Author: lou
More Tourney Talk
We clinched our Big East under with Pittsburgh losing to Xavier in the late game yesterday. That leaves the maximum Big East wins available at 15 and even that would require Syracuse meeting West Virginia in the championship game. It more than makes up for a disappointing round two gambling-wise. Of course, even though my bracket was one of the losers in the kickass Maryland-Michigan St. game, it’s still worth replaying their final 22 seconds below.
It’s also worth noting that 12-seed Cornell (+9 versus Kentucky Thursday) absolutely shredded two of the better defenses in the country in Temple and Wisconsin over the weekend. Cornell is the top 3-point shooting team in the country, but unlike other top 3-point teams Utah St. and BYU haven’t hit a dry spell yet. Kentucky has a very good defense and Cornell will need to rebound and continue to shoot well to have a chance.
Just got going on MLB season win totals, hope to have those up in the next week or so as the NCAAs (and NIT) are winding down.
Lastly, the Onions Award for the 2010 tournament will be given for this shot, and I can’t think of any circumstance that would cause me to change my mind.
NCAA Round 2
Worried about a top seed who nearly lost in round 1? Here’s something to consider.
There are two schools of thought on being tested by a lesser opponent early in the tourney. The optimistic view is that a close game like that serves as a useful wake-up call, and that most teams play such a close game somewhere along their NCAA Tournament path. The pessimistic perspective is that struggling in the early rounds reveals weaknesses that better teams can take full advantage of in later rounds.
Can we learn anything about these situations from the numbers? Using the incredible new treasure trove of NCAA history offered by sports-reference.com, I went through the last 10 NCAA Tournaments to find examples of top-three seeds playing games decided by five points or fewer in the first round. In that span, no No. 1 seed has gotten such a serious scare from a 16, but five No. 2 seeds have eked out victories and nine No. 3 seeds have won by five points or fewer.
The second seeds who were tested in the first round indeed struggled the next time out, going just 2-3. By comparison, No. 2 seeds who were more dominant in their opening-round wins won 58.8 percent of the time. (One oddity from these numbers: Third seeds were more successful in the second round overall than second seeds over the past decade. In 2000, three of the four No. 2 seeds failed to reach the Sweet Sixteen.)
At the same time, third seeds saw little to no carry-over. They went 7-2 in second-round games, which is better than their peers who got off to a better start.
Official color commentator of Miracle Covers Bill Raftery was the subject of a recent SI article. He had the quote of round one telling America that Scottie Reynolds, “stroked it admirably today,” and causing anyone who was playing the Bill Raftery Drinking Game to take a sip. Unofficial onion count : 1
“He’s the only person I know who can say, ‘F— you’ and make you think it’s a compliment,”
NCAA Conference Win Totals
Bookmaker has a prop up listing how many games each conference will win in this year’s NCAA tournament. My initial instinct was 7 1/2 wins for the ACC was way too low. The best (or second best) conference has six teams! How can they only be expected to win 7 or 8 games? Wayne Winston had a nicely formatted chart that used the Sagarin Ratings to project out win probabilities for each team. I aggregated these by conference and came up with the following (substitute your own numbers from Pomeroy or someplace else as you wish):
Projected Conference Win Totals
I definitely didn’t expect it, but the Big East under certainly looks appealing. Unsure probability wise how 1.5 wins stacks up with the +115 on the under (Needs to hit 47% to break even), but it’s about as anti-public as you can get.
EDIT: After some feedback from a couple of people, I re-ran these numbers using the Pomeroy projections and this morning’s changed lines. MUCH better.
When Good/Great Programs Have a Down Year – Part 2
Following up on Pat’s post, below records against the spread for selected teams this year compared to their actual record the past two seasons:
There have been some attempts to try and predict teams by using the number of minutes returning and then a variable to represent the quality of freshmen, but I’m not aware of anything that’s actually worked and worked well. See Texas on this year’s list as a perfect example. They were winning unimpressively (and not covering) before finally starting to lose games when 2010 rolled around.
The tom and bottom teams on this list are always going to be the ones most over/under valued by the general gambling public. Finding & betting on these teams before they get all popular is kind of the idea.
For example, anyone who was paying attention to Notre Dame basketball noticed their sudden transition into a slower paced team in February.
“I went to sleep that night and just thought, ‘We’ve got to do something different,’’ Brey said of his Solomon-inspired epiphany. “We’ve had burn – where we run the clock in the final four minutes – in our playbook forever. So I just told the guys, ‘We’re going to extend burn to 40 minutes.’’
