I think polls are pretty meaningless until after the Thanksgiving tournaments. The SEC gets a huge bump in football every year because they get so many teams ranked in preseason polls, so a loss to one does not hurt as much. The ACC once upon a time actually got the same benefit in basketball (you young people may not believe that but there was a time best basketball conference was even debatable).
I read somewhere that pomeroy is simply about the math, and his formulas do not take game location into account. I think that is a huge negative. Under his formula if UNC beats Kansas at KU and dook beats them in HIS by the same score, both wins count the same.
I have always been very skeptical of those algorithms. As someone once said, "there are lies, damn lies and statistics".
According to his website, he does factor in home court.
"I add 1.4% to the home team’s OE and visiting team’s DE, and subtract the same amount from the opposite parameters."
I'm more data driven. So I find it hard to understand why there's any angst against an analytics site like KenPom. I think it's valuable to have tempo based statistics. A team that uses 28 seconds of the shot clock and allows 55 PPG vs a team that uses 20 seconds of the shot clock and allows 55 PPG... That's a huge difference that prior to more evolved analytics sites, that difference wasn't common knowledge. So I like that there's a place that gives you a team's numbers based on their possessions as opposed to based on how many games they played.
There's also very clear trends that teams that are really good in certain analytics categories have the best chance to win it all. Teams have to be in the top 20 in OFF and DEF efficiency. And teams usually have to play within a certain range of tempo. UNC is always an outlier on the tempo so apart from them, fast teams do not win national championships. In fact in recent years, extremely slow paced teams have won regularly.
So I like that there's this information out there because you should always question yourself when you're running a team or any kind of business. I've brought it up here that maybe playing super super fast isn't great in today's college basketball. For that, I'm simply following the trends of recent college basketball.
