Halloween was this week and it always makes me wonder why it is perennially set for October 31^st? Shouldn’t Halloween be scheduled for the last Friday in October? No kid wants to go to school on a Tuesday, the day after Halloween. Thanksgiving always gets to fall on a Thursday, so I don’t understand why Halloween can’t be scheduled for the final Friday of the month. The only good thing about Halloween falling on a Monday is that you get to see the costumes on the fans in the stands during Monday Night Football. Speaking of football, why are penalties not reviewable, exactly?

I suppose these are rhetorical questions. Just like the age old question: Why can’t Pittsburgh make the Final Four? When you mention this to most people they say things like, “Pitt doesn’t have NBA talent. You need NBA talent to advance in the NCAA tournament.” Except that Pitt hasn’t exactly been losing to North Carolina every year. Last year Pittsburgh lost to Butler. The year before that Pittsburgh lost to Xavier. Three years ago it was a conference opponent Villanova. When you have one of the best efficiency margins in the country every year, you need to win these games.  The funny thing about the NCAA tournament is that everyone forgets what it means to have a small sample. North Carolina head coach Roy Williams didn’t win an NCAA title until his 16^th try. Sometimes these things take time. 

Last year’s Big East Standings

If you sit at a baseball game, you can probably have a discussion about whether the team that won 110 games over the course of the season was really better than the 87 game winning wild card team that won the World Series. But that’s baseball for you. Baseball fans have a lot of time on their hands.

Basketball fans don’t have the patience to hear about how much UConn struggled in Big East play last year. Did you know UConn was 12^th in the Big East in eFG%? Did you know that Shabazz Napier took far too many three pointers (141) for a 33% shooter?  Did you know Roscoe Smith only made 43% of his twos, which was a distressingly low number for a post player? Did you know that fellow forwards Niels Giffey and Tyler Olander had equally poor shooting percentages inside? Of course adding marquee recruit Andre Drummond solves a lot of those problems in the post. UConn was also 14^th in the Big East in free throw rate, and 12^th in defensive rebounding, and Drummond might solve those problems too.

And I love Jeremy Lamb as much as the next guy. His development in the Big East and NCAA tournament games last season was critical to UConn’s national title. But I also think the Big East schedule is a marathon, not a sprint. And UConn doesn’t quite have the extreme depth of Syracuse, or the proven season-long track record of Pittsburgh. And I really love a Louisville team that should finally have some healthy post players, even if Will Blackshear is now out for the season. UConn should be substantially better than last year’s 9-9 record, but this season the Big East is a four-way coin flip, and you cannot convince me otherwise.

When looking at the rest of the Big East standings, it is hard to pick out many other surprises. By now, everyone knows that St. John’s is going to struggle. It is one thing to field a team of entirely new players, but it is quite another when three of the top recruits are ineligible.

Speaking of recruits, what Big East team fields eight top 100 recruits and is picked by many experts to miss the NCAA tournament? The answer would be the Georgetown Hoyas, exhibit A why even the biggest proponents of recruiting ranks will sometimes fail to get excited about a team. Everyone believes in Hollis Thompson (RSCI #76), Jason Clark (RSCI #62), and Nate Lubick (RSCI #42). But Henry Sims (RSCI #51) and Markel Starks (RSCI #94) posted ORtgs of 99.8 and 76.1 last year, and most people are rightfully lukewarm about them this season. Add the fact that Tyler Adams (RSCI #80) switched his commitment from Duke, Otto Porter (RSCI #34) was a late riser who few people have seen play, and Mikael Hopkins (RSCI #98) was a borderline top 100 candidate, and you can understand why many people are rightfully wondering how this team will replace Austin Freeman and Chris Wright. Sometimes recruiting rankings aren’t everything.

In fact, a good bet would be that Notre Dame will have a better offensive team than Georgetown despite the fact that Notre Dame has only a fraction of the recruiting talent. Did you know that Purdue transfer Scott Martin is the only Top 100 recruit on Mike Brey’s roster this season? But Mike Brey’s offense does a fabulous job avoiding turnovers and developing shooters, and you will be shocked by how potent his offense is again this season.

Last year’s WCC standings

With the available statistics, we can do a pretty good job evaluating players who leave school and players that return. (As I said earlier this month, Gonzaga returns Robert Sacre and Elias Harris, and because the team brings back its most efficient offensive players, the offense should be substantially improved.)

But evaluating incoming players is very hard. A few weeks ago I showed how junior college transfers and division one transfers compare to freshmen. And we’ve certainly seen plenty of discussion on how Top 10 and Top 100 recruits are the most reliable newcomers. But what do we do for the large mass of teams whose recruits are all unranked?

Last year, I basically assumed that every team in a conference recruited players of the same caliber. I.e., an unranked freshman recruit that attended Georgia St. was equivalent to an unranked freshman recruit that attended George Mason. The net result of this is that all my conference predictions tended to show a certain regression to the mean. Bad teams lost bad players. Good teams lost good players.  And everyone moved towards the middle.

But this summer I programmed the efficiency stats back to 2003, and I think it is clear that there are persistent historical differences in the recruiting at various schools. In the next table, I look only at unranked freshmen to attend the various schools from 2003 to 2011. I also weight by playing time so that a player that plays major minutes gets more weight than a player that sits on the bench:

School Prestige Exists

I think it is clear that the average unranked recruit that attends Gonzaga and BYU is much better than the average unranked recruit that attends Loyola Marymount. Now part of this may be a coaching effect. And if it is a coaching effect, in most cases I do not care.  If Gonzaga’s freshmen outperform Loyola Marymount’s freshmen because they are better high school players, or because Mark Few is a brilliant coach, it does not matter when projecting the season.  All I need to know is that Gonzaga’s new additions should be pretty good.  But for schools with coaching changes we may be more concerned.  I think we also need to account for the fact that coaching changes often disrupt recruiting classes.  (See Maryland as an example.)

Now, you probably think that the above observation is so obvious that it does not merit any discussion. But after studying most pre-season rankings, I think there is too much fear of the unknown. There seems to be a very large weight placed on returning players and recruits, and with the exception of places like Kansas, little faith that quality coaches can repeat.

Now, finding the right weight to give historical details is very difficult. But I do think that both in terms of recruiting, and in terms of defense, we have to look at more than just one season’s worth of data. Is Matt Painter’s swarming defense really going to fall apart because Purdue loses its two best offensive players? Is Mike Brey’s prolific offense really going to fall apart simply because he doesn’t have a class of elite recruits coming in? Aren’t these more rhetorical questions?