Kenpom movement
Kenpom keeps updating as usual through the tourney. I'm still glad we got UCLA instead of Bama, but UCLA is up to 16th on Kenpom now. I don't know where UCLA was before the tourney, but presumably much lower than that. They are better than an 11 seed. USC also must have taken a big jump up as they're now 6th, which is less surprising after demolishing 2 good teams.
I'll be rooting for USC though. Gonzaga has now pulled away on Kenpom and their margin is 7 points better than Baylor at 2. Of course Michigan would have a shot against Gonzaga but I'd prefer not to see that matchup. The difference between 1 and 2 is greater than the difference between 2 and 11.
Houston is now 3rd, just slightly above Michigan in the 4th spot, but 2 to 4 are nearly identical.
Illinois is the highest-rated team not in the tourney :)
UCLA entered the tournament 45 on Kenpom.
Kind of a lot of movement for 4 games (including 14 seed ACU and meh MSU) at the end of the season, no? I know the P12 has been on fire and that's a bigger share of non-conf SOS buuuuuut those are huge jumps for the end of the year.
Didn't KP make an adjustment to his numbers last week or something? Might partially explain the severe jumps.
I think the P12 is def. underrated. The coach at Oregon - it's not his 1st rodeo and UO has been here before under him. USC and UCLA obvsly have talent. OSU who the hell knows.
It is a lot of movement, but they're not just getting moved from beating Alabama and others. The whole Pac-12 kicking ass in the tournament helps them. Oregon losing to USC doesn't hurt the conference at all. So the conference as a whole has wins over Alabama (8 on KP), BYU (19), Kansas (31), Iowa (7), Tennessee (27), Oklahoma State (34), and Loyola Chicago (10). Those are all current Kenpom rankings so I'm sure they've dropped from losing to Pac-12 teams. Kansas was not 31st before USC obliterated them. Also, because there were fewer non-conference games, I'd imagine these games are changing conference strength more than usual.
It’s the pac 12 doing well overall, and some of Houston passing Michigan is the big ten doing poorly. This is basically replacing out of conference season and having a larger than normal impact because of small sample sizes. Which is why all the claims of best conference ever were pretty stupid. It was impossible to know this year
They are probably still closer to 45th than KenPom’s number 16 team... they survived two overtime games and won by a combined margin of 16 points vs Alabama and MSU.
yeah, IDK if KP takes MOV in OT into account. Like, a double digit win in reg is waaaaay diff than a double digit win in OT..
To be fair they didn't "survive" either OT...they obliterated both teams in OT as far as OT obliterations go.
Beating Alabama by any margin is a very good win. And BYU is 19th on Kenpom. That game wasn't in doubt.
In Re: BYU. When you get your KenPom ranking by playing semi-close games against Gonzaga, I really don't have much faith that your team is actually that good.
And even after yesterday, FSU is higher than UCLA.
Gonzaga is good but I think our Kenpom would be crazy as well if we played their schedule. I also realize Gonzaga has some really good wins too -- but so do we. I just don't think they're as much of a "super team" as it's being made out. If given the option, I'd take my chances against this Gonzaga squad over the Villanova and Louisville teams we played in past tournaments. I don't see guys like Gorgui Dieng, Wayne Blackshear, Russdiculous, Peyton Siva, Chane Behanan, Montrezl Harrell, Eric Paschall, Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, Omari Spellman, Donte Divincenzo, etc. I see Suggs and a bunch of solid guys who aren't insanely athletic or horrible mismatches for our guys.
Honestly, USC, the Mobley brothers, and USC's zone might be a serious issue for them. Beating Creighton by 18 isn't anymore impressive than beating FSU by 18 in my opinion (and Kenpom's apparently). USC has had the most dominating wins in the tournament from what I've seen.
The whole point of Kenpom is to adjust for schedule. The shorten pre-conference schedule may have made this a tougher year to compare across conferences. And I can agree that styles makes fights and Michigan has had to face more varied opponents that like Illinois gave Michigan matchup problems.
They're just as good as Louisville was, I think they're better.
They're right there with Nova.
Michigan was right there and then the B1G made us play all of those games, leading to fatigue, losses, and one of the best players ending his season with a stress fracture.
Michigan was clearly the second best team in the nation before all of the madness happened during the regular season.
And as the #2, they had a legit shot.
Now? Of course they have a shot, but we'll have to play damn near perfect and our defense will have to be lights out. Both Johns and Brown will have to play their best games along with the usual suspects.
