069: CBB Conference Index

A tool to check conference standings and quadrant opportunities.

👋 I’m exploring a way to surface college basketball conference standings and a summary of NET rankings by conference. I’ve written a tiny app that you can check out below:

The goal of this project is to share tables of data about the 2023-24 men’s college basketball season. CBB Conference Index is built on top of cbbdata and cbbplotR both developed by Andrew Weatherman¹.

There are two types of tables surfacing the following data:

• Conference standings and point differentials by game location

• NET summary by conference

Pitter patter, let's get at 'er² . . . here is a preview of how to the app:

Standings

The standings show win/loss records and point differentials by location (home or away). You can filter by any conference to see the specific data.

The intention is to show the raw differential only, so you can quickly grasp the performance of certain teams in conference play only. For example, Virginia is 0-3 with a -57 point differential on the road in ACC play.

If you’re looking for adjusted metrics or standings, you can check out other data sources like barttorvik.com or kenpom.com or John Gasaway’s website.

NET Summary

The NET Summary table is a static table that surfaces the home win percentage in conference play, the average NET ranking of teams in a single conference, and the percentage of conference games in each quadrant.

This can be used as a gauge of quadrant opportunities in conference play. For example, ~64.3 percent of Big 12 games played thus far are in the first quadrant.

Head-to-head conference records?

A third table I’m working on surfacing is the head-to-head conference records. For example, what is the ACC’s record against the Big 12³ and how do those games show up in the NET rankings?

Right now, I haven’t added it to the app because the performance of fetching or filtering by each conference is quite slow. Plus, I’m not sure how useful this is either?

Here is an example using the ACC:

Let me know what you think

If you’re still reading this far and find the app useful, thank you. Please share any questions or other ideas in the comments.

I’m working on tidying up the code and automating the data updates this week, so please stay tuned.

And as always, subscribe below if you haven’t already:

1. Andrew has built incredibly useful tools to fetch data. You can follow him on Twitter - @andreweatherman - and check out his newsletter too: Buckets & Bytes

2. Letterkenny is a great show. Terrific show.

3. The ACC is 9-3 overall against the Big 12 and now 4-2 in Q1 games too.