- While we are not sure we can buy the methodology they used to come to their final conclusion, we were intrigued by a post by Duke Hoop Blog that attempts to quantify home court advantage in the ACC. The post was initially an attempt to defend the honor/importance of the Cameron Crazies by using statistics to prove it (since 14% of people know that you can prove anything with statistics), but some of the results they got for their proposed metrics were fairly interesting. We would love to see somebody carry out an ongoing anything like this with a little more statistical rigor to really measure home court advantage for some top teams to gauge the actual effect rather than just throwing out the usual clichés.
- It appears that West Virginia will be a member of the Big 12 in July after it announced yesterday that it had settled its contentious Big East exit fee lawsuit. According to Athletic Director Oliver Luck the terms of the deal are confidential, but no tuition, taxpayer, state, or academic funds would be necessary to pay for it [Ed. Note: He didn’t mention if his son Andrew would be chipping in a token amount after April’s NFL Draft.] While this would create a precedent for both Syracuse and Pittsburgh to leave for the ACC, but both schools appear to be willing to wait the mandated 27-months before leaving the conference.
- With the increasing separation of teams from the media and public it is nice to see that John Calipari has decided to open today’s practice to Kentucky students, faculty, and staff. Calipari feels that the different environment will help his team stay sharp with a long gap between games as he feels that a long layoff played a role in the team’s only loss of the season. We doubt that Calipari will unveil any new sets, but those in attendance will get to see the team practice for 30-40 minutes and then see two 10-minute scrimmages along with some other interaction with the fans. We will be watching to see how this goes and if any other coaches may try implementing this in the future.
- One of the biggest traditions in sports is retiring the jerseys of great players, but one major program–Indiana–does not engage in the practice. Terry Hutchens, stealing an idea from former Hoosier A.J. Guyton, takes a look at the ten former Hoosiers whose jerseys he would raise in Assembly Hall. Hutchens lists ten Hoosiers who played at the school for at least three years, which ruled out some very big names, but he still managed to put together a solid list of ten Hoosiers. With the resurgence of the program, we would be interested to see if the Indiana administration would consider retiring a few jerseys as a way to help link the old Hoosier program with the new one.
- Finally, for those of you who are craving college basketball sabermetrics, we bring you “Tuesday Truths” by John Gasaway at Basketball Prospectus. If a ton of numbers make your brain overload then this post is perfect for you as it breaks the nation’s top 14 conferences down by teams and looks at pace (possessions per 40 minutes) and points per possession on offense and defense along with the difference between the two. Depending on whether or not you believe in advanced statistics in basketball it is a useful general tool to figure out which teams may be ranked too high and which teams may be ranked too low.