During the regular season I thought an A Michigan team is neck and neck with an A- performance from the Zags.
Now I think they'll have to be a B or B+ even with out A game. They're legit.
I compare them to Clemson over the past 6-7 years. Everyone talks about the ACC schedule but in the CFP Clemson is still giving everyone all they want and more and has what two NCs in that period?
You can be dominant and play in a shit conference. They've played enough good teams to prove they're among some of the elite teams of the past 25 years.
Livers said he was hurt before the shutdown. If anything, the shutdown probably gave him a chance to heal—it just wasn’t enough. The only way to really heal a stress injury is to just shut things completely down for a while.
If Livers wasn't playing hurt, Michigan's ranking would probably be considerably higher. Wouldn't have been run out of the building by Illinois, probably wouldn't have lost to State. We wouldn't have reached Gonzaga, but I bet we'd be a solid number 2 (hehe).
That is in fact not how kenpom works at all. If anything Michigan is more likely to have an inflated kenpom ranking from getting to play overrated big ten teams
I mean, Gonzaga's big noncon wins were against Iowa, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kansas, none of whom made it out of the first weekend. Talk about an overrated schedule. Oh and then they get to play a bunch of high school teams in conference play.
March 29th, 2021 at 11:29 AM ^
I take solace in knowing that Gonzaga hasn’t faced any of the top of the top this year (like we have with Illinois), but we haven’t played anyone that got out of the first weekend either... FSU game notwithstanding.
At this point all the teams are "playing" good so it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's better to play the supposed better team than the "hot" team. Just beat UCLA.
Agree, but hot typically ends around now.
This reminds me of FSU then a hot Loyola. They were legit, but ran out of gas and Michigan never ran away from it, but you never felt like it was out of control. They kind of just cruised to a solid win.
We got FSU, a hot low ranked team and then we get the buzz saw if we win. Just like 2018.
The difference before is we got Nova on 2 days rest and prep.
We'd have Gonzaga on almost a week's worth of rest and prep and still no travel.
But first, BEAT UCLA!
Four out of five doctors recommend Metamucil™.
Who were all the voices that said "we might win a game or two, but without Livers we aren't making a deep run"?
There were a lot of them......
The TEAM, The Team, The Team.....
Hell, I said that.
But I also said that if somehow Brandon Johns could pitch in double-digits then maybe we could keep rolling.
Johns was our leading scorer yesterday. I was NOT expecting that. If he keeps playing well, the team's ceiling is only slightly lower than it was with Livers. IMO Michigan played it's best complete team game of the season against FSU. Everyone pitched in and there were tons of great assists.
March 29th, 2021 at 10:07 AM ^
Brown is capable of scoring double digits on any given night, Johns is capable of scoring in double digits on any given night..... Big Country can even score in double digits in the right match up. that's how teams win.
Losing Livers sucks, no doubt, and we're a better team with him on the court but this team has balance and there is enough talent to make up that loss, as we're seeing.
GO BLUE
It is so difficult to not feel badly for Illinois ;)
One game at a time...Michigan sure looks to be rounding back into shape very nicely.
One thing about UCLA is that they are quite slow. The slowest team left in the tourney. Actually a bit slower than Wisc and Maryland. They try to slow down and ugly up games. Very different than that Alabama team which was something like top 10 in tempo. I think UCLAs style took some teams by surprise as well. But UM plays in the B1G where a lot of teams slow things down, so it's not something that should surprise them. I think, they went small against MSU as well which helped them come back against them.
Which is odd since they start four guards and a power forward.
I think we maul them inside.
They've been on a nice run but shoot more contested shots than anyone.
I have been saying this for a while but KenPom is sort of broken for this year. Just too few days points such that teams get these massive jumps because the couple of data points they do have regarding wins and SoS get magnified. UCLA is a good team buy in no way have they been the #16 team in the country this year not would they have been so had MSU held onto a missed FT. That's the craziness here - they jumped 30 spots mostly because a couple of Pac-12 teams played well over 4 games.
Through 3 rounds the PAC 12 hasn’t lost a game outside their conference. That will change up the conference strength by a ton, especially in a shortened season.
I don’t think KenPom is broken—it is just adjusting to the recent data that Is indicating that all of the teams UCLA lost to this season were really good teams.