The burn has scorched opponents. Since Brey put the brakes on the usually run and gun, up and down Irish, Notre Dame has ripped off five wins in a row and gone from not being in the NCAA Tournament conversation to playing for a seed. The Irish defeated Seton Hall 68-56 Wednesday night.
Notre Dame lost by a basket against West Virginia in the Big East semis, ending their six game win streak, but every since their 91-89 loss to Louisville has hit the under.
John Gasaway from Basketball Prospectus added this bit of goodness:
Notre Dame defense, first 14 Big East games vs. last five
Pace: possessions per 40 minutes; Opp. PPP: opponent points per possessionPace Opp. PPP
First 14 65.8 1.13
Last five 56.9 0.97Speaking of transformations, this is not a matter of a coach simply taking his foot off the accelerator. More like yanking the emergency brake so hard it flew off. Notre Dame is now locked in a pace cage match to the death with Wisconsin and Arizona State for the title of slowest late-season major-conference team.
Why is the Irish D so much better all the sudden? Partly it’s because in their sassy new Big Ten look ND has improved noticeably on the defensive glass while committing fewer fouls. (Again, feel free to draw a Wisconsin parallel.) But far and away the largest single before-and-after difference here is opponents’ threes. They used to go in (over the first 14 Big East games) 37 percent of the time. Now (last five games) they go in just 24 percent of the time.
Interestingly, everything else has stayed the same, even at the dramatically slower pace. Just like before, teams playing Notre Dame never turn the ball over and, indeed, opponent two-point percentage has actually gone up a hair. It pretty much all comes down to the threes.
Certainly I can envisage the Irish playing better and more locked-in perimeter D in games this slow, just like it makes sense that more minutes for a 6-7 athlete like Carleton Scott would have an impact.
It took bookmakers three full games to even have a hint as to what was going on, and it wasn’t until after the fifth game against notoriously uptempo Seton Hall that the lines even started getting adjusted. And Notre Dame has still been smashing the under which means the lines still weren’t right. Here’s the list:
The Irish play Old Dominion in an early game Thursday and the line is currently 122. Old Dominion plays at a similar tempo to UND’s last two opponents Pittsburgh and West Virginia. It’s worth a look if not a play. Of course, those that actually watched the games over the last few weeks (hint: not me) and took action already should be sitting on enough cash to make this play.
One last bit of reading material to recommend for bracket selections: Seth Davis, who you’ll see on TV a lot over the next three weeks, called a bunch of coaches and asked them for their off-the-record thoughts on a bunch of teams in this year’s field. The insights are very telling. I’ll quote my favorite below and then tell you to read HERE and HERE.
KENTUCKY: The main question with them is obviously their inexperience. Regardless of what people say, freshmen are freshmen, and all it takes is one freshman moment in a single-elimination tournament to end your season. The second thing is their perimeter shooting. Statistically their percentages are respectable, but their volume of outside shots is not high. Nobody gets up and down the floor like John Wall, but when you get into the tournament, the pace tends to slow down. Teams that are averaging 75 points a game are going to get 70 or fewer. If people put a premium on possessions, they are going to have to make perimeter shots. DeMarcus Cousins’ emergence offensively has taken the focal point off of Wall, and to [John] Calipari’s credit they’re going more inside-out. Against Wall, you have to change your looks and try to get him confused, and he will turn it over by trying to go too fast. Then at the end of a shot clock, you have to make him make jump shots. There is no doubt Cousins is the best post player in college basketball. He’s a load on the block, and it’s incredible he gets one of every four shots taken off the offensive glass. [Patrick] Patterson is almost an afterthought, but he hit the big three against Vanderbilt, so you know he’s going to make big plays.
Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/seth_davis/02/22/hoop.thoughts/1.html
Midnight Zen
Full day today at the Sloan Conference. I’ll have lots coming in the next week or two. For now you can catch twitter links here. Truehoop has a writeup on all panels basketball here.
Completely unrelated, it seems as though the European Poker Tour was recently robbed of over a million euros during a live taping. Video Below. Maybe they got their idea from the World Series of Dice?
| Chappelle’s Show | ||||
| The World Series of Dice | ||||
|
||||
Dorkapalooza 2010
I’ll be there on Saturday at the event also known as the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I’m unlikely to liveblog as that will be too distracting but we may have to bust out the old Twitter feed. Any requests?
Olympic Links
All Olympics, all the time.
First, a fascinating look at scalping tickets at the winter games.
