College Basketball Contenders
Posted by cuorange on February 14, 2010
These stats are through games of Saturday, 2/13/2010
Here’s the criteria to reach the final four:
1. Defensive efficiency ranking of 25 or better
2. Offensive efficiency ranking of 50 or better
3. RPI ranking of 27 or better
| Team | O Efficiency | D Efficiency | RPI | % Final Four | % Champ |
| Kansas | 2 | 3 | 1 | 100.0 | 83.3 |
| Duke | 1 | 12 | 4 | 37.5 | 33.3 |
| Syracuse | 13 | 6 | 2 | 12.5 | 0.0 |
| Wisconsin | 14 | 9 | 14 | 12.5 | 0.0 |
| Kansas State | 21 | 14 | 8 | 8.3 | 0.0 |
| Purdue | 23 | 11 | 10 | 4.2 | 0.0 |
| West Virginia | 4 | 25 | 6 | 4.2 | 0.0 |
| Brigham Young | 10 | 21 | 19 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Kentucky | 18 | 19 | 5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
The basic concept here is that though a team like West Virginia has both the offensive and defensive efficiencies to make it to the final four, when you combine the two the chances are much less. In other words, one of the last 24 teams have had an offensive efficiency of 4 or worse and a defensive efficiency of 25 or worse.
This refining also removes two teams from our final four contenders – Brigham Young and Kentucky, that our old formula would have included.
It looks like we have a Final Four: Kansas, Duke, Syracuse and Wisconsin. Later this week, we’ll use Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology to put teams into regions and see if that has any effect on which teams make it to the Final Four (i.e. if Kansas and Syracuse end up in the same region only one team can advance).
The percentages don’t add up to 100% because in this formula one team’s chances are independent of another teams chances.
