that reporting tends to be complex and open to interpretation--and that makes comparing institutions (on almost any metric) more difficult.

bkewman

May 17th, 2010 at 10:24 PM ^

I actually happen to be a student worker in the Athletic Department at one of these schools (Purdue). So I can only answer for Purdue, but the answer to your question is yes. Purdue's Athletic Department does not use work study. I qualified all 3 years so far and the dept has rejected the use of it and has just employed me as a regular worker. I was shocked at first because they could just get something like half my wage paid by the government (if I understand correctly), but I believe the bragging rights to say they recieve absolutly no money from the university is perhaps their rational, and possibly it may mean more work and burocracy for the accountants and payroll people to deal with. So no it is not due to interpretation of reporting. Hope this helps. In case anyone cares I work in the Athletic Ticket Office (Anyone need GOOD tickets???? haha)

M-Wolverine

March 23rd, 2010 at 10:07 PM ^

With the thrill of the unexpected, though, comes the unavoidable tradeoff of a certain kind of justice for obviously superior teams -- such as, say, Kansas, which defeated rival Kansas State three times en route to the Big 12's regular season and tournament championships, only to watch the Wildcats move closer to the national championship because their inexplicable lapse against an inferior opponent came at a more convenient time in the season -- whose otherwise brilliant campaigns can go up in a blink. (The classic football example is the 2007 Patriots, arguably the greatest team in NFL history, whose perfect season was extinguished by a six-loss team that not only lost to New England in the regular season but finished three full games behind the champion of its own division.) For all the BCS' faults, producing an "unworthy" champion has never been one of them, as opposed to the occasional Villanova, N.C. State and Arizona in the basketball tournament; the Series' sins have always been at the opposite end, of leaving obviously worthy contenders out of the mix rather than letting stragglers in.

Seems he's making the same point that I was making after the Kansas loss...that the Tournament as it is situated is as exciting as all get out, but not the fairest way to determine a championship...something any playoff should consider (and though it wasn't the point of the previous topic, one I think Brian's system takes into account).

zlionsfan

March 23rd, 2010 at 11:03 PM ^

is that it crowns a different kind of champion. Especially if we're talking about football: I think almost any sort of playoff system would be more fair than the BCS. (At least in basketball, every team save a handful of Ivy League schools can win the title.)

I think once you get above a certain number of teams, you can't really determine a champion fairly with respect to reducing the impact of individual games. European soccer does pretty well with a round-robin schedule of home-and-home matches (sometimes multiples of same), but even then bad conditions in one match can make the difference.

Naturally, systems that reward season-long excellence don't make for good television. People like semi-random stuff. So you get what we had this evening, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. Even if I don't like it any more than he does.

sorry. I mean, the single-elimination tournament. Sucks if you have a bad game. Sucks when Jim Valvano takes a bunch of intellectually-challenged kids and uses intentional fouls and slow play to steal a title.

Great when Rumeal Robinson hits free throws.