Olympic ticketing has its set process. Organizers generally sell seats as far ahead of the Games as they can, slowly releasing batches for the premier events first — in order to maximize cash flow in the years leading up to the festival. Pools of seats are then made available to citizens of the host nation, and anything that’s left goes to general sale nine to 12 months before the Opening Ceremony. So the Games are usually either “sold out” or “95 percent booked.” It only takes one visit to the Olympics to know that this type of news is all useless misnomer that should be completely ignored.
Why Scandanavian countries aren’t any good at figure skating.
A majority of Canada’s hockey players are left handed. I don’t know hockey well enough to say, but maybe there’s a strategic advantage in being left handed, like in baseball, creating a self selection bias toward those players.
Roughly 60 percent of the Easton hockey sticks sold in Canada are for left-handed shots, Mountain said. In the United States, he said, about 60 percent of sticks sold are for right-handed shots. Figures over the years from other manufacturers have put the ratio discrepancy between the two countries as high as 70 to 30.
The difference even trickles over into golf, where the swing is not unlike that of a slap shot. According to the Professional Golfers Association, 7 percent of Canadian golfers play left-handed, which is proportionally more than any other nationality. The reason is probably that Canadians pick up a hockey stick first and are therefore imprinted by the time they take up golf. Especially if they are from Quebec, where hockey players are even more left-handed than players in the rest of Canada.
Oddly, British Columbia — sometimes said to be the most American-like of the Canadian provinces — skews the other way. “The rest of the country goes 2 to 1 in favor of left sticks, but it’s reversed in B.C.,” said Marc Poirier, a customer service representative who handles Canadian orders for Warrior Sticks.
Europeans also tend to be left-handed shooters. The International Ice Hockey Federation does not keep figures by European nationality, the communications director Szymon Szemberg said. But, he said, lefty shooters have predominated. “For long spells, the great Soviet teams of the ’80s never had a player who shot right,” Szemberg said.
Boston.com has a kickass photo blog for the Olympics so far.
As if curling wasn’t cool enough, the US curling team has it’s own condom.
Lastly, what’s better than a women’s hockey brawl in an Olympic qualifier? Don’t miss the score.
Friday Links
Michael Vick is back in the news this week. From Mark Bradley of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
I was encouraged to hear that Michael Vick, in advance of his reality show that debuts Tuesday on BET , is saying he led “a double life,” and I use the word “encouraged” advisedly. Because you don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself and asked people who worked inside the building at 4400 Falcon Parkway if I/they had any hint — any hint — of what was to come.
And I did not. Which might make me the world’s worst reporter, except that I’ve not yet found anyone within the compound who saw it coming, either.
I know, I know. People on the outside will harrumph and say they knew it all along because he wore his hair in corn rows and dressed in a manner different from, say, Peyton Manning. But I grew up in the ’60s and have had some fairly extravagant hairdos myself, and I attended my high school graduation wearing platform shoes with four-inch heels. Me, I stopped judging on appearances long ago.
And even if you believed Vick mightn’t have been a model citizen, you knew this … how? Before the Ron Mexico civil action was filed in 2005, there wasn’t a hint of misdoings, and he’d been a Falcon since April 2001. In hindsight, the weird part wasn’t that we “knew all about” the most famous person in Atlanta but that we knew, as in really knowing, hardly anything.
That’s why I’m intrigued by “The Michael Vick Project”, and what it might reveal. I thought I knew him. Turns out I only knew what I was allowed to see. I’m intrigued to see how he kept his lives compartmentalized. I’m intrigued, as the spies in John le Carre’s fictional Circus would say, by the tradecraft.
Vick in an Atlanta radio interview this week said the following:
On whether or not people ever saw the best that he could’ve been:
“No. Not at all. I think if I woulda applied myself, there was a lot more I could have done off the field and also in the film room that could have elevated my game to a totally different level. I was complacent at the time, somewhat lazy, and I kinda settled for mediocrity. I thought what I was doing was enough. I thought that would suffice and I didn’t have to do anything else. I thought as my career went on I would continue to play at a high level. Everything that I was doing off the field, in regards to the marijuana and everything else, it didn’t slow me down, but it definitely slowed my developmental process because it made me lazy in a sense and I wasn’t really focused and didn’t take things seriously. Now, I want to make the most out of the next couple of years out of my career. I want to play my best football up until the age of 34 or 35, so that’s my plan. I’m gonna put everything into it. Put my all into it.”
