Posted by nvr1983 on December 27th, 2011
- With the ascension of Harvard from an also-ran into a borderline top 25 and the 2010 Sweet 16 run of Cornell it has become apparent that Ivy League is no longer the pushover it once was on the basketball court. For years, many have cited the conference’s rule against athletic scholarships as a reason for their poor performance against other schools in major sports, but it appears like the schools have found a way around that restriction by offering “substantially enhanced financial aid for all admitted students”. While this decision affects individuals coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds regardless of athletic ability and could lead to significant societal change down the road, the immediate impact is being felt in sports where Ivy League teams are less handicapped as they can offer financial aid packages that are not too far from what an athletic scholarship would offer. While some question what are felt to be reduced academic standards for admissions for many of these athletes, in theory the decision to allow for these increased financial aid package should be an effective one as long as athletic programs do not compromise too much on the basic mission of their schools.
- It looks like Jamie Dixon may be getting a late Christmas present as he announced yesterday that Tray Woodall would be a a game-time decision tonight against Notre Dame. Woodall, who leads the team with 8.3 assists per game, has been out for five games so far with an abdominal injury and his return would be big for a team that has struggled at times this year including an embarrassing five-point loss on Friday at home against Wagner. Fortunately, Pittsburgh has played an easy schedule so far this season and will not face a ranked team until January 14, which means they should have a solid record heading into the most difficult part of their conference schedule.
- Many fans worry about how their favorite team will fare at this time of year with the distractions of final exams and Christmas. When teams lose their fans often attribute it to those distractions and it has become such an ingrained part of college sports that most fans and many in the media point to it as the primary reason when a ranked team loses. John Ezekowitz decided to take a look at this often-cited phenomenon and found some interesting results based on how favored home teams perform against the spread at this time of year, which is probably reasonable way to account for the variable strength of opponents. As he points out the results are subject to some manipulation like Las Vegas lowering lines to account for this reported effect, but it is still an interesting result.
- We are barely past Christmas, but Ken Pomeroy is already ready to start giving you the likelihood that each team will win their conference. Of course, being one of college basketball’s foremost sabermetricians Ken is not content just to pull numbers out of thin air (or other places). Instead, he uses Monte Carlo simulations based on his statistical analysis so far this season. Basically what he is doing is simulating each conference season 10,000 times under varying conditions (set by Pomeroy) and takes what happens on average in those 10,000 conference seasons. As the first part of this season’s project, Pomeroy unveils the six least competitive conference races. Five out of the six he lists are not surprising and we probably could have told you that they would be the least competitive conference races off the top of our heads (think very good teams in very bad conferences), but the fifth least competitive conference is a little surprising to us. As we say with all prediction models, you need to be cognizant of the inputs as they can lead to drastically different results than you would expect. In this case, those inputs would be teams that you think are significantly overvalued or undervalued by Pomeroy’s analysis.
- One piece of news from the weekend that we forgot to mention in yesterday’s Morning Five was the death of Chicago prep power broker McGlother “Mac” Irvin, who created the nationally known Mac Irvin Fire basketball team that has featured some of the best high school players from Chicago over the past 20 years. Irvin, who worked as an executive for Xerox until 1992 before setting up his basketball club was one of the most well-known figures on the high school basketball circuit. Irvin’s death on Christmas Eve from complications of diabetes mellitus will be felt throughout the Chicago basketball scene and his memorial services on Thursday and Friday should be a veritable “Who’s Who” of Chicago high school basketball.
| morning 5, Regular Features
| Tagged: cornell, harvard, jamie dixon, mac irvin, pittsburgh, tray woodall
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