Rush The Court

Ray Floriani is the RTC correspondent for the Northeast Conference and an occasional contributor.

In the pressure packed world of college coaching a 25-year career is a rarity these days. Twenty five years at one school ? You can almost forget it, except in the case of Tom Green. The Fairleigh Dickinson mentor, who won his 400^th  game late last season, is entering his 26^th year at the Northeast Conference school. Green is the winningest coach in NEC history. It’s not even close.

Tom Green – Longtime Coach of FDU (photo credit:  FDUKnights.com)

His conference record stands at 257-177, a distant lead over second place Ron Ganulin, who won 129 conference games at St.Francis (NY) from 1991 through 2005. Green is also the NEC pacesetter with 26 conference tournament wins. All told, FDU has reached the NEC semis in 16 of his 25 years and captured four conference post season titles and ensuing NCAA Tournament bids (1985, 1988, 1998 and 2005).

A legacy of success which includes seven 20-win seasons has brought opportunities at other schools. In the past, Green has flirted with other institutions. Each time he felt the Northern New Jersey school was his best fit.

What is his secret of the program’s excellent track record ? For one thing , flexibility. He is able to adjust to the talents of his players. He will push the ball if he has to and play at a slower pace if need be. Last season an injury decimated squad finished up an uncharacteristic 8-20. The coach and staff went over tape and spent hours coming up with combination and ‘junk’ defenses to try to remain competitive.  Another factor is discipline, but not the yelling and screaming type. Green doesn’t need that, and still his players know who is in charge. Discipline is evident as FDU rarely beats themselves. They are well drilled in their system.

FDU has made the NCAA Tournament in each of those aforementioned NEC title years. Each time the top or #2 seed has never rested easy against the bottom seed Knights. Green’s teams are extremely well prepared and play hard.  Most recently, in 2005, FDU gave top-seeded (and eventual national runner-up) all it wanted in its first round game before losing 67-55 (see highlight below). 

Tom Green will not win a national championship at FDU. Regardless, the former Syracuse guard can take solace in knowing he probably assisted on one. In 1985 his FDU team took top seeded Michigan to the wire, eventually losing 59-55. Villanova coaches were scouting that game and noticed the Knights exposed a few weaknesses in their Big Ten opponents. Two days later Villanova upset Michigan in the second round of their championship run.

Interestingly, Jim Boeheim and Green shared an apartment when they began as Syracuse assistants. Boeheim has been at Syracuse over three decades, Green a quarter of a century at FDU. Neither seems in a hurry to leave, which is good news to their respective schools and fans.

Today we’re ready to unleash the last installment of our analysis of NCAA Tournament stats of the 65 (64) team era… that is, unless we decide to analyze the coaches too… well, it is over three months until Midnight Madness, so ok, hold that thought.  Anyway, as you hopefully recall, during the weekend we took a look at the raw numbers of the era by conference, and essentially concluded that the ACC has been the most successful conference of the last 23 years, the Pac-10 SWAC/NEC the worst, and that the mid-major conferences may not have been as consistently good as we had hoped over the years.

Now let’s take a look at the conferences who have overachieved and underachieved over the 65 (64) team era. In our analysis of this measure by school, you may remember that we looked at two different models – a Standard Model of expected wins by seed (e.g., a #1 seed should win 4 games per appearance), and a Historical Model of expected wins by seed (e.g., a #1 seed has actually won 3.36 games per appearance from 1985-2007). We concluded then that the true value lies in considering the Historical Model foremost because the Standard Model places too unrealistic of an expectation on high seeds and not high enough of one on low seeds, which ultimately skews its results in favor of lower-seeded schools and conferences. Given that condition, we now show the Overachiever and Underachiever conferences of the 65 (64) Team Era using the Historical Model. See Table A below.

Table A. Historical Model applied to 65 (64) Team Era

Notes: the table is sorted by “+/- per App,” which represents the number of games won above or below the expected number of wins for that seed per NCAA appearance (1985-2007). The conferences whose names are in bold are BCS conferences. The conferences whose names are in red are conferences that no longer exist.

Not Just George Mason. The first thought everyone will have (because we had it too) is that George Mason’s miraculous run in 2006 accounts for the Colonial Conference’s rather aristocratic pedigree at the top of our list. But looking a little further inside the numbers somewhat mitigates this idea. Sure, the Masonites (as a #12 seed) won 3.52 games beyond its expected value of 0.48 wins per appearance in 2006, but that only accounts for half of the Colonial’s wins beyond expectation during this era. So where are the rest of the wins coming from? Thank David Robinson’s Navy squads of the mid-80s and Dick Tarrant’s Richmond Spiders in the immediate aftermath for the CAA’s perch as the biggest overachiever on our lofty list.

George Mason isn’t the only CAA School to Overachieve

BCStriation. Unlike our previous posting that used standard objective measures (wins, F4s, titles, etc.) to show that the six BCS conferences were without question the top six leagues of the era, today’s posting paints a substantially different picture. A league can be very successful objectively and still considerably underachieve, as in the strange case of the Pac-10 (and to a much lesser extent, the Big 10). Although the Pac-10 was clearly the weakest of the BCS conferences by the raw numbers, we certainly didn’t expect that it would be the second-worst underachiever of the 65 (64) team era – but it unquestionably is. The Pac-10 has won sixteen fewer games than it should have during this period, which dwarfs the negative output of any other conference – next in line for public shaming are Conference USA (7.6 wins fewer) and the Big 10 (6.5). Looking back at our list of chronic underachieving schools, we note that Stanford, Arizona and Cal all fall into the frequent NCAA underachievers list, which should have tipped us off that this was coming.

High Achievers. On the other side of things, the ACC and the Big East fall in line behind the CAA as the biggest overachievers of the era, which proves that you can get great seeds, have tremendous objective success in terms of wins and titles, and still overachieve as a conference. The ACC has won a whopping 22 games and the Big East 18 games beyond expectation; and the SEC isn’t far behind with 13. We also want to nod a tip of the hat to the Mid-Continent (+4.5 wins), MAC (+4 wins) and Horizon (+4 wins) conferences, each of which shows that leagues with consistently low seeds can do some damage on a regular basis in the NCAA Tournament.

Missouri Valley Teams Need to Do More of This

What About…? If anything, these last two posts have opened our eyes to just how traditionally overrated the Missouri Valley Conference has been. For a so-called mid-major who gets multiple teams invited every year, its performance leaves a lot to be desired (4 wins below expectations). We realize that things change – conferences get better and worse over the years – but the MVC is going to have to really start producing in the next 5-10 years to lose our proffered overrated tag. As a comparison, the Horizon and West Coast conferences have performed nearly as well (19 wins each) as the MVC (22 wins) despite earning far fewer NCAA bids and having a slightly worse average seed.

Ivy League Paradox. We suppose that if you asked a hundred college basketball fans whether they believed the Ivy League traditionally overachieves in the NCAA Tournament, 99 of them would likely agree. This is probably due to a memorable upset or two over the years in addition to a common perception that the Ivies are a “tough out” every year. But looking above, we see quite starkly that the Ivy League has been one of the biggest underachievers of this era, earning only three wins versus an expected total of seven. This is largely because the Ivy champs (usually Penn or Princeton) have consistently earned seeds ranging from #11-#13 over the last decade, but haven’t been able to earn a single win during that period. The lesson here, we suppose, is to never take an Ivy team in your brackets (we’ve heard that taking an Ivy team against the spread in the first round is a good bet, however).