On the fact that he still had success even when he didn’t dedicate himself completely:
“Just imagine what I could’ve been doing if I really would have been applying myself. That’s a regret that I have. I’m just glad that I have an opportunity to make amends for what I didn’t do and try to recap that. That’s what I wanted to show in my documentary because people didn’t know that. I wanted a clean slate, I wanted to put all of that out there so that once this documentary aired and the series is over, then I can move on with my life and I don’t have to answer a lot of questions. I can just answer them through my actions.”
Judging by the above paragraphs only, it sounds like he’s growing up.
Why Germany will win the upcoming World Cup.
Did Avatar mercilessly steal from Pocahontas?
Lastly, Lamar Odom entertainingly pimping Powerbars. Or something.
2011 Super Bowl Odds
These were posted by Bodog this morning. Make of that what you will.
Team Odds
Indianapolis 6.5
San Diego 8
New England 10
New Orleans 10
Pittsburgh 11
Dallas 12
Green Bay 12
Minnesota 12
Philadelphia 16
Baltimore 20
NY Giants 20
NY Jets 25
Tennessee 25
Atlanta 30
Cincinnati 30
Arizona 35
Chicago 35
Houston 35
Carolina 40
Miami 45
San Francisco 45
Seattle 45
Denver 50
Jacksonville 50
Washington 50
Buffalo 100
Cleveland 100
Detroit 100
Kansas City 100
Oakland 100
St. Louis 100
Tampa Bay 100
Defending champions at 10:1??? Atlanta at 30 is also appealing. It’s really tempting to take the top 8 NFC teams, banking on the fact that one of them should make the Super Bowl and then hedge the moneyline on an AFC team a year from now. Probably not worth the effort considering you’d have to tie up your money with Bodog of all places for a year, but it’s something to think about.
Saints at 10:1 still doesn’t feel right, though maybe I’m just biased based on the last few seasons.
Comment away, especially if I’m missing something.
EDIT: Lombardi makes an excellent point this morning I overlooked yesterday in that teams in the last 8 of the playoffs (IND, SD, NO, DAL, MIN, BAL, NYJ, ARI) cannot make significant free agent additions unless replacing a departing player.
If you leave out those 8 teams, the top plays would seem to be NE, PIT, GB & ATL. Still awfully hard to tie up any significant $ on something a year away without a good feel for an outcome.
Super Bowl Propping
Apologies for the lack of posting this week. Real life + being sick = light blogging. I’ll attempt to make up for it here by hopefully passing along some of the more appealing prop bets available from the literally hundreds available.
Other sites have much more detailed analysis here and here. If you are participating in a square and want/need to calculate your odds of winning, that link is here.
Dallas Clark over 68 yards receiving (-110)
This is a really high number for a tight end, but Dallas Clark is more of a hybrid slot receiver than even Antonio Gates or Jason Witten, so this number is probably very close to the true line. This is a high variance play, but I think Clark will see single coverage all day and will likely be the recipient of many checkdowns thanks to the Saints blitzing. Another similar play is Joseph Addai over 2.5 receptions or over 18.5 receiving yards.
Total Penalties
If anyone can find a prop bet on this, please let me know. The Colts and Saints are two of the least penalized teams in the league and referee Scott green, to my complete and total joy almost never calls roughing the passer. He’s thrown only seven flags for roughing the passer over the past three seasons, including zero during the entire 2008 season. Many of the roughing the passer penalties are simply things that happen in a game called “football” and it’s fantastic that a referee that subscribes to this belief will be in charge of the game.
Highest Rated Commercial Anheuser-Busch +200
These odds have been heavily slashed from the +900!!!! opening, but there’s still value here.
I think there is tremendous value in Anheuser-Busch and Doritos at Bookmaker here, and it goes beyond just comparing their odds to Bodog’s. Busch won ten years in a row before Doritos broke their impressive streak last year. Even in defeat, Busch showed very strong, with their ads placing both second and third. In 2008 Busch placed first, fifth, and sixth, with Doritos coming in fourth. And in 2007 the two companies dominated the standings, monopolizing the top seven spots. Even at +900, Busch actually has the shortest odds of any of Bookmaker’s 35 options; it’s like BM was aware that they should be the favorite, but had no idea just how dominant they’ve been.
As for this year’s game, the Clydesdales won’t be appearing, but Busch has purchased five minutes worth of ads, and their non-Clydesdale commercials have scored well in the past. Doritos is running a similar contest to the one that landed them the top spot last year; they’ll have three commercials during the game.
Likely more degeneracy to follow between now and kickoff.
