061: Deceptive boost
Welcome to quadrant season.
College sports is diving ass first into late stage capitalism.
The rich and powerful determine what is “better” and rig the rules in their favor.
The consolidation of conferences keeps all the power in the hands of a few.
And coaches and administrators get paid millions while players and support staff make minimal wages.
Data is only available about the past
It’s a shame that a committee of 13 people had a sleepover and decided the four “best” teams for the college football playoff invitational.
So many things are easily measured, and we assume that everything that can be easily measured is important.
Just because something is hard to measure, doesn’t mean it’s not important though.
Injuries and unbalanced schedules bring uncertainty. And the greater the uncertainty, the greater the similarity in predictions.
A lot of us assume Florida State is not going to produce a competitive game because of a quarterback’s injury.
The truth is we don’t know, and it stinks that we don’t want to know either.
We try to understand running water by catching it in a bucket
The first iteration of college basketball’s NET rankings were released today. We’re 104 days away from Selection Sunday.
The NCAA releases the NET rankings daily moving forward. Fans, coaches, and media all battle this frequency with tons of anxiety.
The anxiety might be because media creates messaging in poorly formatted word documents1. For example, the made up experts claim that the ACC gets a deceptive boost by having two teams make the 2022 Final Four.
More Final Fours, most wins above seed, and second most wins in the big dance since 2021. That is the ACC’s performance.
The ACC performs in the NCAA Tournament and somehow that is misleading because the metrics said it shouldn’t? And that’s a problem?
The medium of the message and the messenger can often be more important than the message itself. This message and the messenger combined with an over reliance of a tool like the NET manufactures that perception.
Welcome to quadrant season
It’s well documented that quadrants are arbitrary. There are better ways to determine a team’s performance.
However, if quadrant 1 games are the currency to obtain a higher profile, it’s important to remember how the “power” conferences exchange those games.
The Big 12, made up of 10 teams last season, played a round-robin schedule of home-and-home games against all opponents. In total, those 10 teams played a combined 199 quadrant 1 games.
Kansas played 31 regular season games last season. 24 of those 31 games (77 percent) were in the first quadrant. 15 of its 18 league games were Q1 games too.
Think about that.
This season, the Big 12 expands to 14 teams and continues to play 18 conference games. I imagine that the quadrant 1 opportunities won’t be as bountiful with the unbalanced schedule because teams will play five opponents twice and the other eight conference opponents once.
The cutoffs of the quadrants mean the location and the ranking is important for all games.
For example, Georgia Tech’s home win over Duke this weekend is not a Q1 win. If it was in Durham or Greensboro, it would be a Q1 win. It’s a Q3 loss for Duke if it was in Durham, Atlanta, or Greensboro though.
There are plenty of ways to slice the ACC’s downturn as a conference. It has too many teams, its messaging is milk toast, and its scheduling is too rigid2.
It’s a shame we can’t be more transparent about the numbers though. Instead of claiming the numbers are absolute and the performance is deceptive, what if we asked why those numbers might be deceptive on their own?
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A couple past college football projects I’ve followed up on recently:
comparing pre-season win totals with actual regular season win totals: https://blessyourchart.shinyapps.io/cfbwintotals/
And I’ve tracked the game duration of all games between one FBS team. I’m going to work to socialize more of the code and evidence around this data in the future, check out the logs here: https://fbs-logs.blessyourchart.com/
Lunardi going dark red highlight on black text is objectively bad.
The ACC plays 20 conference games across 15 teams. The schedules are unbalanced, which often means games outside the first quadrant are more available.