Even though we are only three weeks into the College Basketball Season and 1,389 games in Division 1 basketball.
I have a feeling that these will be my best predictions yet. Its my first time predicting college basketball on here, and if you bet, you would be smart to place all of these futures. (I would like some of the money if they hit :)).
I am convinced that I have figured out the system after lots of time looking at the past years championship winners and teams that either had an unexpected good run in March, or an unexpected bad run in March.
You might be wondering “But Connor, March is so far away how are you so confident in your predictions” and that is solely because of the Ken Pomeroy Rankings.
Ken Pomeroy who is a retired meteorologist, has worked in sports and has had a website called kenpom.com, and since 2004 he has charted statistics and ranked teams based off of averages. What I have noticed, is that there has been a common theme with the teams that do well in the big dance, and teams that fall short. The two main statistics are the teams total offense efficiency being in the top 40 in the country, and the same teams total defense efficiency falling in the top 20 in the country.
That might make little to no sense to you, so I am here to explain it. If you go to the website you will see the list of 362 division one basketball teams and you will see two columns side by side that say “AdjO” and “AdD” which just stands for Adjusted Offense Efficiency and Adjusted Defense Efficiency .
How this is measured is by the rough average of how many possessions a college team will have in a game, and the actual number sits around 80, but in the rankings he just uses 100. So for AdjO, it is an estimate of how many points would be scored per 100 possessions a team would have against the average D-I defense, and on the flip side, AdjD is an estimate of how many points would be allowed per 100 possessions a team would have against the average D-I offense.
That’s a very condensed version of what it all means but I did the work so you don’t have to, so if you are in a march madness pool and want to gain an edge on the people in your pool, refer back to this story.
Granted, this is all subject to change and you can never know what can happen with a team as we are very early into the season, but if the season ended today, here would be some teams to take far into your bracket.
Houston is ranked 1 in AdjD and 9 in and AdjO, so they are a very strong pick and are ranked number 6 in the AP poll.
North Carolina is a team that’s hot right now but will need to step it up on defense as they are ranked 39 in AdjD.
BYU is a shocker to a lot of people as they have had an extremely hot start to their season being ranked 19 in the poll, and being ranked 18 in AdjD and 17 in AdjO.
These are just a few teams and what they are ranked, but if I had to pick a champion right now, I would pick Marquette who is ranked 7 in AdjO, and 14 in AdjD. They have an extremely high ceiling, and play in the super competitive Big East Conference.