I don't think it's broken generally but it's a system that relies on a fair bit of inter-conference results to frame it's ranking system and it's been lacking in that this year. I went back to look at 2018, for example, and noticed that Loyola Chicago went from #45 to #30 in their system after beating the #37, #13, #25, and #42 teams in the country before losing a close game to the #7 team. UCLA has gone from the #45 to the #21 team in the country after beating the #63, #19, #85, and #8 teams in the country. And if you factor out the Alabama game they rose 13 spots despite beating exactly one team in the top 20 per KenPom. A lot of the movement is based on the Pac-12 having a really good tournament, which in one respect is good because it's updating based on recent data but on the other hand isn't being counter-weighed by a significant number of OoC games they didn't have this year.
Also, UCLA had one top-25 KenPom win coming into the year, and that was Colorado back on January 2nd. They also have loses to #79 WSU and #58 Stanford. And even those rankings are inflated from the end of the regular season. My issue is that KenPom is a feedback system that was built on having a robust data set and because of the uniqueness of this season doesn't. So it creates these wild swings and it's just a little weird to watch it happen in real time.
March 29th, 2021 at 10:01 AM ^
I think we agree, we just are looking at it differently. You are right that the ratings swings during the tournament are much larger this year. I guess I was expecting that. But I don't think the swings indicate the rankings are currently less accurate. I think the swings mean, as you said, that going into the tournament KenPom didn't have enough cross-conference data and therefore had less accurate rankings than usual. The rankings are now swinging more towards reality.
March 29th, 2021 at 11:08 AM ^
I think of it like a data pendulum. Less data, the bigger the amplitude.
Was UCLA and the P12 generally underrated in the KP system 2 weeks ago? No doubt.
Now, the last 2 weeks of limited data has swung the pendulum closer to the equilibrium (true value) but I'm getting the sense it's swung too much the other way now and it's over rating the P12 a bit based on the recent handfull of games.
It would be interesting to see how predictive his numbers have been compared to previous seasons. It's a weird season, so weird numbers would also be expected to a certain point. I'm guessing the reduced big time non-conference match ups means less intra conference data to consider until the tourney starts.
I think the numbers are going to settle down somewhat but I think we'll look back and see a lot of teams get overrated or underrated based on the weird schedules everyone played.
I think the numbers are going to settle down somewhat but I think we'll look back and see a lot of teams get overrated or underrated based on the weird schedules everyone played.
March 29th, 2021 at 11:01 AM ^
Ok but you can't say kenpom is broken this year because of lack of data points and I know Ucla isn't that good because they went to OT against State.
March 29th, 2021 at 11:36 AM ^
You can say their model is sub-optimal for this year’s data set, though.
Sure, but in light of that how do you evaluate teams instead? People just cherry pick individual games. That's not better.
UCLA has a couple of defense invariant dudes, which makes them tougher to beat than FSU. That said, maybe Franz can shut down one of them. Michigan is the better team, but I don't think they will blow out UCLA like they did FSU.
So a Houston team that needed a complete Rutgers-ing from Rutgers to get out of the second round and then beat a Syracuse team that is, well, on par with the last 15 years of plucky but undermanned Syracuse teams is #3?
That checks out.
By beating Rutgers and 'Cuse, Houston gets the benefit of the overall strength of the Big Ten and ACC conferences.
Michigan, on the other hand, loses points due to the overrated nature of the Big Ten and ACC conferences.
Makes perfect sense to me.
March 29th, 2021 at 11:04 AM ^
They killed Syracuse so why is that a knock? Rutgers isn't a bad team. I don't remember what Houston was before the tourney but they were very highly rated. They haven't jumped up much. And most of their movement has probably been teams like Illinois and Iowa losing in front of them.
March 29th, 2021 at 10:04 AM ^
Baylor Houston and Michigan are all rated within .31 points by KenPom. They are virtually tied for #2 behind Gonzaga.
March 29th, 2021 at 10:12 AM ^
I think Michigan is playing well enough to beat UCLA and move on to the FF, and its most likely they will come up against Gonzaga. The nice part about the tournament is that Michigan doesn't need to be the best team this year like they would in a series, they need to be the best team for one night. And one game elimination can do crazy stuff. If they get behind, how do they handle it? How do they handle a close game at finish? Gonzaga os a great team, but the pressure is on them to win.
Michigan isn't even supposed to be here. Picked 7th or 8th in BIG for a transition year. And now playing without a top player and leader of the team. They get to play loose. Juwan is such a great coach and person. So fun to see him and the team succeed.
March 29th, 2021 at 12:15 PM ^
that subtle dig at Illinois at the end earned an upvote from me.