There’s never a clear answer. Should George Welsh have spent more time implementing trick plays instead of practicing the inside counter play over and over? Until we gain experimental control over practice time, we’ll have to speculate.
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Remember the desperation zone he rolled out against Wake in 2015-16? That was something crazy.
Getting back to the point, I’m warming to your press idea. But I wonder if the most salient lesson learned from the Wisconsin game is “we cannot let teams limit IMac to 1 3PA,” and the offensive tweaks since have been effective at countering that.
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Could the upside to the Wisconsin issues be the abandoning of blocker/mover? If we beat Wisconsin… would our offense be playing like it is now? Butterfly effect 
.
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I like that Tony gets the bench guys time in blowouts. It’s good for their development, it’s good sportsmanship. And yet, blowouts earn better analytics.
https://x.com/JBRBracketology/status/1732755741847556367?s=20
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The effect of that is biggest now when the NET’s sample size for each team is so small. Also, technically it helps their opponents, because Miami jumping in NET changes nothing materially on their team sheet that the committee works off of, but it does change how they get listed on opponent’s team sheets.
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Yeah, I’d love for someone to track how much putting green teams in earlier vs. later ultimately hurts your NET. Could get some sort of rough approximation looking at line-up efficiency differences and tracking a sample of games, and then plugging in the counterfactual.
By end of the season the impact of your overall NET has to be marginal, at best, whether you put in green team at minute 3 or the 30 second mark. It’s a small number of games and small window of time in those games.
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Walker and Kenny are sons of my cousin, Butch who was an excellent bball player at Richmond late fifties and early sixties.
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The Wisconsin game was definitely an outlier, in that two of our best players were hobbled. Might we have lost the game even if IMac was 100% and Dunn hadn’t tweaked something knee/leg related in the first few minutes of the game? Sure. Wisconsin is a pretty good team, as it turns out. Not sure a narrower loss in that game would be worthy of calling for changes to our defensive schemes. We have 1 loss. There are only 6 unbeaten teams in the Kenpom top 25.
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Gotcha. Thanks for clarification. Met Walker and his wife over the summer threw a buddy in Morehead City, NC. Enjoyed hanging out with them and hearing his NC State stories lol.
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I’m willing to let that Wisconsin loss be this season’s equivalent of 2013 Tennessee.
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Yeah, sure, fine. I’m more of the mind to treat it as a true outlier because of easily identifiable personnel issues that make the margin of defeat almost worthless in evaluating the ability/quality of the team. None of these nerdy predictive models will take it out, nor will the tournament committee if it is relevant, and that’s fine. I just don’t think that one game informs us much. Especially since the single best player in program history was also hobbled by a grade 3 tear to his redshirt ligament.
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Bro X wasnt even playing then. Pre X dont count
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I was just thinking about this. NET rewards teams based on their efficiency and it rewards teams for exceeding expectations in games, right? If you’re expected to beat someone by 10 and you beat them by 20, that’s a bonus.
You should be able to figure out how many points a team has scored and allowed over the season using their pace numbers, efficiency numbers and their opponents’ efficiency numbers. So if, in addition to rewarding teams for efficiency, you also reward them for beating people by more than expected (even if in a way that loses value the more you blow someone out by, and is ultimately capped), doesn’t that imply you’re rewarding teams for being high-variance?
Because the blow-out improves your efficiency AND you get extra points for the unexpected margin of victory. I don’t know if this is true, but I wonder if you had two identical teams, one who’s games’ scores were exactly what the system expected and another that alternated underachieving by two points for five games and then exceeded expectations by ten points for a game, if it would judge them the same. I bet it wouldn’t and the occasional higher-victory team would be ranked slightly higher.
Edit - That having been said, the real problem is that teams that blow out lesser teams are doubly rewarded by having both their efficiency numbers improve AND they get extra credit for the blow-out. I almost feel like NET should not merely put a cap on the bonus points for blowing people out, but even put a very slight penalty on teams that blow people out to partially offset their efficiency gains.
I could have sworn it was just a tear to his, “not playing” ligament and didn’t really have anything to do with his, “redshirt” ligament.
The NET is totally inscrutable, but I don’t think this is accurate. Here’s the only thing we know about the NET:
So, yes, it rewards based on efficiency, but I think it rewards you for beating expectations only in the sense that you get credit for beating good teams, and teams on the road. I don’t think – and could be wrong, because the whole thing is so inscrutable – that TVI factors in Margin of Victory. But maybe it does, in which case, that would be double counting.
The thing that helps me remember this is that NET basically tried to split the baby between KPI (results based) and KenPom/Sagarin (efficiency based) but didn’t want to just take a weighted average for reasons that elude me…
Is that really all it is? For some reason I thought they took some of the more established efficiency based rankings (KenPom, Torvik, BPI, etc.) and threw it all into a big soup with strength of schedule and game location.
I sorta think the pic above is basically just two doses of KenPom with a side of KPI (but they won’t even fully reveal the recipe so 
)
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Take this link for example – if you took a weighted average that was 2 KenPoms and 1 KPI, how many NET outliers would you have?
Because all the world needed was another secret algorithm. They have to use KenPom or something - I was taking that literally as they used Net Points/Possession, but there has to be some sort of opponent adjustment. Though based on some of the wild swings from blowouts, maybe that adjustment is weaker than it should be?
Does KenPom show day-over-day changes to his rankings anywhere?
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That’s my guess - mostly just a weaker opponent adjustment than KenPom uses (and maybe because even Torvik preseason removed uses preseason bias, but at one level of abstraction)?
Not easily. You can see how it changes over time on one of his pages, but even that “at the time” ranking is not a true pic of what he had them at the time. Does that make any sense? Probably not, and I’m not even sure if it’s correct.