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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.

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